This is what I did too. It works, and is simple and easy. The downside is that it sort of "takes over" SLIME and prevents you from easily using other Lisps with it. As a frequent SBCL user, I found this annoying. I ended up putting a switch in my .emacs which I can turn on and off depending on whether I want my SLIME to use Clojure, or some other Lisp. Suboptimal, and someone really needs to fix this Clojure-SLIME integration problem, but it serves my needs.