Thurs. May 24

Handsome Dick Manitoba and I go way back. On record, when I started playing “The Dictators Go Girl Crazy” album in my college dorm and on WMEB radio– annoying most everyone without a sense of humor or prog rock fans – and in person when I interviewed the band in 1977.  The proto-punk, CBGB-raised band was the improbable opening act on some triple-bill that passed through my local cement-mixer of a concert hall we called the Bangor Auditorium in Bangor, Maine. There were post-show hijinks in the hotel rooms and an early morning dinner at HoJo’s and a story that ran in the long-defunct Sweet Potato magazine. Much merriment ensued. There was a shared love of junk culture, pro wrestling, trash talking, Iggy and the Stooges, killer melodies and guitar riffs – and a sense that real change was in the air, and we were all part of it.

   My relationship with Manitoba (born Richard Blum, he’s legally been Manitoba for more than a decade) moved on through various phases at numerous Dictators concerts and hangs in Boston and in visits to New York and Handsome Dick’ bar, Manitoba’s.
    Now, with the Dictators dead or on hiatus – main songwriter Andy Shernoff is doing his solo thing and doesn’t want to recreate the Dictators in concert any longer - Manitoba – now a popular SiriusXM DJ on Steve Van Zandt’s garage rock show (weeknights, 8 pm, Ch. 21) – has put together a quintet called MANITOBA (not to be confused with his former band, Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom, assembled after one earlier Dictators split, or that Canadian province). The band, which includes Dictators lead guitarist Ross the Boss (Friedman) and Dictators’ longest-running drummer JP (Thunderbolt) Patterson, plays Church Thursday May 24th, their first area gig. I spoke with Manitoba – you call him Richard, not Dick or Handsome Dick - recently from his New York home.

   Manitoba’s history includes more than a few years of drug and alcohol abuse – he was living out the HDM character, not unlike Alice Cooper used to do - and at least a couple of decades of sobriety.
    There’s some verbal sparring here.  A lot of it is good-natured camaraderie driven his lifelong devotion to the Yankees and mine to the Red Sox. He’s been known to wear Yankees uniform garb while performing in Boston clubs.

HDM: Is this a Boston area code? 617? I don’t usually pick up 617. I’ll make an exception in this case.
JSInk: I appreciate that. I also appreciate that your band has deigned to play, as you’ve called it “our tiny college town.”
Ha-ha. And I would like to go that bandbox called Fenway Park, but I can’t seem to get away. I’d love to go. I’d love to see every stadium. (Lots of baseball yak happens.)
How and why did Manitoba come about?
A few years ago, we ]the Dictators] played Spain. We played four shows and came home with a boatload of money in our pockets and we had a wonderful time, with people from their 20s to their 50s coming up to us saying “That’s the best rock ‘n’ roll concert I’ve ever seen.” We came home. We were thrilled and excited and happy. And I said “Let’s do it again next year” and Andy didn’t want to do it. For whatever reasons. I’ve made peace with Andy. I’m not going to go into why he is the way he is. My thinking is that generally speaking he’s not inspired to do the same thing over and over again. He told me he gets excited by pushing himself and trying new things. I think he saw Nick Lowe do something in bookstore and he was inspired by a guy getting older playing music on an organic level, a song guy doing songs and telling stories, and I think he wants to go in that direction and occasionally rock out.

 My thinking was always, “Hey, why can’t we do both?” I think he didn’t want to, in his words, “turn into an oldies act.” I’m just a different  person. I see it as I’m an entertainer – I don’t see it from the perspective of being the songwriting creator. I’m an entertainer and people think it’s my band, for better or worse, and they think it’s my band and I wrote all the songs anyway. And that’s how it is being a lead singer. And they say when are you guys playing? I find the split is that there are people who are gonna say “Well, it’s not all the original guys so I’m not interested” and there are people who are gonna say, “Wow, I worked my ass off all week, I put down my $15 or $20 and saw a great rock ‘n ‘ roll band, I had a few drinks, I’m happy, I’m excited, I feel good.”  That’s my gift. You come to our show, you get entertained, interacting with the band on stage. Iggy plays, with all due respect to Iggy and in all deference to Andy or anyone else’s opinion, I think people clap politely when they hear “The Weirdness,” but I don’t think anyone goes nuts. I think if that makes Iggy an ongoing artist with value, then that’s your opinion. People are really laying down their money to hear “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “1969.” And that’s what drives them crazy. I’m up there with the guitar player who started the Dictators, the drummer who’s been there longer than any drummer we’ve had, a guy who’s worked with Ramones [Daniel Ray] and the best bass player I’ve ever worked with [Dean Rispler]… the difference is being old friends, like any family relationship there are a bunch of stresses. And I thought that might make for great music, but that was me being romantic and it was wrong. Really, we’re a bunch of guys now, laughing, goofing, having fun, playing great and looking at each other thinking it’s better not to have that turmoil. The new philosophy is if you’re out there in the audience watching a bunch of guys laughing and having fun, you’re probably gonna have fun, too.
Are there hopes to take this further in terms of writing new material?
Yes, there are plans and hopes. Right now, I want to focus on getting together a set. Ross, myself, Scott [Kempner] and for many years JP were integral members of the microscopic fiber of what went into making the Dictators the Dictators. The odd thing is that Andy is the main songwriter, and he’s not there. But it’s not like we’re a bunch of guys in Vegas picking up the name. We were there at the beginning. The thing is, we want to get an exciting set. I want to find my voice. I’ve been adding words to the in-between stuff and the story-telling. Physically and sonically, it’s a high energy rock ‘n’ roll band. If you want to go in there thinking these are old guys, I can’t help that. If you go in and let the sonic-ness take care of itself, you’re going to hear a high-energy, great-played rock ‘n’ roll band. In that part, we’re like teenagers. The other stuff I’m working on, we’re not trying act like teenagers. We’re not trying to act like we’re this hot, dangerous band. I talk about family stuff. It’s my version of Springsteen. Don’t take that the wrong way. I’m not trying to be Bruce Sprinsgteen, but I’m saying Bruce talks to his audience like a real grown up who happens to love and play rock ‘n’ roll. And that’s what we do; I play my version of that. It’s the Handsome Dick Manitoba version of that.
Your character on stage, from what I’ve gathered, is somewhat an exaggeration of who you are off-stage. Some things are over the top, on purpose. Is that still there?
Yes, but I think I was trying much harder in the old day to be everyone’s enemy and a bad-guy wrestler. It’s still there in snippets, but now I’m trying to be everyone’s pal. A real good example is the guys from Guns N’ Roses called up and asked if we’d like to open up their Roseland show. We go on at 10. I figure we play to 1000 people, that’s great. We played to 3000 people, it was packed, and these are people who came in my bar [later] and said to, “I was at Roseland. I looked at you guys come on stage. I didn’t really know ya, I kinda heard you had this bar in the East Village, let’s see what this guy has, and you won over that audience so sell, you were so engaging. People liked you and stayed with you and wanted to be your friend.” They came to see Guns N’ Roses and saw this really fun opening band that was fun and charming and entertaining and then watched the headlining band they paid to see. …
Maybe I am taking a page out of Andy’s book by pushing myself, because I want to exercise all the stuff that’s in Handsome Dick Manitoba, not just the loud, braggadocio rock ‘n’ roll singer. I wanna exercise the other stuff too – the storytelling, the social satire, the commentary, the heart and soul stuff, the funny stuff, the ridiculous stuff, all that’s in there. Why not let it out? I want to keep pushing myself and be exicted about life. I’ll always love rock ‘n’ roll, but the reason I do it two things. One, and  I got this from Ricky Byrd, who was in the Joan Jett band, it gives me a hard-on to do it, and two, I get it back from the audience. If it just gave me a hard-on, that wouldn’t be enough. If they didn’t say “Wow!” …
You’ve always had that rapport with an audience. I liked it when I was down in New York covering the CBGB closing nights for the Christian Science Monitor and L.A. Weekly. You said something to the effect of “It’s all right to be sad tomorrow, or sad next week, but not right now. Tonight we rock!”
Ain’t I fucking brilliant?
Well, it really was the best thing to hear. We had that pall about us, but we wanted to celebrate somehow. You nailed it.
I was in the moment. I’m thrilled! What am I supposed to do? Be in the moment tomorrow? Or next month when you feel sad? I was just on the phone with Ed Stasium [Ramones producer]

who asked me to sing a song at the Joey Ramone {Birthday Bash, May 19] and I said to Ed, “You know, you’ve got to stay in the moment. Everyone talks about losing CBGB. “Oh, CBGB is gone, the Fillmore East is gone!” Everything is gone. Records are gone, 45s are gone, CDs are gone. Turntables are gone. Everything is internet. The world has changed before our eyes. I said to Ed, “You know what, it’s bigger than that, it’s deeper than that. It’s more than the actual physical manifestation of a store or a cool club.” CBGB had a great run, a wonderful owner with a great vision for 33 years in the same spot, the same man. You can complain it wasn’t 43 years or say thank you for 33 years. I tend to say thank you. … New York’s all about change and sometimes it changes for the worse, but the music thing is: After Andy didn’t want to go on the road, the boys came to me and said “Let’s do something.” I said, “No it doesn’t feel right.” Then, I had a weird epiphany when Steve Jobs died and it resonated deep inside me. He said “Stop listening to the voices outside of you and start listening to the voices inside of you.” I started going … I have all these  smart studied musical people around me, and I thought, wait a minute, nobody else owns a bar, has a constant line of people from all states coming in saying “When are you playing? We want to see you on stage” for years and years. Scott can’t do it ‘cause he’s in LA getting the Del Lords ready, Andy doesn’t want to do it, and finally I’m like, “Wait, they don’t want to do it, but Dean wants to do it, JP wants to do it, Ross wants to do it,” so we went to rehearse and it sounded amazing. And if felt amazing. So for now, listen, the Rollling Stones didn’t have an album of all-original material ‘til “Aftermath.” There’s no rush. I’m 58 years old, it doesn’t matter. I can go out and kill with a fun rock ‘n’ roll band and play songs I have been a part of creating for the last 30 years. We have 25 Dictators songs to play, 10 Wild Kingdom songs and half a dozen cool covers, and that’s just to start. We have people begging to get together saying “Let’s start working on new material.” Let’s go out and have fun and then let’s go get a couple of new songs. That’s a good start. But there’s no rush. I don’t have to have an album out. I’m not turning the world on its head by playing rock ‘n’ roll. And we don’t have that machine like Andy churning it out, so I want to be cautious about this. There’s a few really good songwriters I like I want to get together with and see if we can come up with something we consider MANITOBA friendly and that’s it. We’re all champing at the bit to play.
When I’ve talked to other bands who’ve been on the rock ‘n’ roll as a career path and it didn’t work out or whatever and they let it go. Then when they got back into it, everything changes in terms of the reasoning and rationale. Like you said, you’re not gonna change the world or be the world’s next big rock star, but you are enjoying yourself and making people happy. That’s the goal.
Yeah. I don’t know how you philosophically live life or spiritually, but I have a very simple thing. I know I love to cook for people. When I found out after ten years sober that I was HIV negative, I looked up at the sky and I’m not the most God guy in the world, but I have a sense of spirituality but I looked up at the heavens …. I’m not searching for religion, but I looked up and said, “Why am I here?” Then I  had my son, we, me and my wife Zoe had Jake, that gives a lot of clarity why we’re here. This miracle baby was born to us. We would have been voted the least likely to have children – we didn’t even like kids really that much -  and we had this kid. That’s some clarity about why I’m here, to take care of him now. But besides that I can tell you for sure, my Zen moments in life, where there’s not a lot of thinking, but a lot of being and feeling like I’m connected to the planet is when I’m watching baseball or playing baseball, anything to do with baseball,  when cooking, the idea that I would cook some magnificent dinner saying “Hear is a  gift for you” and I get it. There’s reasons why Jimmy Fallon came into my bar and invited me onto his bigshot famous TV show. It’s not something I worked at. I never aspired to be a singer or entertainer or perform when I was a kid. It’s just Murray [Krugman] and Sandy [Pearlman, original Dictators and Blue Oyster Cult producers] stuck a mic in front of me and said Andy’s a good songwriter, but when this guy gets on stage people get excited – and that was me.
When I saw you on were going to be on Fallon I yelled to my wife, “Holy shit! Handsome Dick’s gonna be on Fallon!” As much as I love you, but he’s going be on network TV. Was that how it came about, him coming into the bar?
Yes. Two years ago, he came in the bar. And he goes, “Why don’t you come on the show?” and I go, “Me!? Go from the cracks of the underground to the big time?” I didn’t say that, but that was my thought. I said, “Thank you, that’s really nice of you, Jimmy, but I don’t have anything to push right now, can I take a rain check?” Now, I have this reality show “Meet the Manitobas,” that me and Zoe are working on – it’s about this amazing life like the Munsters family, raising a child and playing baseball and still doing all these dark side things. Yet, we’re the all-American family and all the wacky characters that go in the neighborhood and we just thought, “With all these horrible reality shows, let’s open up a door and see what’s in there. Wow, we’re a lot more fascinating than that.” We’re working on that. I had my bobble-head doll come out. I have a book I put out a few years ago, I have a radio show and I’m getting a band together. With all that going on, I got in touch with him and I didn’t hear back. I sent a second letter. I said, “I never want to be the kind of guy that is too pushy or asks for too much. I’m a big boy. “No” is something I can deal with, but I got in touch with you it’s time now …” I go to Sirius one day. I’m on the 35th floor and someone once and someone from the 37th floor says “Fallon’s people got in touch with me and they want you to be on the show.” That was it. I called in my favor. He came down to greet us and Jake opened the door and Jimmy was standing there. He was so gracious. It was one of the great thrills of my wonderful career.
Explain the Sirius show to people who don’t know what you’re doing.
About six years ago, Little Steven got his own radio station called “The Underground Garage,” and he came to me and asked me to be one of his DJs and I said yes. We started on weekends and then it turned into full time. My understanding of it is, it’s his vision. I call myself a loyal warrior, DJ, host entertainer for Mr. Van Zandt. The genesis of it is the British invasion, that’s the big bang, the Beatles and the Stones, but it’s basically the history of rock ‘n’ roll through the eyes of Little Steven. It’s everything that went into the British invasion which is American pop and soul and R and B. Those guys took our stuff, and added their stuff. And the British invasion began stuff like the Ramones and the Clash, everything else. It’s from ‘50s to modern times.

Link to my Monitor CBGB closing story: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1019/p20s01-almp.html
Link to Dictators playing the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” at CBGB, 1977 http://youtu.be/xuKd65C6jvU
Link to MANITOBA doing “Faster and Louder” http://youtu.be/zGpq5rVBwTI
MANITOBA will be on at 10. At 9, Rule opens. Tickets: $12 (advance) $15 (day of).

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