Jack Nemier: In an ARC of light, rolling away the stone

What's the first job you ever had?
For songwriter Jack Nemier, the first was the worst.

''Picking stones. It was awful,'' the singer says, his face scrunching up at the memory. .

Nemier, frontman for the rock 'n' roll quartet ARC, grew up in the North Country.
Home was a farm near Malone, just inside the American/Canadian border.
Standing in the long, flat fields behind the family home, he remembers being able to make
out the big city lights of Montreal in the distance.

For the young boy with a head full of dreams, music was a way to get off the farm and closer
to those bright lights. Buying a guitar became his first priority.
That's where the stone picking job came in.
It didn't last long, but it was enough to earn him a few bucks as well as the memories
that remain nearly 20 years later.

''I was working with a crew picking up these stones from a dry riverbed. Some of them
were real large, and you would have to attach a chain to them and drag them up onto a truck,'' Nemier remembers.

''One day, while I was picking these stones up, I found this one great-looking rock.
It stood out from all of the others. It was just beautiful,'' he says.

With a keen eye for detail, Nemier has the ability to hone in on an object like a laser,
separate it from all the background clutter and render it immortal by turning it into a song.

With ARC, the music treads the inspirational trails of an entire rock 'n' roll empire:
Think Neil Young-style guitarists and the songwriting of Tom Petty; a grandiose presence reminiscent of U2 and a vocal style that seems like the natural descendant of Ziggy Stardust.

Throw in some Alice Cooper-meets-The Pixies' sonic angst, and you start to get an idea of the band’s diversity.
ARC formed in 1996, its self-titled debut release shortly followed. The band's earliest work teeters between the heartbreaking balladeering surrealism of ''Never Be Forgiven'' and ''Need Want Take,'' and the slow-burning fuse of the erotically charged ''Cracked Diamond.''

The band's follow-up CD, ''Raised on Social Posture,'' ventures into deeper territory, from nervous angst-riddled rockers like ''Obsession'' to catchy dance-crazy, stuck-in-your-mind anthems like ''When the Night is Young.''

ARC’s third album, “Name the Day,” was issued in 2004 and part of the legacy of Nemier’s tunes, a songwriter whose high caliber of works trace a strong line through the landscape of area music since the early 1990s.
From his solo work to his releases with bX7 21 and now, nearly a decade into ARC,
Nemier is one of a handful of independent musicians in any scene who could pull together
a collection of his songs in a volume all its own.

The songwriter’s secret?
“You know, it's not the number of chords you use,” he says.
“It's how you put them together.''

As for Nemier's stone-picking days, they seem to be a thing of the past, although the
memory will always stay with him.
Ever wonder whatever happened to that stone?

''That particular rock? While I was out there looking at it, one of the guys on the truck yells, 'What the hell are you doing?'
I said, 'Dude, check it out, look at this beautiful rock.'
He looked at me like I was crazy.
So he looks at the rock.
He looks back at me.
Then his face gets all twisted up and he yells 'What the ….?!?
Just throw that back on the truck with the rest of them kid; It's a rock just like all the others.'

“But really,’ says Nemier “I knew that it was different.''

by Thomas Dimopoulos
originally published in The Saratogian, May 2003.