Fundraiser Launched for Sick Of It All’s Original Bassist Rich Cipriano

Richard Cipriano, the original bassist of Sick Of It All, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The Sweet Relief Musicians Fund has set up a fundraiser to support him through treatment.

Cipriano, known in the New York hardcore scene as Richie Cip, held down the low end in the Queens band’s earliest lineup, before Sick Of It All settled into the configuration that would carry it through decades of touring and a catalogue that made the group one of the city’s most recognisable exports. His time in the band belongs to the period when New York hardcore was still a neighbourhood proposition, built on small rooms, shared vans and records passed hand to hand rather than on infrastructure.

That absence of infrastructure is the quiet subject of the news. Sweet Relief was founded to cover medical costs for working musicians, a function that exists precisely because careers built on independent touring rarely come with the buffer that a serious diagnosis requires. Pancreatic cancer is generally detected late, which leaves little time for planning, financial or otherwise.

Cipriano’s name still carries weight among those who followed the band from the beginning, and the fundraiser places his situation inside a wider pattern: the scenes that shaped hardcore’s language were sustained by people who were never paid enough to absorb a crisis alone.