Andy Shernoff

Andy Shernoff (born April 19, 1952) is an American musician, songwriter and record producer.

He is a founding member of The Dictators, one of the original New York punk bands, in which he wrote nearly all of the songs, played bass guitar and keyboards, and sang backing vocals and occasional leads.

He has been involved with a variety of other musical projects, most notably the heavily Dictators-populated Manitoba's Wild Kingdom and Joey Ramone's first studio album, Don't Worry About Me. He additionally co-wrote four Ramones songs with Joey.

Shernoff's current projects include garage rock band The Masterplan, featuring members of The Fleshtones and the Waxing Poetics.

The band then linked up with Blue Öyster Cult's management/producers Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman to record the first Dictators album, The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! for Epic in 1975.

Shernoff penned the vast majority of the songs, a pattern that would continue throughout the group's career.

Lauded by Trouser Press as a "wickedly funny, brilliantly played and hopelessly naïve masterpiece of self-indulgent smartass rock'n'roll", the album nonetheless failed to connect with the general public at the time and Epic dropped the band.

Disillusioned, Shernoff left the Dictators for a short time and was replaced on bass by Mark "The Animal" Mendoza before returning to the band, on keyboards.

The group was signed to Asylum Records and released its second album, Manifest Destiny, in 1977.

The album, also produced by Pearlman and Krugman, featured a more mainstream sound than The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! but once again the band failed to find an audience.

Shernoff was back playing bass in 1978 after Mendoza left the band, and the Dictators recorded their third album with Pearlman and Krugman, Bloodbrothers.

Mainstream success continued to elude the band, and the members took a long break, reuniting occasionally for live concerts.

In the late 1980s, Shernoff formed Manitoba's Wild Kingdom with his Dictators bandmates Handsome Dick Manitoba and Ross the Boss.

Live recordings during this time were captured in the cassette-only Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take a Joke (ROIR, 1981), later released on CD as The Dictators Live, New York, New York (ROIR, 1998).

In the late 1990s, the Dictators began recording a new album, which was eventually released in 2001 as D.F.F.D. The album was named on several critics' Top 10 lists for the year, including the Denver Post and the Boston Globe''.

He wrote and produced the band's 1990 MCA Records debut, ...And You? which received warm reviews, national radio airplay and regular airplay on MTV for the video "The Party Starts Now!!".

Shernoff's side project with the Waxing Poetics' Paul Johnson and Fleshtones Keith Streng and Bill Milhizer, the Master Plan, released its first album, Colossus of Destiny, in 2003.

The band later released the live album Viva Dictators (2005) and the rarities compilation Every Day Is Saturday (2007).

In the fall of 2009, he embarked upon a series of solo shows playing songs he wrote or co-wrote and telling the stories behind them.

The band's second album, entitled Maximum Respect, was released in November 2009 in Europe by Nicotine Records and released in the U.S. in May 2010 on Steel Cage Records.

As a solo artist, Andy has focused on creating videos for his YouTube channel.

He has produced videos for "Are You Ready to Rapture", "Let's Get The Band Back Together", "F*ck Christmas" (an Eric Idle song), "Laugh and Walk Away", "A Good Night to Say Goodbye" (a collaboration with Lydia Lunch), a tribute to Joey Ramone called "Sweet Joey" and a song parody of Blondie's "Dreaming" entitled "Streaming".

He has also released two 7" singles and two CD EP's (listed below).

Shernoff has also been a member of the bands The Resistance with Joey Ramone, The David Roter Method with Albert and Joe Bouchard, Andy Shernoff's Maximum R&B and The Bel-Airs.

He has appeared as a guest musician on albums by the Ramones and the Fleshtones, as well as Joey Ramone's solo album.

In the spring of 2010, those shows would become "When Giants Walked the Earth - A Musical Memoir" with 50 tour dates in the Eastern U.S. and Canada.

Shernoff sang "California Sun" in the official Major League Baseball promotional video for the 2010 All-Star Game.

On March 24, 2012, Andy played the Reason Rally, the largest secular gathering in American history, on the National Mall in Washington DC.

He released his first solo EP Don't Fade Away in October 2012.

A follow-up EP, On The First Day Man Created God, was released in February 2013.

Shernoff grew up in New York City, in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights.

He attended elementary school with Johnny Thunders and Flushing High School with Peter Zaremba and Keith Streng of the Fleshtones.

After high school, he attended the SUNY New Paltz Music Department.

There he started the music magazine The Teenage Wasteland Gazette, known for its sarcastic, wise-guy attitude.

The publication's contributors included famed rock critic Lester Bangs, who invited Andy to write for Creem magazine.

Shernoff's early profession of choice was rock journalist.

As both a journalist and a musician, Andy Shernoff is often credited as "Adny Shernoff", a deliberate typo transposing the second and third letters of his name.

Shernoff has never explained the reasoning behind this stylistic quirk.

While at SUNY New Paltz, Shernoff met Ross Friedman, aka Ross the Boss and they started a band with Scott Kempner.

(Later members included roadie turned singer Handsome Dick Manitoba and several different drummers.)