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 | | | | Sep30Written by:Bill Park
Saturday, September 30, 2000 6:00 PM  Drowning in the River...BP: Like you said, everything was hitting. Through the various people that the bunch of you knew, you had the ear of the majors, and a lot of stuff from our area was begining to take off.
NN: It was a team effort.
BP: As a result, Tom Cossi, Bobby Z, and Harry Turner got together and started River Records. Tom, Bobby, and Harry were pretty heavy-weight industry professionals. This made for a very powerful management team with a huge success potential, and they were all your friends. Yet you went your own way.
NN: I ended up not being involved in River Records. Those guys were strong, and they had their own product vision, and they wanted an act to come in and do what they wanted done. I started getting hip.. I was lucky enough to go out and tour with 'Kiss' and 'Ted Nugent', 'Blue Oyster Cult', and 'Kansas' and all these bands. I started to meet the Detroit people, and I was getting offers to play in bands like 'Brownsville Station', 'the MC5'....and I started to get a sense that my boys Warren King and Frank Zuri were as good as if not better than the lead guitar players and singers in any band that I saw that was considered 'World Class'.
BP: Before he joined 'Diamond Reo', Warren and I played together in 'Black Bart'...
NN: ...Then you know what I'm talking about. So I felt that I had the team with me that I could push further. Bobby McKeg left, and it was me, Frank, Robbie Johns, and Warren. We got real tight and kept this 'Diamond Reo' thing going, and we started calling ourselves 'the Diamonds' or 'Dirty Diamonds'.... but when the River Records thing started happening, I was trying to get -my- house in order and what I considered -my- house to be was Frank, Warren, Robbie Johns; and I started having a vision for original music.
At the time of our first album I was just trying to play and get famous. But what happened through that was that my confidence came up, and my ability to believe in myself came up, and then I started thinking about finding our own music and our own voice. And that's why the thing with us and River Records didn't work out. We had a vision of what we wanted to do, and they had a vision of what they wanted done, and these were differing visions. They were all 'World Class' guys... but because I was getting some reinforcement from being out on the road and hearing the applause and watching my band kicking it, I started believing in -us-. Because of hard headedness on both our parts, we never got it together to form the partnerships that might have meant great success for all of us, and changed the musical history of this town.
Boom. There It Is...BP: Okay, now I'm working for a producer, booking shows all over the country. Someone cancels their warmup spot for the UK show at the Old Leona Theater in Homestead, PA. I want to book you guys, so I push to have you on the bill. UK is a King Crimson off-shoot, and all the crowd wants is King Crimson. The new improved, hard-edged 'Diamond Reo' is not at all what these people were expecting. It must have been an awful gig to have to play. What do you remember about it?
NN: (laughing....) It wan't awful at all. I remember it all, let me go over it.... We were just starting to realise that when we got in front of an audience we could -crush- them. We were extremely ahead of our time. We were a combination of 'Guns'n' Roses' and 'the Sex Pistols' before either of those fuckin' bands happened. We were magic. And we knew it, and we were cocky, and we were going to change the world. And we knew that we were -not- playing to our kind of people that night. We loved that. You know what I mean? That didn't scare us or intimidate us at all. Like: Here's a chance for us to make a statement. Although -none of us- anticipated the statement that would be made. (chuckles again.)
Just as the curtain is about to open.. ..we are all standing in our spots, getting ready... and Robbie Johns shouts to us from the drums and says, "Hey!" and we look back and he's waving an M-80. I say, "What the fuck are you doing?!" and he lights it and tosses it toward the front of the stage just as a voice says, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Diamond Reo!" and the curtain opens. We're watching this thing roll towards the edge of the stage and off into the pit, and I'm shitting my pants, and it goes off.... and all the dirt accumulated on the pipes, in the flys, on the rail, and on the grid from 70 years of being a mill town theater... all that dirt fell all at once down onto the stage and rolled out into the audience. It looked like we had a confetti machine or something.
BP: We had only been doing shows in that theater for a little while. It had been closed for 20 years and it had not been restored and as far as I know had never been cleaned, so there was a lot of dirt up there to distribute. The concussion rattled the whole theater....
NN: ...and it all came down! And I said to myself, "What am I involved in here?!" And we were all really mad at Robbie for doing that, and I remember that we were booed there at the begining. But by the end of the set we had started to break some walls down, and we made a good musical statement....... and the next morning we left for a tour of Texas...and we were so glad to get out of town!
BP: Yes, leaving me to take all of the heat.... What makes me feel doubly bad was that a few days later, David Johansen dumps off of the Patti Smith show. Patti was riding high on the growing success of her single "Because The Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen. You couldn't get bigger than Bruce at that time, and Patti's audience would have been the perfect audience for 'Diamond Reo'. I originally wanted you for the Patti Smith show, but the labels and the powers that be were pushing David Johansen on us.... he had just left 'the New York Dolls' and was trying to do a solo thing. The good business decision at the time was to let them talk us into David Johansen. As it turned out, neither of you did the show, and it was the right one for you to have been on. It was possibly another historical turning point, but I would have had a hard time selling you again as a warmup act only two weeks after the first shot even without the M-80 incident. There were a lot of other bands waiting for their shot. I couldn't sell it at all after the M-80.
NN: It was a no sell, yeah. Hey, we made a lot of mistakes, but we had to make those mistakes and do some stupid things. I wouldn't trade any of it. As I have gotten older I have found that it has given me a back-log of mistakes that -can- be made that I still use today when I am teaching young bands how to think and how to act, and to position themselves to be able to climb. All those mistakes hit home.
BP: Don't you wish that you could have gained the knowlege without having to make the mistakes, though?
NN: But there's no way! You don't -know- until you have made that mistake.
BP: You could look around and see the mistakes that others have made, and not make them yourself.
NN: It don't work! "I have to make this mistake myself. Get out of my way. Let me hurt myself." Right? And then if I am a good man I will learn something from it.
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