Bands

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To discover the roots of John Nickoloff’s rock ’n’ roll swagger as the singer-frontman of the band that bears his name, you have to go back – way back to his days growing up in Indianapolis just 10 minutes from that city’s world-famous speedway.

Inspired by Kiss and Van Halen, Nickoloff joined his first band, Strutter. Then came a name change.

“We actually called ourselves Lust at my Catholic school,” Nickoloff says.

If that didn’t make the nuns squirm, Nickoloff’s band had more rock brazeness to deliver.

“We were going to play our first show ever, the talent show in my freshman year at Cardinal Ritter High school in Indianapolis,” Nickoloff recalls. “We got up and played, of all things, ‘All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose’ by Kiss (laughs). We were a huge hit. So stupid! But it was memorable.”

Nickoloff moved to Florida in 1985 with his family, and there he encountered “probably my biggest influence,” he says: The country band Sawyer Brown with its manic frontman, Mark Miller. “He’s the first one I ever saw get off the stage and get into the crowd,” Nickoloff says. “He was great. My other biggest influence was seeing INXS at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach (in 1991). I had seen some cool concerts at that point, but I had never seen one where the aisles were filled with people dancing.”

In 1994 Nickoloff serendipitously met guitarist Reg Monsanto (see Reg’s bio for more on that story), and their band RainLord was born.

Crafting original, macho, swagger-filled rock, power ballads and guitar-pumped pop rock that would give Bon Jovi, Kiss and Journey a run for their money, RainLord released CDs and became a torrid presence on the Central Florida music scene. The band played incessantly at regional clubs, was a fixture at Daytona biker festivals and the summer concert season at the Daytona Beach Bandshell, and opened for just about every name-brand rock band that toured through the area.

The band amicably dissolved in 2000 as Monsanto wanted to down-shift and spend more time with his wife and children, while Nickoloff still desired to ride the rock ’n’ roll beast. Monsanto formed the aptly named Low Profile and gigged at a less manic pace than the RainLord days, and later he went solo when he discovered “a lot more clubs just wanted an acoustic guy in the corner.”

Meanwhile, John fed his rock jones in such post-RainLord groups as Snakeskin Parade, Naked Rachel and the first incarnation of Nickoloff.

RainLord played a 20th reunion gig in 2014 at the Bandshell with all four original members, and the quartet even wrote new songs for the occasion. Nickoloff and Monsanto discovered the rock ’n’ roll chemistry of their early days was still smoldering, and a second RainLord reunion went down in 2015, but with them as the only founding members. Talk of a full-fledged RainLord revival “fizzled” – to use Nickoloff’s word – and he and Monsanto realized, as the guitarist puts it, that the 2014 reunion “was the best way to put the epilogue at the back of the book.”

Subsequently, Nickoloff occasionally guested with Monsanto at his gigs, but the singer-frontman virtually stopped rocking for three years as he and his wife Stephanie poured their time and efforts into building a new home.

Then came the summer of 2020 with its pandemic lockdown, and Korky Butto, a drummer friend, “was always calling me saying ‘Hey, what are you doing? You need to be doing this. You’re a rock star. You need to be out playing,’ ” Nickoloff recalls. “So he pulled me in and I’m like ‘I’ll give it a shot.’ ”

The Nickoloff-Monsanto partnership was reborn in the band John Nickoloff & The Rear View Mirror in the summer of 2021. The rock ’n’ roll universe shape-shifted yet again, and in early 2023 a new lineup of vocalist John Nickoloff, guitarist Reg Monsanto, bassist John Bigwood and drummer Kevin Smith emerged, rechristened and revitalized as the band Nickoloff.

It’s been a long, strange trip since that day Lust rocked that Catholic high school in Indianapolis, with the past decade seeing Nickoloff take as much time off from rock ’n’ roll as giddily strutting through its trenches. So, what was the inspiration-motivation to fill up the gas tank again, rev up the engine and charge full throttle back into the arena?

“Plain and simple, I LOVE THIS!” Nickoloff says. “I’ve missed this. I thrive on this. There’s a team here that’s bought into the whole thing. The songs, the image, and all that goes along with it. It doesn’t hurt that we all get along great! I need to be doing this. It keeps me sane.”

As for rechristening the band as Nickoloff . . .

“The name recognition was huge in that decision,” the singer says. “John Nickoloff, John Nickoloff & The Rear View Mirror . . . Blah Blah Blah . . . . It all keeps coming back to NICKOLOFF. The logo was there, a lot of the songs were there. What was the point of all of the other stuff? We could have created a whole new name, but why? The WHY was the key to reach a bit into the past and grab the future.”

Past, present, future . . . Nickoloff admits he’s changed since his early days of commanding a rehearsal room and prowling a stage.

“I’d like to think I’m a bit more calculated in my decision-making for the band and in general,” he says. “I’d also like to think that I’m a bit less of an ass than I used to be. I think I got caught up in it in my 20’s and was a little more than difficult to deal with outside of the band life. I still have my impulsive moments, but I think more before I do.

“In my 20’s, in our rehearsal room in the early days of RainLord, we were auditioning drummers and a guy went to the bathroom and when he came out I asked him if it was going a little slow for him. When he replied yes, I immediately told him to pack his s@@t and get the f@@k out. Not anymore.”

Yet, Nickoloff says, in many ways his inner rocker – and the ways that inner rocker comes alive onstage – hasn’t really changed.

“I still have the same drive,” he says. “I still have the same dreams of making it. I still have the same energy and stamina onstage that I had in my 20’s. I still don’t drink, smoke and have never done a drug in my life. NEVER have I even smoked a joint, weed or whatever they call it now. I’m not all that different than I was then.”

As he and his bandmates are about to ascend a stage for a live gig, “I’m never nervous,” Nickoloff says. “I’m reading the room. I’M READY TO ENTERTAIN!”

At the conclusion of a show, he adds, he and the band “hope that you’ve been thoroughly entertained, you’re smiling, that you were able to forget about anything negative going on in your world for the last however long we were together, and that you can’t get our original songs out of your head. See you the next time . . . TELL YOUR FRIENDS.”

In 1965, The Who famously sang “Hope I die before I get old” in their song “My Generation.” Almost 60 years later, The Who are still touring with Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey in their late 70s. Likewise, Nickoloff is ready to, as he says, “grab the future.”

“In the past year I’ve been compared to Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger and Elvis,” he says. “With the exception of Elvis, the other two are still kicking ass. Kiss is still out there, Sammy Hagar is still out there and Elvis, long gone, is still the KING! I’ll be here in 20 years! Come see me!”