Musical
Adventures & Misadventures
I
just want to start this off by declaring that this is the coolest
photo on the whole dang site (click it for the full-size
version).
This is my
friend Brian in his home studio...if you don't see the humor in this
one, you might as well forget the rest of this page. Brian
and I worked together on the San Francisco Blue "Idiot's Vision" cd, as
well as the Gary Cothran & Riversouth band mentioned later.
Now that you've passed the prerequisites, we can get on with the gory
details of my musical travels. Well, actually, I'm just
going to give you a quick run-through...after all, we've all heard the
tales of life in a rock-n-roll road band, and mine are pretty much the
same as everyone else's. If nothing else, you can
get a good chuckle from the photos, which display in graphic detail the
tragedies of '80s fashion and the ravages of time.
We had a pretty good time, though! And still do!
I knew
early on that I wanted to be a musician...real early. I'm not
sure when the jones bit me, but here is photographic evidence of my
stage addiction at the tender age of 7 yrs. That's me behind
the drums, so I was still a little confused.
My teenage son thinks I'm lying when I told him
*I* knew what I wanted to do with my life on the day I was born
(besides cry, crap and eat). So there....
Got my
first bass guitar for my 15th birthday and did the usual variety of garage bands, until I hooked up with some folks
from a little town just south of the AL/FL state line and formed "Tracker" . It was the first
nightclub gig for most of us, and we worked a few "clubs" installed
in gutted double-wide trailers, way out in the north Florida boonies.
The pay and the tooth count was low, but we had a lotta fun.
Although there was no doubt in *my* mind where I was headed, my parents
had other ideas and I finished high school and even made it through a
couple of quarters of college before I found a band out of
Jacksonville, FL called "LeGrand". They were
obviously in serious need of a bassist because they took on a green kid
who'd hardly been anywhere and certainly didn't know anything.
Imagine my culture shock: from playing
Lynyrd Skynyrd covers in the sticks to playing Top 40 hits and jazzy
dinner sets in Key West. Virtually overnight.
Even the garden-variety road band debauchery was interesting and fun.
We could wear spandex with a straight face, circling the
Florida resort coasts. Trouble was, we had a Greek
booking agent who never read a map in his life and the work began to
get more sporadic when we complained about the excessive travel between
gigs. When we found ourselves in Ft. Myers, tending crab
traps to feed ourselves, we got another agent. The
new guy was pretty gung-ho and got us right into the photo
studio for promo shots. I knew it was going to be Cheese City
when he made us do the "Band On The Run" pose and yell "Yeah!" as the
photos were snapped. Next came the insistence that we play
the entire "Footloose" soundtrack. Time for Mikey
to move on.
So,
in a Holiday Inn in Longview, TX I ran into a group of guys
from Oklahoma...the Broxton band. Like the band I was
leaving, they played popular hits but leaned a little more in the rock
direction. Their bassist had just given notice (Brad Houser
of New Bohemians and Critter's Buggin' fame), and they needed a
replacment pronto. We hung out a little, and I slipped them
my demo tape as we left town. They rang me later in
as LeGrand went on break in a bar in Mississippi
somewhere. Sent my gear west on a
Greyhound and I hopped a plane to meet Broxton in Lawton, OK.
I knew this was a good match right off the bat.
The brothers who ran the band, were just country
boys like me. They were well-established and booked up almost
2 yrs in advance. Even had a sizeable female following in
most places on their regular circuit. We had a pretty great run for a few years, running the
highways of the south, southwest, and midwest. Despite the
squeaky-clean looks, there was quite a bit of the usual
carnage
you'd expect. For example, there was the night I found myself in a McAllen, TX
drunk tank wearing a toga made from a Big Bird bedsheet.
Those
were the days, boy.... We parted ways in 1989, but I hear they still
do
casino gigs as a trio.
I was pretty tired of living out of a suitcase by now, so I
headed to my Mom's home in Georgia for a visit. Took
some traveling gigs, backing a guy who scared me to death.
He was a minor former member of a band which had some big hits in the
'60s, and although he'd not had a decent career for decades, he was
still milking that 15 minutes of fame for all he was worth (which
wasn't much)... All the guys in the backing band watched that
pathetic old guy every night, seeing ourselves in his shoes if we
continued. We played pretty well together and
found we had a common liking for rockabilly and blues and decided to
start our own band, calling it the "Beat Bullies".
On our first road stint of any length, we found we despised
each other. Flushhhh.......
Getting tired? I sure was, by this time.
Funny how a few years of living the kind of life that most
people dream of will make you wish you had a home and a steady job,
working with people you can escape from on nights and weekends.
A steady relationship? I couldn't even
comprehend it. This realization marked the end of
my full-time music career. I got a corporate job and bought
a home, but the music didn't stop...it just got better, on a
part-time basis.
Click Here For Page 2...
I knew
early on that I wanted to be a musician...real early. I'm not
sure when the jones bit me, but here is photographic evidence of my
stage addiction at the tender age of 7 yrs. That's me behind
the drums, so I was still a little confused.
My teenage son thinks I'm lying when I told him
*I* knew what I wanted to do with my life on the day I was born
(besides cry, crap and eat). So there....
Got my
first bass guitar for my 15th birthday and did the usual variety of garage bands, until I hooked up with some folks
from a little town just south of the AL/FL state line and formed "Tracker" . It was the first
nightclub gig for most of us, and we worked a few "clubs" installed
in gutted double-wide trailers, way out in the north Florida boonies.
The pay and the tooth count was low, but we had a lotta fun.
So,
in a Holiday Inn in Longview, TX I ran into a group of guys
from Oklahoma...the Broxton band. Like the band I was
leaving, they played popular hits but leaned a little more in the rock
direction. Their bassist had just given notice (Brad Houser
of New Bohemians and Critter's Buggin' fame), and they needed a
replacment pronto. We hung out a little, and I slipped them
my demo tape as we left town. They rang me later in
as LeGrand went on break in a bar in Mississippi
somewhere. Sent my gear west on a
Greyhound and I hopped a plane to meet Broxton in Lawton, OK.
I knew this was a good match right off the bat.
The brothers who ran the band, were just country
boys like me. They were well-established and booked up almost
2 yrs in advance. Even had a sizeable female following in
most places on their regular circuit. We had a pretty great run for a few years, running the
highways of the south, southwest, and midwest. Despite the
squeaky-clean looks, there was quite a bit of the usual
carnage
you'd expect. For example, there was the night I found myself in a McAllen, TX
drunk tank wearing a toga made from a Big Bird bedsheet.
Those
were the days, boy.... We parted ways in 1989, but I hear they still
do
casino gigs as a trio. 
I was pretty tired of living out of a suitcase by now, so I
headed to my Mom's home in Georgia for a visit. Took
some traveling gigs, backing a guy who scared me to death.
He was a minor former member of a band which had some big hits in the
'60s, and although he'd not had a decent career for decades, he was
still milking that 15 minutes of fame for all he was worth (which
wasn't much)... All the guys in the backing band watched that
pathetic old guy every night, seeing ourselves in his shoes if we
continued. We played pretty well together and
found we had a common liking for rockabilly and blues and decided to
start our own band, calling it the "Beat Bullies".
On our first road stint of any length, we found we despised
each other. Flushhhh.......