Covers

For me, the sound of The Smithereens was born the moment Jimmy and I first hit a downbeat together in the early 70s. There is something in the way he voiced a chord combined with my attack on the drums, an essence that was forged as we bashed away our teenage summers in his parents' garage on Coolidge Ave in Carteret, NJ. I still hear it at sound checks when it's just the two of us tweaking our monitors. It's the distillation of the records that always turned us on. When Mike joined forces with us, our collective spirit was sparked by The Kinks, The Who, The Beatles and a slew of other musical heroes. We copped licks, feels, attitudes and melodic ideas that inform our playing to this day. Pat often spoke about getting ideas for his songwriting from his most beloved records (not forgetting Buddy Holly's) and dug throwing non-Smithereens tunes into our sets. Heck, he and I even played together in a cover band in 1979! The Smithereens will always play covers for inspiration and the sheer fun of it. And it keeps us in touch with our roots and the feelings that made us want to pick up our instruments when we were kids. Dennis Diken, 2018