CLINT HOLMES INTERVIEW
Vegas Luxe Life
by Robin Leach
June 13th, 2007

It packs a punch as solid as a Muhammad Ali knockout! It grips until you're breathless. The brutally-raw emotions of 61-year-old Clint Holmes' new semi-autobiographical musical Just Another Man jolt you out of your seat. Add that to the fact that you've got brilliant young talented performers singing and dancing with formidable nonstop energy, plus a cast of veterans bringing experience, timing and wisdom, and the former Harrah's headliner may just have created the
volatile cocktail of showbiz success to fulfill his dream of taking the project onto the West End and Broadway.

Clint, along with Earl Turner (another Harrah's headliner), Tina Walsh (Mamma Mia! at Mandalay Bay), Reva Rice (Starlight Express and Spamalot), and Bill Fayne, his 30 year musical director gave J.A.M. its world premiere at UNLV's Judy Bayley Theater.

There's no sugarcoating in this production. it comes with the harsh problems of his parents bi-racial marriage, (his father was an African-American jazz singer serving in the US military in England during the second World War and his mother was a white English opera singer). It comes with the breakup of his 30-year marriage and the midlife crisis at 58 when he underwent surgery for colon cancer.

I knew I could die so this is all about the truth, said Clint when he and I chatted backstage shortly after the opening night curtain fell. Everybody has things in their life they are not proud of as well as things that we can be proud of. But we must keep learning, as life continues, to find peace and harmony. It's dark and comes right at you warts and all.

RL: This was so powerful because of its rawness and brutal honesty! Was it a real cathartic exorcism for you?
CH: Absolutely. I was really ready to be honest and to be raw. It was nice to not be concerned with what would someone think?' I am regarded as the nice guy, and I am, but there are different sides to me - and this was a real exorcism of my niceness if you will.

RL: Was there a release after you had done it?
CH: Yeah, it is hard to explain the feeling. It is a very raw, very powerful, very emotional feeling that I think you only get in the theater. I don't think you can get this in a movie because it is stop and start, or in a nightclub performance, this is rewards and all. I feel cleansed by doing this.

RL: The genesis of all of this came from the song If Not Now, When? that came tumbling through you in just one hour after the cancer operation. So, coming successfully through the surgery did your mind talk to you about this public self-examination of your innermost secrets? Was that your inspiration for all of this?
CH: Going through the divorce, going through the separation of a 36 year marriage, going through the cancer, which does slap you in the face, and it is going through all the clich?s like tomorrow is never promised' you do meet reality. That is when the genesis of the song came out, if not now, when? Do what you want to do now, why not? You go after what you want to go after and you don't let anything hold you back. That is where I am at in my life now.

RL: So for a long time, you worried about how people viewed you, not being either black or white, but you as a guy?
CH: I did. My mom would always say, be nice. She said it all the time. But that doesn't always work. Sometimes you don't agree with someone and being nice doesn't work. You have to stand up for something. I had a lot of trouble doing that all my life until the last few years. This place I reached simultaneously with the end of a marriage and beating cancer gave me the opportunity to do that.
 

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