Diamond is Forever

Katie Johnston
The Gazette
5/2000

Luckily for Randy Cordero and his Neil Diamond tribute band, people who dare only whisper their adoration for the king of '70s schmaltz-pop aren't ashamed to sneak into a Neil Diamond concert - even if Neil Diamond isn't playing.

In the seven years they've been covering the Diamond repertoire, San Francisco-based Super Diamond has seen fans grow bolder about their love for "Cherry, Cherry" and "I Am ... I Said."

"Back in 1993, when we started, I didn't know anybody who admitted to liking Neil Diamond," says lead singer Cordero.

Still, fans constantly tell the band, "I thought I was the only one." Diamond's soft, simple pop often is filed under "Cheese," but in the age of camp-is-cool retromania, Diamond fans young and old are creeping out of obscurity. "You can like ABBA these days; you can like the Carpenters," Cordero says. "You can like anybody and it's OK."

Cordero once thought he was the only Neil Diamond fan out there. His parents bought their 11-year-old son his first eight-track tape - Diamond's "His Twelve Greatest Hits" - which eventually got pushed to the back of the drawer behind the Tubes, Kiss and Oingo Boingo. Cordero rediscovered Diamond when he started playing music and found that by tweaking his voice, he could perfectly match Diamond's husky baritone, grunting "hunhhs" and between-song banter. But he was truly surprised at the positive reaction in 1989, when he first slipped "Sweet Caroline" into a set of original songs at a punk bar. "I didn't do it thinking people would like it; I did it thinking I would be booed off the stage and people would hate it," he says.

He started playing parties as "Surreal Neil," complete with sequin shirts, platform shoes and Diamond's song-ending arm swoops. Super Diamond, appearing tonight at the Colorado Music Hall, came along a few years later.

These days the six-member band sells out 1,300-seat clubs in Chicago and New York City, recently allowing Cordero to quit his weekday job as a design engineer. The band rocks out Diamond's pop with heavier guitar and synthesizers for an effect Cordero places somewhere between Kiss and Depeche Mode. "We certainly have a lot of room to put our own art into it," says Cordero, who paints in his spare time.

"It doesn't feel mundane. If I was just in a normal cover band doing songs straight up, I would be really bored."

Crowd surfing is not an unusual response for this decidedly un-loungey act. Every Halloween, the band dresses up like one of their influences - Kiss, the Sex Pistols or the Cure so far - and mixes the group's songs with Diamond's. "We really give it a kick in the pants," says Cordero, who turns Diamond's flash up a notch and doesn't try to replicate his puffy, hairsprayed look.

The rest of the year, Super Diamond may play all Diamond all the time, but they have their limits. Nothing after 1982, for instance - after "Heartlight" (an oft-maligned song inspired by the movie "E.T.") the songs were overproduced, with too much reverberation, Cordero says.

Diamond's longtime drummer Vince Charles occasionally joins them on stage, but the "Holly Holy" himself never has seen his alter-Diamond. His children have come backstage and passed along a copy of Super Diamond's al- bum, "14 Great Hits" to their illustrious father. Diamond watched a video of the band and had one of his assistants call Cordero to find out if he was lip-synching. Apparently, Diamond was impressed when he learned the answer was no. Even Diamond's official fan club has given the band its blessing. Cordero, 35, hopes to one day become known for his original alternative folk-pop tunes; for a while he and the Super Diamond gang had an original band called Universal Jack. If he gets tired of Neil and his original compositions don't hit the charts, he has a number of other voice impersonations down his throat: Peter Murphy, Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo, Tom Petty, Jim Morrison, Johnny Cash.

For now, he's happy to spread the gospel of Neil. As famous as Diamond is, precious few books and TV specials have been devoted to him.

"He's really left out," Cordero says.

"I don't want him to be left out, but that's one of the fun things about doing these shows - he's underappreciated."

And he loves it when he hears a vindicated fan - one who kept a low profile all these years - turn to a doubtful friend and say:
"See, I was right all along. It's cool to like Neil Diamond."