Local band always has crowds guessing

By John Benson

Dizzy Whore has been around for roughly eight years, and singer Ronnie Riccadonna says the band members are now more committed than ever.

“Yeah, we’re more serious, especially from a long time ago when my cousin Mike Underwood first put the band together,” said Riccadonna, a 1997 Brookfield High School graduate. “We were like two idiots back then.”

And now?

“Now, we’re still two idiots, but we’re taking the music a little bit more serious,” Riccadonna laughed.

The current Dizzy Whore lineup — Riccadonna, Underwood (guitar), Jake Luther (drums) and Paul Sheehan (bass) — released its 2008 debut effort, “Desperate Side of Rock n Roll,” which is molded in the vibe of early Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses. Riccadonna points to tracks such as the upbeat “Dead and Gone” and the “Appetite For Destruction”-sounding “Drop Dead Dangerous” as defining the band’s sound.

“Our whole album is kind of modeled off of that raw punk, garage sound with a lot of changes and a lot of left turns in the music,” Riccadonna said. “You never know where the songs are going to go. It’s unpredictable and rough around the edges.”

Riccadonna said the mission statement behind Dizzy Whore is to return rock ’n’ roll back to its unpredictable and hard-edged past, when Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were the bad boys of rock. He also mentions a great fondness for the original Guns N’ Roses lineup, which did things on its own terms without kowtowing to fashion or musical trends.

It’s this same mind-set that the singer, who is often compared to the likes of Alice Cooper, said Dizzy Whore brings to its live show.

“We’re trying to make our concerts more of an experience,” Riccadonna said. “We change the songs a little bit from the album, and it’s not so much funk but add more of a groove to it. I don’t know, it just has more rhythm. We put some tricks in there too by adding some covers in. So we’ll break our songs down and then change over into an old Foghat song or something by The Who. We do that to keep the crowd on their toes.

“So it’s a lot of left turns. You never know where it’s going, you never know what you’ll see.”

The quartet is looking forward to its Friday gig at Barley’s in downtown Youngstown.

“When we play in the Youngstown area, a lot of people come out and see us,” Riccadonna said. “It’s a party every time.”