Sat. July 10

Andy Shernoff can and will drop a few names when he plays a solo acoustic show at the Rosebud Diner in Somerville Saturday July 10. They’ll be names from the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Heartbreakers, well a lot folks from the early punk rock days, mostly in New York, but elsewhere too. Andy’s got stories to tell. That’s because, as the main songwriter (and bassist, guitarist and sometime singer) for the Dictators, he’s been there and done that. He’s also written some damn fine music, with the ‘tators, who pre-dated punk by a couple of years and also his latest band, the Master Plan (with Keith Streng from the Fleshtones). But what brings Shernoff to our neck of the woods is the result of something he started doing last November in New York and continued to do elsewhere: Small, intimate acoustic gigs, structures sort of like what Ray Davies did with his Storyteller tour.
    “I was getting more and more disenchanted with what I see in rock ‘n’ roll bands,” Andy tells us. “I wasn’t getting excited. The best concert I saw in the last two years was Nick Lowe in a small bookstore, just him and his guitar. It was really powerful. I enjoyed it. Maybe I’m getting old or I’m more of an adult. I’m not gonna get a band better than the Dictators.” (JSInk note: The Dictators, fronted by satellite radio star Handsome Dick Manitoba, are pretty much on hiatus right now. They were one of the bands to close down CBGB and it was one of the best club shows-cum-wakes I’ve seen.) 
    “Let me try acoustic,” continues Andy. “I played in a friend’s bar, Eric Amble from the Del Lords, and my papers were falling on the floor, I was forgetting my lyrics, a total amateur. People said it was really great. I said ‘Ok, let me continue, sort of as an experiment.’ It’s been getting better and better reactions.”
   What may seem incongruous is the Dictators are noted for hard and fast songs of teen (and adult) angst, with a healthy bit of humor, both broad and tongue-in-cheek. Their debut, “Go Girl Crazy,” was one of the best teenage wasteland albums ever – celebrating and sending up stupid way before Beavis & Butthead took it to the mainstream. Although the band started, with the intention of Shernoff fronting it, they soon discovered their roadie, Richard Blum (aka HD Manitoba), with his limited range but leather lungs, was better suited for the job. And, as Shernoff was writing mostly about Dick’s then wild-and-crazy life, it kind of made sense.
   What Andy’s done, he says, is “take some Dictators songs, rearrange them,  changed the keys, and do some songs I wrote with Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone.”
   But key to this is the storytelling. “There is sort of a narrative,” he says. “A beginning, middle and end. Growing up in New York in the days before CBGB playing music before punk rock, before the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Stories about the craziness, the disasters up to playing the UK in 1977, meeting the Sex Pistols, the Clash Billy Idol, people like  Sandy Pearlman (who co-produced the Dics first album) and Lester Bangs (legendary gonzo rock critic). Sid Vicious played my guitar. AC/DC opened up for us the first time they played New York. The stories I tell, a lot of them are funny, the story of rock ‘n’ roll seen through my eyes. I went to elementary school with Johnny Thunders.”
    “I tell stories follow it up with songs, songs I co-wrote with Dee Dee, I did two. and with Joey, I did six I also wrote a song for Mary Weiss of Shangri-las, which  makes sense. People associate me with stacks of Marshalls, but I’m a folksinger, I call myself the insensitive signer-songwriter.” 
    “I developed a style. I worked very hard to translate these electric songs and riffs. It was a lot of trial and error and work.”
    What to expect at the Rosebud? “Well,” says Andy, in New York, the set included ‘Master Race Rock,’ ‘Hey Boys,’ ‘Baby, Let’s Twist,’ ‘Haircut and Attitude,’ ‘You’re Never Gonna See Me Cry’ (the song I wrote for May), ‘Stay With Me,’ ‘Stop Thinking About It (from Joey’s solo record) and ‘Who Will Save Rock ‘n’ Roll?’”
   That latter song came from the Dictators’ last studio disc. It’s a plea that runs “Our generation is not the salvation/Who will save rock ‘n’ roll?”
   Andy’s attitude now? Is rock doomed?
   “I’m more positive of that than ever,” he says. “I see rock ‘n’ roll as being a little blip on the radar. I’m just dong my little bit to keep it alive. When I was a kid, rock drove the culture and it doesn’t any more. If you’re a kid into rock ‘n’ roll, are you doing something innovative? Or are you on the Internet playing computer games or skateboarding?”
   Who is Andy’s audience now?
    “It’s mostly older people drinking a cocktail, a glass of wine. There’s a few younger people coming out and they love the stories. My two inspirations are Ray Davies and Nick Lowe. What I’m doing is a little more storytelling than music - 11 songs, about two hours long. When I’m talking, nobody moves. You do a song, that’s when people get a drink. People want to hear the intimate details of what it was like.”
    Since Andy seemed to play a side role in the Dictators (on stage, anyway, he sees this as a case of stepping out. “I’m a behind the scenes guy, a producer, a bass player. Putting myself out never occurred to me. I wasn’t comfortable with it; I wasn’t into celebrity for myself, though I understood the importance of it. But I’m diggin’ it.  I’m really comfortable doing it and the reaction is very rewarding.”

Set starts at 10. Tickets: $10.

381 Summer St., Somverille, 617-330-6285 www.rosebuddiner.com