The Smithereens drummer Dennis Diken discusses moving forward with guest vocalists after death of frontman

It’s been a little more than seven years since The Smithereens singer/guitarist Pat DiNizio died, but the power-pop band is still going with a little help from their friends on vocals.

With a revolving group of lead singers, the New Jersey group known for songs like “A Girl Like You” and “Blood and Roses” feels fortunate to still be playing, according to drummer Dennis Diken, “because we don’t know how to do anything else.”

The Smithereens will play their last show of the year on Dec. 18 at Jergel’s Rhythm Grille in Warrendale as part of WXDX-FM’s holiday show for X-Out Cancer, benefiting the Mario Lemieux Foundation. For this show, they’ll be fronted by Gin Blossoms singer Robin Wilson.

Besides Wilson, Marshall Crenshaw (who played on The Smithereens’ first album “Especially For You”) and John Cowsill of The Cowsills (who sang on the band’s 1991 song “Now and Then”) have toured with the band in the past.

“It’s not like we cast a net out there to find the perfect replacement for Pat. Nobody can be a replacement for Pat, No. 1,” Diken said. “But we didn’t spend a whole lot of time digging too deep. Just things organically fell into place.”

DiNizio died on Dec. 12, 2017, after battling a variety of health issues for years, but the band had a show booked for Jan. 13, 2018, at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, in a show presented by Steven Van Zandt.

“He suggested that we keep the date, and three guys from The Smithereens would perform, and we would back up a slew of singers that were enlisted for the event into a tribute to Pat, which is what we did, and it was wall-to-wall attendance,” Diken said. “The love in the room was really palpable, and we were fortunate that we realized that night there were two or more singers that really could interpret the music.”

A host of vocalists joined the band that night, including Van Zandt, Freedy Johnston and Richard Barone of the Bongos, and the show proved that The Smithereens, founded in 1980, still had a future.

“(Crenshaw) had the spirit, and so we considered him as a possibility to front the band moving forward, and also, unbeknownst to us, Robin Wilson of Gin Blossoms was a major fan of The Smithereens,” Diken said. “He and his bandmates and other musicians from the Tempe, Arizona, area took a lot of inspiration from The Smithereens back in the ‘80s, so he was on board with us that night too, and again, it just felt right.

“It wasn’t like he or Marshall were soundalikes or lookalikes, but they interpreted the songs and they maintained the integrity of the music. And Robin made it known to us that night that if we ever wanted him to sing with us, that he would be very excited to do that. So that made it a lot easier to consider what our future might hold for us and to kind of move it forward.”

In a call this week from his home in New Jersey, Diken discussed the band’s upcoming 45th anniversary, touring with the Ramones and his favorite late-night TV appearance:

What’s the best part about still having the opportunity to play shows together?

The great thing about it is that I’ve known Jimmy Babjak, our guitar player, since the first day of high school. That was September of 1971, a long time ago, and we’ve been best friends since then, and we get to hang out and play together, which is a dream come true. I say this in our shows, it’s really the truth, when we were growing up, we were such fans of the radio and then buying records and going to shows, doing all that stuff together, and sharing that passion and loving music and the camaraderie and also recognizing the fact that watching all our favorite bands, we realized that for us, there was nothing cooler that we could do than to play in a band together.

And it really is the truth and it became our lot in life. Thankfully, we were able to pull it off and people dug it. And Mike Mesaros, our bass player, who’s not on this show, but we grew up with him too and we did so much, so it’s like a family. It’s just great to be able to continue doing this and have people like what we do because we couldn’t do it without the audience coming to see us and wanting to come to see us. So we’re eternally grateful to our fans and the people that are still discovering us. It’s crazy to think that, but it’s true. And we’re going to turn 45 years old as a band, if you can believe that. And there’s no way we could have kept that going without the love and support of our fans. I’ll add one thing that, when you say what’s good about it, what’s great about it, is that it does keep us young at heart. We really feel the same buzz we got when we were teenagers playing together. We can have a bad day, bad travel day, or things may not be falling into place as well as we’d hope they might on a given day. But once you hit the stage, and every performer says this, you forget everything and you hit the stage, you hear the audience applaud and you go to it and everything else just fades away. There’s so many pluses, and they really do outweigh the minuses.

The Smithereens will be hitting 45 years as a band (in 2025), so what do you think is the secret to the enduring success of your music?

Well, like I said before, a big component is the friendship. There’s a lot of mutual respect and a lot of shared history which makes it (work). Any band is going to tell you that they have their own insular world where a lot of in-jokes, we even have our own little language, there’s a bond there that has been forged over these so many years, and it’s just a blessing to be able to play with your friends and play music that you love. And what we do really comes from our heart.

I tell this story all the time, but it’s true. When I went into high school, we didn’t have middle school. We went straight from eighth grade in Carteret, New Jersey. We went from eighth grade straight into freshman year, and I thought, all right, well, I’m gonna be meeting a whole bunch of new kids. Although I had great friends in grammar school, I didn’t have any musicians that were in line with my sensibilities, so I was really hoping to meet musicians in high school that I could form a band with. That was my greatest desire. So I thought, if I could meet a guitarist who could play “I Can’t Explain” by The Who, then that would be a really good starting point.

And the first day of high school, it sounds like this is from a script, but it’s true. It was day one, period one, earth science, row one, seat one, Jimmy Babjack is sitting there. I never met him before and he opens up his loose leaf (folder) and there’s color pictures of The Who plastered inside. (laughs) So I introduced myself that day, and we started playing together that week. So what we do is really from our heart and soul. It makes it easy to keep going because we’re really cut from the same cloth. When young people ask me, what advice can you give me? I want to have a career in music. I say, if you want to form a band, No. 1, find people that you like playing with but maybe even more importantly find people that you like to hang out with because you’re gonna be doing that an awful lot in airports and hotels, restaurants, and sound checks. We’re really lucky that we have this bond and this friendship as well as a mutual shared love for the same musical sensibilities.

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You toured with the Ramones back in the ’80s, so are there any crazy stories from those days of touring with them?

Nothing outlandish, more amusing perhaps. We knew Joey (Ramone) mostly from New York a little bit prior to that tour. That was actually the first leg of our first national tour in the summer of ‘86. It was really, really exciting for us to go out with the Ramones, who we admired so much.

So I guess the funniest thing that happened was Joey was really cool and hung out with us. After our show in Norfolk, Virginia, we were at the bar at the Holiday Inn, and they announced last call, and we were heading over to a radio station after that to do a late-night interview at WNOR with Carol Taylor. And Joey and us, we were both going to this interview, so they announced last call, and he says, (in Joey Ramone’s voice) “I’ll have a case of Budweiser.” (laughs) They gave it to us, we took it to the radio station, that was pretty funny. He took us aside after one soundcheck … and he said, (in Joey Ramone’s voice) “You know, you guys are pretty good. Maybe a little too (expletive) good.” I mean there wasn’t any wild partying that I remember, but just fun moments like that.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, you made a bunch of TV appearances. Are there any that still stand out to this day?

We did “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” twice. That was very exciting, but I think one of the best things we’ve ever done — and you can find this on YouTube — but there was a show on MTV called “The Cutting Edge.” I think it was a weekly program and was hosted by Peter Zaremba of the band The Fleshtones, and he would have bands on, like maybe two or three different acts every week, pre-taped. He was a friend of ours from New York, a very good friend, and he really was plugged into the same cultural stuff that we were, TV shows, old TV shows and records and movies.

So he had us on, and we did a live performance that was interspersed with an interview with Peter, and it really captured the essence of the sensibilities of The Smithereens. I recommend anybody who wants to know what makes us tick — or what broke our clock — to watch “The Cutting Edge” episode we did in ‘86. That, to me, is my favorite of all our television appearances. We did a lot of other shows. We were on “Conan (O’Brien)” a few times. That was fun. Oh, “Saturday Night Live,” or SNL. But we did that, and that was totally cool and fun.

If the internet’s to be believed, it’s been a while since you played Pittsburgh back in 2014 (at the Three Rivers Arts Festival). Does that sound about right?

It could be, which is regrettable, because I really like coming to Pittsburgh a lot. I’ve been coming to that area since I was a little kid actually, because my parents had friends, not in Pittsburgh proper, but a bit further out in Uniontown. And we would take road trips from New Jersey every couple of years. So I always have a soft spot in my heart for that area. And then once we did start to visit Pittsburgh and play there, it’s become actually one of my favorite cities in America. I really love coming there. I just love the vibe and the restaurants and the feel of the city. I like it very much. … My parents both come from Pennsylvania too, so I just love going there. And we always have good crowds too. It’s a cool city.