Jersey Bookshelf: ‘The Undiscovered Showman’ by Wayne B. Olivieri
The Undiscovered Showman: A True Story of Being Almost Famous (2025)
by Wayne B. Olivieri
(Headline Books)
Four decades of playing the Jersey club scene could do something to a guy’s soul. Four decades of seeing your friends and fellow musicians hit the heights of stardom that you didn’t could make a guy bitter. Wayne B. Olivieri isn’t bitter. And he’s stilling rocking. Plus, he wrote a book that’s juicy with anecdotes—he names names—that’s honest, unsparing and wildly entertaining. (I couldn’t put it down.)
Wayne was always a hotshot frontman. When his lead guitarist up and split in one of his early bands, his other guitarist finds a kid named DiNizio to replace him. He gets on well with him but DiNizio splits too and winds up forming The Smithereens 13 years later. He meets Bowie at a party, remembers his crooked teeth, and shares a drink with him. Slips him a demo but never hears anything. He gets close to that elusive record deal with Epic. He opens for Roger McGuinn of The Byrds but the rock star is too drunk to be nice. Page after page is filled with the kind of almost-there moments.
In the ‘70s, a Long Island band, The Good Rats, are bringing down the house every night on the Jersey circuit. He becomes friends with singer Peppi Marchello when they both are recording at The House Of Music in West Orange. He falls in with the nascent CBGB’s scene in New York City and waits for hours to finally take the stage. As he watches band after band bash out two-chord punk songs, he thinks how much better his band is, especially when one of the bands “with a girl bass player who couldn’t play…and a singer with a weird droning voice that kept going out-of-tune” grates on his nerves. Even they wind up getting a record deal. But not him. (The band was Talking Heads).
His band, The Rockids, would play The Stone Pony, The Fast Lane and Xanadu (owned by professional wrestler Diamond Dallas Page) in Asbury Park, The Riverview Lounge in Bridgewater, The Main Event in New Brunswick, The Rock Machine in Bound Brook, and they open for Aerosmith at The Fountain Casino in Aberdeen. He gets to go on The Howard Stern Show after winning a songwriting contest. And, most profoundly, at the heart of the book, he becomes best friends with Jon Bon Jovi for 16 years.
The Bon Jovi stories are priceless. He’s tight with Jon and girlfriend/future wife Dorothea. But when Jon helps Skid Row, he passes over his friend to front the Toms River band. Instead, he brings in a kid from Canada, Sebastian Bach. Jon does try and get him to sing lead for Stevie Van Zandt’s Disciples Of Soul but it falls through. Then Jon dumps him flat. Changes his phone number. The author is dumbfounded. Was it something he said? Sixteen years of close friendship down the drain? Then he’s floored when he finds out from a guy on the Bon Jovi road crew that Jon tried to sabotage his career! Why? “I still wonder, every time I hear a Bon Jovi tune, what happened?” He hasn’t seen or spoken to his former best friend now in over 20 years. Then he’s told from someone who would know that Jon believes he was sleeping with Dorothea. “That would explain things,” he writes, “but I never did. We were close friends, and that was that.” The author is still at it. His current band is The New Bardots. The new album is Endless Drool.
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