NICK CLEMENTE
How Not To Make It in the Music Industry author
www.quigsmss.com

(Winter 2005) by George Dionne

I was thinking the same thing as you, who the hell is Nick Clemente? Nick is the author of How Not to Make It in the Music Business. In the book, Nick discusses his trials and tribulations in the New Jersey hard rock scene in the 1980’s. You’ll follow Nick from his humble beginnings to his eighties heyday as the bassist for the hair band Sinnocence. If you were a part of the scene, Nick’s interesting and sometimes humorous tales may seem familiar to you. If you’re thinking of starting a band, maybe you should let Nick tell you how not to do it. Nick also wants to clear up that although his lead singer Frank was portrayed dark in the book, he was still a good writer and contributor.

RIL: Why write a book about how NOT to make it in the music business?
NC: The book itself was without a doubt therapy. I had just finished up with a band called Mystery Bloom. Our last album was produced by Eddie Kramer, and Robin Fuso from Skid Row was in the band. Things got crazy really quick. It seemed like we spent a lot of money on nothing. Even before the album was finished, I was gone. I had really had it with the music industry at that point. It all seemed too much. With the book I was able to go back to where I started. I realized that even though we were trying, it was bitter sweet in the end. I also realized that we did a lot of immature things that were kind of funny looking back. Back then we took it so serious, but now we laugh at it. In this business you kind of have to laugh at yourself and you have to take any kind of rejection, or you won’t last one day. When something bad happened I always joked that I would write a book on how not to make it in the music business. The writing of the book just started to flow. After a year I returned to the business. I guess once you’re in, you’re in for life.

RIL: Have you been getting good responses about the book?
NC: Yeah, a lot of people are finding that it seems to be their life story. It’s like Steve Blaze wrote on the back of the book jacket “this is like my story too, I even played these places”. It’s like misery loves company in a strange way. People are finding out that their no the only ones that went through this stuff. To be in a rock and roll band back then, you had to look like you had a million dollars worth of clothing and gear, but you walked around with your pockets empty.

RIL: You were in a lot of bands throughout the years; I believe that it was Sinnocence that had the most substance for you, tell me a little bit about that band?
NC: Sinnocence kind of formed out of the group The Way In. We got a little more serious about what we were doing so we changed the name of the band. In the middle of the mid to late eighties, Sinnocence became the quintessential local band. We all have to have the perfect hair, clothes, guitars, and guitar sounds. We always wrote for the song and put the coloring on later. We played with a lot of people, LA Guns, Enuff Z Nuff, Kix, and anybody that came into town. We worked hard selling tickets. As any band trying to make it knows, you have to sell them own even if you have to dig them up from the cemetery and drag them to the show. That was the hardest part. We pushed as hard as we could. As the scene changed, we started to have internal problems. I think that if grunge hadn’t come in, we still would have self-destructed. Even most successful bands get five, maybe six years…

RIL: Back then maybe.
NC: Yeah, now if you first album doesn’t have a big hit, then they drop you. I’m not really sure what that’s all about. I think that’s the shame about the music industry today, there’s no room for development. I think that if the bands I grew up with came up with the same atmosphere, they’d be non-existent today. Aerosmith didn’t score a hit until their third album. Kiss didn’t break until Alive. In today’s music scene, they wouldn’t get past their first album. It’s a tough business. That’s what makes people nuts.

RIL: Out of all your experiences within the time frame of the book, what was your greatest experience?
NC: I can remember one night opening for the band Kix, I can’t remember if I wrote about it for the book or not. We opened for them at the Cricket Club in New Jersey, and we had one of those shows where you couldn’t be more on. The crowd was ours because we always played their. Kix was just starting to break; they had stuff on MTV and everything. It was just a great night for us. Night’s like that made going through all the other crap worth it.

RIL: What would you say was your biggest down point during that period?
NC: Definitely when our roadie Rich got hit by a car. It had nothing to do with us, he was up at college. He got hit by a car getting off a campus bus. The driver was a pizza delivery person and he didn’t have his lights on. He didn’t see Rich until the last minute. He went up and right through the windshield. He’s actually in medical journals for being the only person to be hit in that manner and not break any bones. He actually took the whole brunt of it to his head. He was in a coma for a few months, but he’s still kicking today. He has a wife and kids, and he’s a corrections officer now. It was just difficult at the time because we were so young. Rich was the guy who would carry a Marshall stack over his head like it was nothing. Then when he came out of the coma, he didn’t seem to know his own parents, but when he saw our promo picture in front of him, he could name us. That was like his test that he would do with his doctors. They had us come in to try to bring him out of it. We all wore red bandanas around our wrist until he got out of the hospital.

RIL: In the book you have a few ‘Spinal Tap moments’, one of them being when you set the rug on fire while creating your own pyrotechnic displays, what other moments did you have like that?
NC: The guitar player had built a ramp in his basement for one of the shows. That’s where he used to rehearse. When we went to take it to the show, it wouldn’t fit out the door. He never measured the door. It just seemed that we always had moments like that. We were scheduled to go to a rehearsal studio in Staten Island, and the guitar player had called to get directions. We were coming from New Jersey; Staten Island is in New York, over the bridge. We got across the bridge and followed what direction he thought he had remembered. We pulled up in front of the studio, got our stuff out, and found out that it wasn’t the studio we were supposed to be at. What were the chances of their being another rehearsal studio in Staten Island?

RIL: Why do you think you guys never broke that level of local favorites?
NC: The competition was severe at that time. By the time we got to where we polished our act, got our sound down, and got the music right; grunge had come in. It knocked us right out of the box. The show was good too. We had a point where we would all spin in place; even the drummer would play sideways. We had a giant Statue of Liberty head that we used to bring around, we had dancers that followed us to the shows, and we really pushed it as far as we could. I guess it was just too late. New Jersey was just filled. I don’t know if you’ve heard the rumor about New Jersey in the eighties, it was like Los Angeles. There was a hair band event every night, everywhere. There were tons and tons of bands. We all had a good time, but there were just so many. I think that if these bands were around today, and drew the kind of numbers we had back then, they would all have record deals. You don’t see that anymore.

RIL: How did you get Joe Lynn Turner to write the forward to the book?
NC: I had been working on a charity event for a website and they had a guitar that was donated by Guitar Center. We were going around getting signatures from rock stars that were in the area at the time. We raffled it off at the Kiss Expo in New Jersey. The money went to the St. Jude’s Hospital Children’s Hospital in Memphis. It went under the name of Eric Carr the Kiss drummer. Eric loved children, so we did it for him. I knew a couple of guys that knew Joe, and they suggested I call him so I could get him to sign the guitar. I called him and left a message.

He called back, and in total Joe fashion said that he was dropping his wife off at the airport and I should come over later. It was really cool. I went over his house and we sat around his kitchen table talking for like two hours. We talked about Rainbow and Deep Purple; he signed the guitar, and signed some of my records. I mentioned the book and he said he loved the name, and wanted to do the forward. That was it. I had to wait it out for him because he does a lot of work overseas. He’s gone for like two or three months at a time. He was even nice enough to read the forward for an audio version that I’m going to be doing for the book. He’s a really nice guy.

RIL: What do you do now?
NC: I have an entertainment company called Commodity Oddity Entertainment. I do just about everything. I write songs for people, I manage people, I put bands together. I had a band called the Little Kings that was the world’s first little person rock band. They were in the Ben Stiller movie Zoolander. They opened the WHFS Festival at RFK Stadium in front of 50,000 people three times. They opened Livestock in Florida in front of 30,000 people three times. They did Strange Jam with Dee Snider. The band broke up unfortunately, but we left a legacy. They did the Howard Stern Show and the Opie and Anthony Show too.

I working with a New York City band now called The Kin. They’re kind of like that band The Killers. I think they have a lot of promise. Kiss World in Australia is going to be releasing an Eric Carr CD. When Eric passed away, he had left lyrics to a song called “Elephant Man” that he had never finished. His sister had given me the lyrics and I finished the song with the family’s approval. We did an acoustic version and an all out electric version. There was more demo material that they had found that going to be compiled for this CD that expected to be released this summer.

RIL: What would you say is the number one thing that you learned about how NOT to make it in the music industry?
NC: One of the things that can keep you down is if you think something, whatever it might be, whether you think that a band member isn’t pulling their own weight or management isn’t doing their job; go with your instinct. If you wait too long, you won’t make it. I’m not saying that was the whole case with us, but we had a few people that we trusted that we wasted a lot of time dealing with. Also, if you think what you’re doing is good and you believe in what you are doing, don’t let anybody change you.

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