Pat Dinizio
Singer, songwriter, musician, founder of the Smithereens
Pat Dinizio, musician. Born: 12 October, 1955 in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Died: 12 December, 2017 in Summit, New Jersey, aged 62
Pat Dinizio, the songwriter and lead singer for the durable New Jersey rock‘n’roll band the Smithereens, whose melodic, guitar-heavy songs like Blood and Roses and A Girl Like You has died at the age of 62.
Dinizio, who also played rhythm guitar, formed the Smithereens in 1980 with three other young men from New Jersey: Jim Babjak on lead guitar, Dennis Diken on drums and Mike Mesaros on bass. (Mesaros was replaced by Severo Jornacion in 2006, though Mesaros still performed occasionally with the group).
They soon started performing original songs, most by Dinizio, at clubs like Kenny’s Castaways in Greenwich Village, but it was years before they received a record deal.
“I was beginning to entertain the notion of pursuing other things,” Dinizio told the New York Times in 2004. “I had already turned 30, and no one was interested in the band.”
The Smithereens eventually signed with Enigma Records and released their first album, Especially for You, in 1986. It featured catchy rock songs like Blood and Roses and Behind the Wall of Sleep, which garnered radio play and helped the Smithereens begin to build an audience.
The group broke into the Billboard Top 40 in the early 1990s with the power ballad A Girl Like You and Too Much Passion, which had a new-wave feel.
Grunge soon overshadowed more traditional rock acts like the Smithereens. But Dinizio and his bandmates refused to quit, working day jobs when needed and performing constantly, sometimes opening for internationally known artists like ZZ Top, Blondie, the Pretenders and Lou Reed. Dinizio also performed solo in fans’ homes.
“That’s been the credo of the band,” Dinizio said. “You never give up.”
Patrick Michael Dinizio was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on 12 October, 1955, to Nicholas Dinizio, who ran a waste management business, and the former Antoinette Gallo. He grew up nearby in Scotch Plains and graduated from Scotch Plains-fanwood High School before attending several colleges, including Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey; Seton Hall University in New Jersey and New York University.
He worked as a refuse collector for his father’s company while he tried to make it as a musician. “I remember completing Blood and Roses while on the back of a garbage truck, oddly enough,” he told Terry Gross on the NPR programme Fresh Air in 2007.
Dinizio released solo records, including the jazz-inflected Songs and Sounds (1997). The Smithereens also released cover albums like The Smithereens Play Tommy (2009), a take on the Who’s 1969 rock opera, and Meet the Smithereens! (2007), a tribute to the 1964 album Meet the Beatles!
“This is what I like about Meet the Smithereens!: it bridges the extremes of note-for-note fidelity and pure interpretation, offering the best of both worlds,” the critic Allan Kozinn, author of The Beatles: From the Cavern to the Rooftop, wrote in 2007. “The band has treated Meet the Beatles! as a symphony, a complete cultural artefact, to be heard intact.”
Dinizio also ran unsuccessfully for the Senate on the Reform Party ticket in New Jersey in 2000.
He was married and divorced and is survived by a daughter, Elisabeth Dinizio.
Diken said in an interview that the group last performed together in September. They had been working on new material for an album and had planned at our for 2018. he said that even after decades together the Smithereens remained enthusiastic and “always played like we were 18”.
“We saw the world together,” he said, “shared a deep friendship and realised our childhood dream of playing in a rock‘n’roll band.”