God Save “A Date With The Smithereens” [30th Anniversary Edition]

 

A Date With The Smithereens, released April 26th, 1994. 30 years, and still waiting for it’s cult...

Was I wrong?

I have a real problem with record reviews...and yes, they'll always be “records” to me. I can listen to a piece of music, and on first impression, think it's one of the greatest things I've ever heard. Then some review in a music magazine or online blog will be less enthusiastic, and I'll immediately question my own opinion. It took a long time to trust my own musical instincts, and disregard what other people told me I was supposed to like. I've dissented with many reviews and opinions of my favorite music, but none has broken my heart more painfully and more often than The Smithereens 1994 album A Date With The Smithereens.

A little background here: In 1994, The Smithereens were fighting for their careers. After years of being a hot band on the way up, their star had started to fall. The “Grunge” music fad had eclipsed anything and everything that had been popular before Nirvana hit the charts, even as the most popular new bands hailed The Smithereens as a major influence. A proposed Smithereens album helmed by the hot producer of the moment, Butch Vig, had acrimoniously crashed, and with it, The Smithereens record contract with Capitol Records. The Smithereens themselves rebounded quickly, beginning self-produced sessions for an album that eventually appeared in 2022 as The Lost Album, before signing quickly with RCA Records, and enlisting Don Dixon, producer of their seminal Especially For You and Green Thoughts albums, to guide them in to their next phase with a fresh set of songs.

From the very start, A Date With The Smithereens is not pretty. The Smithereens were angry, and they made an angry album. Pat DiNizio literally spits out the first line we hear of “War For My Mind”: “Guess what?!? There's a black cloud inside of my head...Yes, I'm mad at the way things have turned out for me!” The band sounds tightly wound and about to snap, extra loud, with no sweetening, no strings or pretty backing vocals, and firing on all cylinders. The full band's entrance after a verse of “Everything I Have Is Blue” is akin to a boot to the head, and the slashing riffs of the album's best known song “Miles From Nowhere” leaves the listener breathless. So effective was the album's opening fire that the band performed these three songs together in concert for several years afterward.

Elsewhere, A Date With The Smithereens introduces a rather motley cast of characters. “Long Way Back Again” was inspired by the tale of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and is propelled by hypnotic, repeating guitar chords that set an eerie tone. “Gotti” salutes the famed mobster, while pointing out that most of the people who were finally able to send the “Teflon Don” to jail probably had good reason to join him in the slammer. The rollicking “Can't Go Home Anymore” follows a stalker as he warns his prey that they “should have known better than to walk through the jungle at night...”

Guitarist Jim Babjak had been growing as a songwriter over the course of the band's last few albums, and his “Love Is Gone” may be his tour de force. It packs an emotional wallop even all these years later. In a personal cruel twist of a coincidence, it was the song that came on my car stereo as I drove home from work on the afternoon of 9/11/01, and I'll always associate it with the raw emotion of that day.

Pat DiNizio had a way of writing songs that, no matter what his actual inspiration, the listener can project their own thoughts, feelings and experiences in to. It was one of the things that first drew me in to The Smithereens music. He ends A Date With The Smithereens with one of his most achingly beautiful and heartbreaking songs, “Life Is So Beautiful”. The self-doubts and feelings of failure are his own, yet they are universal. I particularly latched on to the line “There's a young man in a photograph, and he's smiling, young and so care free. Now I see that it's been torn in half, and I can't believe that boy is me.” It came at a very confused time in my life, still getting used to the changes that adulthood had brought, not quite satisfied with life and career, wondering if I'd made the right decisions about the path I was taking. At the moment you connect your own experiences and emotions to a song, it becomes your own, no matter what the author's original intentions. “Life Is So Beautiful” might even have become a radio power ballad a few years earlier with a few strings and sweetening added to water it down. As it is, it's a closer of raw emotion and uncertainty for the future.

I loved A Date With The Smithereens from the first note, and I was sure that it would bring the band back to the “top of the pops”, so to speak. Sometimes it feels like I was one of the only people who paid full price for it on the day of release, and on the way home from the record store, I even heard the local rock radio station give “Miles From Nowhere” a spin. Things looked good for the album. Then, I started seeing the reviews come in. “Plodding”...”Running out of ideas”...the usual unenthusiastic music critic cliches.  Even the good reviews couldn't raise more than a B grade of enthusiasm. It seemed to me like the very critics who had in years past supported The Smithereens as the next big thing had not only moved on to the next next big thing, but seemed to take great glee in pronouncing The Smithereens as a thing of the past, something to be discarded. Uncool just by not being new anymore. The album's chart impact was minimal, the airplay for “Miles From Nowhere” never materialized, and momentum soon ground to a halt. It wasn't long before A Date With The Smithereens took up a permanent residency in literally every cut-out bin and used CD shelf in the country. It's broken my heart to find these orphaned copies literally everywhere in my travels for nearly three decades!

What went wrong? Well, for starters, changes at RCA Records hurt. Smithereens supporters at the label had moved on or been fired by the time A Date With The Smithereens was released, and their replacements were more interested in pushing their own discoveries. I recall trying to set up a radio interview with the band in conjunction with a local concert appearance. The RCA label representative couldn't have been less enthusiastic about The Smithereens. He instead quickly tried to steer my interest to his latest pet project, The Dave Matthews Band. The Smithereens were barely on the edge of his radar, probably only there because someone had assigned them to him. I eventually got my interview, but he seemed genuinely puzzled why I was bothering him about The Smithereens.

The public perception of The Smithereens had changed as well. Their last hits for Capitol Records had been catchy pop records, and the back to basics heavy guitar sound of A Date With The Smithereens was quite a stylistic whiplash. Oddly, the album's sound was probably more in tune with what was happening in rock music at that time than anything on their previous album Blow Up. Unfortunately, the perception was that The Smithereens were following the trends, rather than actually influencing them. Even devoted Smithereens fans seem to be divided by A Date With The Smithereens, with a good number falling on the side of “I don't get it”. With so many dissenting views, I began to think that maybe I was the one who'd misjudged the album. I put it away for several years, rarely thinking about it. It was becoming “The Great Lost Smithereens Album”.

Of course, The Smithereens kept going. Record sales and popularity may have never returned to their late 80's heyday, but The Smithereens wouldn't give up. Their aptly named 2011 album turned out to be an acclaimed career highlight. Hearing these new songs prompted me to revisit A Date With The Smithereens. It made me realize that I was right about it all along. It is their White Album, their John Wesley Harding, their back to basics statement. Either you get it or you don't, but you can't deny its power and its strength. What it really should be is their “cult album”. Their Village Green Preservation Society, their Sunflower, their Odessey And Oracle. An album that doesn't find its audience in its own time, but slowly gets discovered by new listeners, who hear in it what most people couldn't.

It's certainly not hard to find. I can almost guarantee you can locate it with little effort. Go to any record store with a used section, and it'll probably be there waiting for you. There are any number of copies on Amazon.com or Discogs that you can pick up for as little as a penny...plus shipping, of course. [Author's Note:  Yes, it's on Spotify, if you must.  Even better, go download a copy on Qobuz!] They're all looking for a good home, waiting to be rediscovered. A Date With The Smithereens is an album waiting for its cult.