The 1990s File Feature
Blues Before And After
"Blues Before And After" — The Smithereens New Jersey Guitar Rock at the Turn of a Decade The Smithereens came out of Carteret, New Jersey, with a sound that…
01 The Story
"Blues Before And After" — The Smithereens
New Jersey Guitar Rock at the Turn of a Decade
The Smithereens came out of Carteret, New Jersey, with a sound that was proudly unfashionable in the best possible way: guitar-driven rock with a melodic center, songs that were simultaneously abrasive and catchy, and lyrics that owed as much to late-1960s British Invasion craft as to any contemporary movement. By 1990, they had been building a devoted following for nearly a decade, releasing records that received consistent critical respect and generating an audience that was enthusiastic but, by mainstream commercial standards, relatively contained. "Blues Before And After" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on May 5, 1990, at position 94, and spent two weeks on the chart before exiting at 97. The numbers tell a modest story, but they understate the song's significance within the band's catalog and within the alternative rock moment of 1990.
The 11 Album and the Band's Context
"Blues Before And After" appeared on 11, the Smithereens' third album, released on Enigma Records in 1989. The band's core lineup of Pat DiNizio on vocals and guitar, Jim Babjak on guitar, Mike Mesaros on bass, and Dennis Diken on drums had been intact since the early 1980s, and that stability showed in the chemistry of their recordings. 11 followed Especially for You (1986) and Green Thoughts (1988), both of which had generated college radio attention and modest commercial success. By their third album, the band had refined their sound to a point of considerable polish without sacrificing the directness that was their trademark.
The production on 11 benefited from a budget and recording infrastructure that earlier Smithereens albums had not enjoyed, but the fundamental approach remained consistent: guitars upfront, drums played with conviction, and DiNizio's voice delivering lyrics with the emotional directness of a classic rock performer who had listened to the Beatles and the Who and taken good notes.
Pat DiNizio's Songwriting and Voice
Pat DiNizio was one of the more underrated songwriter-performers of the late 1980s and early 1990s American rock scene. His ability to write songs that felt simultaneously vintage and contemporary gave the Smithereens a distinctive identity in a period when alternative rock was becoming an increasingly crowded space. "Blues Before And After" exemplifies his approach: a lyric built on the language of heartache and loss, rendered with just enough ironic distance to feel modern while the musical setting grounded it firmly in the guitar-rock tradition he loved.
His vocal delivery on this recording had the kind of weight that came from years of performing live in small venues, projecting over loud guitars to audiences who were close enough to see the sweat. There is nothing polished or calculated about the way he sings; the conviction is unfiltered.
The Alternative Rock Landscape of 1990
In May 1990, the Hot 100 chart environment was a genuinely mixed field. The year before Nevermind, before the mainstream commercial breakthrough that would reorganize the entire rock landscape around the Seattle sound, alternative rock occupied a market niche that was commercially viable but not dominant. The Smithereens were part of a cohort of guitar-rock bands, including Replacements contemporaries and college radio favorites, who had built real audiences without cracking the chart's upper regions. A two-week visit to the Hot 100 in 1990 placed them in the mainstream's peripheral vision without pulling them into its center.
Legacy and Continuing Reputation
The Smithereens continued recording and touring for decades after "Blues Before And After," maintaining a reputation as one of rock music's more reliable live acts and more consistently excellent catalog bands. DiNizio passed away in 2017, a loss mourned by the band's longtime fans and by the broader community of people who cared about melodic guitar rock with genuine craft behind it. The band's surviving members continued the Smithereens name after his death, a testament to the collective identity they had built over more than three decades.
Put it on and let the guitars do their honest work; this is rock and roll that trusts the song.
"Blues Before And After" — The Smithereens' singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
"Blues Before And After" — Meaning and Legacy
Loss Rendered in Guitar Rock
The Smithereens built their reputation on a very specific emotional register: the bittersweet, the longing, the romantic wound that refuses to fully heal. "Blues Before And After" situates itself in this familiar emotional territory while the title itself signals something about the song's structural ambition. The "before and after" framing suggests not just loss but a temporal architecture: there was a period before the pain arrived, and there is a period after it, and the song occupies the space of reckoning between them. Pat DiNizio's lyrics treat heartache as something that reorganizes time itself, creating a before-state that looks different in retrospect and an after-state whose character is still being discovered.
The Blues as Inheritance
The word "blues" in the title is doing real work. The Smithereens were profoundly rooted in the tradition of British rock's engagement with American blues forms, and the sonic vocabulary of "Blues Before And After" reflects that lineage directly. The guitar work draws on blues-inflected bends and riffs, the rhythm section provides a physical pulse that owes something to the Chicago electric blues tradition filtered through the British Invasion, and DiNizio's vocal delivery has the kind of raw emotional directness that was the blues form's original gift to popular music.
This inheritance was not nostalgic or reverential in a museum sense; the Smithereens used it as a living language, expressing contemporary emotional realities in idioms that had proven their emotional effectiveness over decades of use. That continuity between tradition and present is one of the things that gave their work its particular feeling of authenticity.
The Landscape of 1990 Emotional Life
American rock in 1990 was grappling with a significant cultural identity question: what came after the excesses and posturing of the 1980s? The hair metal era was clearly running out of momentum; the underground movements that would produce the decade's defining sounds were still consolidating their audiences. The Smithereens occupied an interesting position in this transitional moment as a band that had never bought into the 1980s' dominant rock aesthetic and therefore did not need to repudiate it. Their emotional directness felt like a corrective without requiring any explicit positioning as such.
"Blues Before And After" in this context sounds like rock and roll that trusts the listener to engage with genuine feeling rather than theatrical gesture. The blues inheritance that the title announces was itself a form of authenticity claim, pointing back to a tradition built on emotional truth-telling as its primary purpose.
Why the Song Resonated with Its Audience
The Smithereens' fan base in 1990 was largely made up of listeners who had found them through college radio and word-of-mouth rather than through mainstream commercial channels. That audience came to the band specifically because its members were tired of the polished, producer-dominated pop and rock that dominated the Hot 100's upper reaches. "Blues Before And After" offered what they were looking for: a band in a room, playing with conviction, writing about things that mattered emotionally, without layers of production artifice between the feeling and the listener.
That directness, which was the Smithereens' most consistent quality across their catalog, is also what has sustained the band's reputation among listeners who discovered them in the 1990s and among the younger listeners who continue to find them through streaming and recommendation.
Pat DiNizio and the Art of the Melodic Lament
Within DiNizio's catalog as a songwriter, "Blues Before And After" represents his ongoing mastery of the melodic lament, a song form that takes emotional pain as its subject and finds in that subject enough richness for genuine musical exploration. The melody is memorable enough to lodge in the listener's head; the lyrics are specific enough to feel personal rather than generic; the arrangement is honest enough to let both elements land without getting in the way. That combination of qualities, simple to describe and genuinely difficult to execute, is what distinguished DiNizio's best work and what makes this song worth returning to decades after its modest chart appearance.
"Blues Before And After" — The Smithereens' singular moment on the 1990s charts.
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