Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
Over the past bunch of years, decade or so, we have rented vans 90% of the time in Europe. They were nice big 10 or 12 passenger Mercedes Benz vans. Since they were rentals there were no real breakdowns or troubles on the road with the vans as the company would come and fix anything if we needed it.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Then I’ll have to lead with Europe, which has a different attitude then America. There it’s more like “welcome to our town, this is the type of food we have in our town, you are our guests” as compared to “hi, how you doing, the olive loaf is in your dressing room”.
The food in Europe is usually wonderful homemade and delicious. The way to eat healthy is simple but actually difficult. What I mean is small portions, but the food is so delicious that it’s hard to eat small portions. So if you eat small portions of anything that is one way of what I call eating healthy.
Eating cheaply is easy – the band stops for lunch usually after driving in the car or the van for three or four or five hours. We go and get breakfast 90% of the time – breakfast at the hotel. I’ll eat breakfast and then I’ll make two little sandwiches that I stick in my pockets to take with me. Sometimes I’ll eat that for dinner in the hotel room before I go on stage. The band will stuff their faces two hours before they go on. Whatever I eat for dinner has to be at least four hours before I go on stage, so we are on different schedules.
How many microphones do you break in a typical year?
I usually break one or two microphones a year and these are microphones that are on cables. Could you imagine if I had wireless microphones? People in the audience would be owning them. I just seem to lose my mind on stage sometimes and drop them and drop them and drop them until they suck.
Where do you rehearse?
I hate to be boring but not really our rehearsal spaces very depending on where we are going and what we need sometimes we rent really nice rehearsal spaces large rooms with more than decent equipment and sometimes we just rent small little rooms to sort of sharpen ourselves up that’s about as exciting as my rehearsal stories get. Unless you count the time back in the 70s I sat on the couch next to Mr. Bob Dylan at SIR rehearsals in New York City.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
The first song that I wrote, I wrote mostly with Ross the Boss. It was born out of the desire for the band to play while one certain songwriter decided he didn’t want to carry on, therefore none of us should. We waited a few years and then we said fuck it, let’s play.
People want to hear us we want to play – that’s good enough. The song is called “Supply and Demand” and it’s obvious where we got it from – the people wanted to hear us that was the demand; we wanted to play that was the supply.
A funny thing happened walking down the hallway of Sirius satellite radio where I worked 14 years on a national radio station. Dave Marsh, a rock historian guy who has written about 100 books (his wife co-manages Bruce Springsteen) said of the song, “it’s a masterpiece”. When I said “oh come on Dave, it’s a good solid rock tune but it’s not a masterpiece,” he said “I don’t fool around about this stuff, it’s a masterpiece.”
I’ll just give you the first verse:
The boys in the band had their asses on their hands,
They couldn’t stick their heads any deeper in the sand,
They sat back did nothing waiting for one man,
The time had come to take a stand,
The time had come to devise a new plan,
And this my friends was the birth of the band,
This my friends was …..supply and demand.
Describe your first gig.
It’s unbelievable. It might be unprecedented in rock ‘n’ roll history. I was the drunk best friend “roadie” of the band. The band had started and I was the best friend of the band but I had no job to do. Never having wanted to be a musician or supposedly never having the drive or talent to be a musician, we played a place called Popeyes Spinach Factory in a neighborhood called Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, right on the water. Chris Stein from Blondie was there. Eric Emerson from the Magic Tramps was there. They hung out with the Warhol crew and, as the years go by, more and more people supposedly were there! The band played to mild applause. They handed me the microphone and I did “Wild Thing” – the crowd went crazy. This happened many times. Every time they put a microphone in my hand, the audience reacted strongly. That was the first song I ever sang with the DICTATORS.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Most of my life I’ve had very few day jobs. I worked for six months at the age of 19 or 20 delivering mail. I worked Customer Service at this weird furniture store that made furniture from your fresh cut trees in the woods. That lasted about three months.
Over the years I’d say I worked a total of about a year. That’s because I got lucky enough and smart enough to take what was thrown in front of me. I worked hard and built on it until I built my name and character and personality to a point where I could support my family.
The DICTATORS kind of broke up when we made no money with record labels. Of course we would go to Europe and travel around the states occasionally and make money because there was no record company sticking their hands in our pockets.
I was fortunate enough to open up a bar that lasted for 20 years and just recently closed – MANITOBA’S bar. Rock ‘n’ roll people came from all over the world and loved it was like a clubhouse a rock ‘n’ roll clubhouse.
I also had a great job working for little Steven Van Zandt up at Sirius satellite radio. I did five shows a week for 14 years and never missed one single show.
I’ve been paid to write, I’ve been paid to be a master of ceremonies, and I’ve been paid as a reader for a literary club. I played with DKTMC5 for a while so most of my life I did wonderful creative exciting things to make a living. I never got up in the morning and went oh shit for a literary club!!
These days I have a book offer on the table that I’m looking over and I have a podcast that is growing monthly. It’s called “You Don’t Know Dick”. I just started a little program just for fun on YouTube called “The Handsome Dick Manitoba Program”. I just put up little five minute and 10 minutes snippets usually.
Born in the Bronx, the first album I ever wrote with the great Jon Tiven, was recently released so I’m thrilled about that. So again I have saturated my life with creative fun exciting things to do. I just don’t do well with real jobs.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
Well, that’s a tough question. It’s a good question since we only put out one single and the DICTATORS will never play again. I’m talking about the DICTATORS NYC. We went to Europe twice a year three weeks each time. I can tell you that we did pretty good in the five or six years in a row that we sold a bunch of T-shirts and played a bunch of concerts six weeks a year. We did pretty good until a former member of the band who didn’t want us to use the name; I guess he thought he owned the air rights of the DICTATORS. He threatened to sue us if we kept using the name and that put the kibosh on that. The downside was hurting five peoples lives economically.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
I wish I didn’t believe that certain people around me who were considered the brilliant genius musicians and songwriters actually were brilliant musicians and songwriters. I wish I had the self-esteem all those years ago to believe that everything I had in my creative soul was every bit as important, valuable, entertaining, and talented as these men I speak of.
As my dear departed friend Lou Whitney once said: “Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which fills up first?” Wishing does no good, except for children. The point is that it doesn’t matter my age now it matters that all that stuff bottled up all those decades are coming out. And it’s starting with Born in the Bronx.