The Dictators NYC
At Parlor Newport, 200 Broadway, Newport, R.I., Friday at 8:30 p.m. Tickets $22. www.eventbrite.com.
At Great Scott, Saturday at
9 p.m. Tickets $15. www.greatscottboston.com
The last time Handsome Dick was in Boston, he took a bus up from New York City with his wife and son. They’d been invited to a pro wrestling extravaganza at the TD Garden.
Their hotel room overlooked Fenway Park, which made the visitor a little cranky: A lifelong New Yorker, he’s a diehard Yankees fan. But he was quick to let it go. Like the wrestlers who inspired him, Handsome Dick Manitoba has made a career out of being a heel, and he’s had plenty of fun with it.
“I’m a bad guy,’’ says Manitoba, who brings his long-running punk act, now known as Dictators NYC, to Great Scott on Saturday.
Before he was “Handsome Dick,’’ Manitoba was a street kid named Richie Blum, causing trouble around the East Village, where he still lives. His reinvention is a bit of punk-rock folklore: working as a roadie for the Dictators, he took the name “Handsome Dick,’’ inspired by wrestlers such as Gorgeous George and the Valiant Brothers — Handsome Jimmy and Luscious Johnny.
That’s Manitoba on the cover of the Dictators’ 1975 debut album, “Go Girl Crazy!’’ — often called the first American punk record — wearing a monster grin and an old-school wrestling singlet, puffing out his chest.
His outrageous stage persona soon made him the face of the band, though he prefers another term.
“In wrestling parlance, there are ‘faces’ and ‘heels,’?’’ he notes, on the phone from New York. “I’m a heel. My band roll their eyes. They don’t like to get booed.’’
But abrasiveness is Manitoba’s shtick. Even his speaking voice sounds like a metal file on prison bars. He has one of the most prominent gigs on SiriusXM, spinning his favorite rock ’n’ roll songs on Little Steven’s Underground Garage from 8 p.m.-midnight, Monday through Friday.
His father was a shoe salesman, he says. “My parents taught me nothing about music or art,’’ he says. “Somebody put a microphone in my hand one day, and I lit up. The audience lit up.’’
He’s still amazed at his good fortune. “By American standards, I have no hiring qualities. Zero!’’
But it only took one person — in this case, Steven Van Zandt, the estimable rock ’n’ roll historian and longtime E Street Band guitarist — to suggest that Manitoba’s outsize personality might go over well on satellite radio. In fact, in 10 years on the job, Manitoba has toned down the bluster considerably, aided by years of sobriety. His reverence for the music he plays, from the British Invasion and the tough-chick girl groups of his youth to the various incarnations of punk attitude, is apparent.
“It only takes one person,’’ he says, crediting Van Zandt with helping maintain his livelihood. Manitoba compares his hiring at the Underground Garage to the Dictators somehow earning a major-label record deal, when industry veteran Sandy Pearlman signed the band to Epic Records.
As a friend once said to Manitoba, “Out of 7 billion people in the world, there might have been one other who would have signed the Dictators, but I wouldn’t bet on it.’’ That memory produces a raspy guffaw.
Van Zandt first crossed paths with the Dictators when Bruce Springsteen was recording “Darkness on the Edge of Town’’ at the Record Plant in early 1978. The Dictators were down the hall, laying tracks for their third album, “Bloodbrothers.’’
“There was a VHS player and couches in the hall,’’ Manitoba recalls. During downtime, the band members sat around together. “In reality, we were a bunch of guys from the Bronx and they were a bunch of guys from New Jersey, happy to be making music. We hit it off.’’
Springsteen once took the stage in a Dictators T-shirt and sometimes featured the band’s music on warmup tapes. Manitoba thinks one of the songs might have been “Cars and Girls,’’ which, given Springsteen’s favorite lyrical themes, sounds about right.
Manitoba was recently in the news when he conducted a fund-raising campaign to save his namesake bar on Avenue B, which he opened in 1999. A throwback to the East Village’s punk heyday, Manitoba’s was threatened with a lawsuit over wheelchair accessibility. The club met its fund-raising goal, and made the necessary changes for compliance.
These days, Manitoba’s not the hellion he once was. He’s friends with the neighborhood beat cops. During a phone call on a landline, his cellphone rings. (The ringtone is the “Godfather’’ theme.) It’s his 13-year-old son, Jake, who dutifully tells his father he’s finished his homework.
Manitoba will be 62 on Friday. What does it mean to be “punk’’ at that age?
To him, it’s a matter of interpretation. Staying punk means “I did it my way,’’ he says, “like Sid Vicious and Frank Sinatra said. I’m playing more rock ’n’ roll shows than ever, I have the joy of raising a child, I have a national radio program.
“I’m being paid money to be Handsome Dick Manitoba,’’ he observes. “What the hell is more punk than that?’’
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.
