Richard Blum went from being a roadie to punk legend Handsome Dick
Jewish Telegraph, June 2016
PUNK legend Handsome Dick Manitoba will be interviewed on stage during a music festival in Blackpool.
The Rebellion Festivals at the town’s Winter Gardens from August 4–7 will also host a performance from Manitoba’s re-formed group The Dictators — now known as Dictators NYC.
There will also be performances from classic punk bands such as Anti-Nowhere League, Cockney Rejects, The Buzzcocks, The Damned and hundreds of others.
Manitoba — born Richard Blum in the Bronx in 1954 to Morris ‘Bill’ and Sylvia (nee Bernstein) Blum — was originally a roadie for the all-Jewish The Dictators before becoming lead singer.
“I was the roadie because I was the best friend of the band and I had to do something with them,” he told me.
“I got up at one of our first concerts and, almost as a joke as a drunk roadie, sang Wild Thing. People went crazy. I became the lead singer because, while the previous singer had respectable responses, when they put a microphone in my hand people reacted like they should to a rock ’n’ roll band.”
Before finding his role as a rock star, Manitoba had worked for the American Postal Service.
But before he could truly be a star, he realised he had to change his name.
“I didn’t think a singer of a rock ’n’ roll band with the name Richard Blum was going to make it, so we threw a bunch of different names against the wall and Handsome Dick Manitoba stuck,” he revealed.
Manitoba, who grew up on the Gun Hill housing project, describes his parents as “hypocritical” when it came to Judaism.
He said: “On one hand they respected and celebrated all the holidays and went to synagogue, on the other, we ate pork in the house and didn’t really pay a lot of attention to religion.
“I went for all the holidays to my relatives’ houses, mostly my maternal grandmother, sometimes to my aunt and uncle. We celebrated all the holidays — I knew we were Jewish and I was barmitzvah.”
He added: “I am not very religious at all now. I am a Jew. My son is a Jew. I have a mezzuza outside my front door!
“I think there is great, great knowledge in the Torah, but I also think there is great knowledge to be found in most religious historical books.
“I will also gain information from the Christian Bible. If you find something valuable, should it not be valuable because it’s not from your religion?
“Knowledge is knowledge, spirituality is spirituality from where it comes, it comes.
“Being a New York Jew for me is extremely cultural and very important.
“It’s a very powerful thing to my identity. I consider myself more spiritual than religious and again I consider myself a cultural New York Jew.”
His band’s first major-label album, The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! in 1975, featured his picture on the cover and he was listed as the ‘Secret Weapon’.
The album, which was produced by Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, also featured guitarist Ross ‘The Boss’ Friedman, bassist Andy ‘Adny’ Shernoff, rhythm guitarist Scott ‘Top Ten’ Kempner and drummer Stu ‘Boy’ King.
Manitoba describes signing to Epic Records as “unreal, actually almost stupid”.
He explained: “We had never played and, all of a sudden, we had a whole bunch of money to be a rock ’n’ roll band and we were big shots in the neighbourhood and we felt like hot s**t.”
They followed this with Manifest Destiny, in 1977, also produced by Pearlman and Krugman.
Third album Bloodbrothers, released the following year, featured a young Bruce Springsteen counting in the opening track Faster and Louder.
The band broke up soon after with Manitoba, who became a taxi driver, taking the split badly.
He told me: “It was this really cool thing I had, but I was sort of at the beginning of my crash-and-burn period.
“I was on drugs so my whole world was spiralling downward anyway.”
He added: “I was thinking for a while we would always play here and there.”
In 1986, he joined forces with Shernoff and guitarist Daniel Rey to form Wild Kingdom — later renamed as Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom.
MCA Records released the debut album . . . And You? in 1990 with Friedman having replaced Rey.
The album cover caused controversy as it was lifted from a Nazi recruiting poster. Tracks included Master Race Rock and Back to Africa.
Manitoba ended the millennium by opening a punk bar called Manitoba’s with wife Zoe Hansen.
In 2001, the reformed The Dictators released the album D.F.F.D.
“It would be nice to have reformed with the total original band, but that couldn’t work out so we reformed with most of the original band and added two amazing musicians/ people,” Manitoba said.
Five years later, Manitoba, Shernoff, Friedman, Patterson and Kempner headlined two of the last shows ever at the legendary New York City club CBGB’s.
Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom reunited in 2008 for the Joey Ramone Birthday Bash at Irving Plaza.
Between 2005 and 2012, Manitoba fronted classic band MC5.
“MC5 were a band that I adored as a teenager into my early and mid-20s and all of a sudden I get a phone call from Wayne Kramer asking me to join,” he said.
“This is the way I looked at it, ‘Would you like to come to Europe and sing Kick out the Jams? I’ll pay you’.
“Of course that’s not how he said it to me, but the idea of travelling, singing MC5 songs and getting paid was absolutely exhilarating.”
Five years ago, Manitoba, Friedman, JP ‘Thunderbolt’ Patterson, ‘Rey, and Dean Rispler formed the band Manitoba — renaming themselves The Dictators NYC.
Manitoba can’t believe that it is 40 years since it all started. But, he added: “You don’t really think about life like that. Usually you’re more in the moment.
“You might ponder the future, but you’re too busy staying in the moment, doing what you do.
“Who walks around thinking what I’d be doing in 40 years?”
And of nostalgia events, he said: “If I see a band called, for example, The Temptations playing Las Vegas and there are one or no original members, that doesn’t turn me on.
“If I see a band which has, like we do, three out of five original members with one who worked with The Ramones and Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom, I do not consider that nostalgia — especially if the band is now sounding mighty.”
Manitoba has also become a popular radio DJ on Little Steven Van Zandt’s Underground Garage channel, on Sirius XM Radio.
“In the beginning it was like anything else that is new,” he said. “You don’t know what to expect.
“You have a bunch of things rolling around in your head, but once I got in there, it took me about two months or so to be very comfortable and I started getting very good at what I did to the point where Little Steven called me up and said ‘you sound like you’ve been on the radio for 10 years’.”
Manitoba — who was influenced by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks and Motown among others — said he has never encountered any antisemitism, despite punk’s links with skinhead culture.
Manitoba has never visited Israel, but he “absolutely, absolutely, absolutely” wants to take his 13-year-old son there.
“I need to find out what the situation is where I can take him for free,” he said. “That is what I heard when he gets to a certain age.”
He did have a message for Roger Waters and others like him.
“The artists boycotting Israel can go **** themselves. I can’t stomach them and I would do anything I can do to support Israel.”
Manitoba’s roots are in Russia and Poland. He says he speaks no Hebrew, but a little Yiddish.
“I will do my best to keep that language alive,” he told me. “I teach my son Yiddish words. I will never let it die as long as I am on this planet.”
n www.rebellionfestivals.com
