Pat DiNizio

Saw this in the news a couple of days ago. Pat DiNizio, lead singer of the 80s/90s pop rock band The Smithereens, died last Tuesday at the relatively young age of 62.

For a year or two (1989 or 1990 or both) I was into the band. Not as a prime source of music (back then it was Rush), but into them as a sort of background sonic pallet to what was going on in my life. Along with Kings X, REM and Queen, for example. But I liked what I heard on the radio (“Only a Memory,” “House We Used to Live In,” “Drown in My Own Tears”) so I picked up the CD Green Thoughts and played it a lot over the winter.

DiNizio was the puppy-dog eyed hapless unlucky-in-love lead singer who always was rejected, turned down, cheated on. For a while back in those days I could relate, though never to quite the elevated art form he turned it into. The Smithereens as a band, though, rocked pretty hard with pretty simple three-minute tunes, and me and my drummer often jammed to extended versions of “Girl Like You.”

A few years back I saw on Youtube that he had gained a monstrous amount of weight and would perform in fans’ living rooms. Not a good sign for even a B-list rocker. Felt kinda sorry for him. But the success he had eclipses mine by a factor of about ten thousand or so. And I, like many, many others, enjoyed his music.

Here’s a nice little ditty under three minutes, “Deep Black,” representative of a more mellow Smithereens sound. I always dug it, primarily cuz I liked the phased out riff F#-G-D-F#-G-D-F#-G-D-F#-G-D-F#-G-D-G to arpeggiated A chord with that moody slide guitar over it.

He died in Summit, New Jersey, a wonderful town I and the missus lived in 2001-2003 before house and children.

RIP, Smithereen.