Mike's Music

Musical Background

My mom's side of the family was my source of musical talent. Both my maternal grandfather and grandmother were old-time gospel singers from Upstate South Carolina. My grandmother is 85yrs old and, although her hearing is now failing, is absolutely one of the greatest gospel piano players on earth. She began playing in her church at the age of 13 and retired after 70 years when her hearing began to fail. She still plays for friends and family.

My mom is a quite above-average pianist in her own right and also an organist. She accompanied my grandmother for many years at the church playing organ and still has a Hammond A-100 (bought new with money from her first job) and a Kimball Baby Grand piano in her living room. She played for a short time in the late 1950s with a gospel quartet called the Jordanaires...Yes, the same group that later backed Elvis.

Hearing Bass

I probably got my sense of basslines from listening to my grandfather sing bass in church, in a gospel quartet, and with friends around the house. I learned to pick those notes out at a very young age, but was not blessed with a deep enough voice. I had no way to get what I was hearing in my head out where I could hear it. Then I saw my first bass guitar.

Learning to Play

I began singing in church at around age 3 and had my first TV appearance at a local Greenville SC gospel TV station in 1970 at age 5. I got my first acoustic guitar for Christmas from my grandfather when I was 6 and immediately started taking lessons. I was living in Yazoo City Missisippi at the time and although I can't remember my first teachers name, I'll never forget going into his house and seeing these BIG (at least they sure looked big to a 6yr old) amps and that super cool guitar looking thing with the four big, fat strings. I had seen a couple of uprights, but that thing looked cool! I stuck with guitar lessons for about six months, but only because he told me I'd have to learn some guitar before I could handle a bass.

The First Bass

I started playing bass by default, I really wanted to be a drummer. I moved to Birmingham in 1976 and met some guys in school who were just crazy about this bunch of freaky looking guys called KISS.

Kevin McKinney and Jason Frost already had guitars and amps (Sears Silvertone Les Paul copies and matching Sears amps!) so they had Paul and Ace's positions sewed up. Jason's friend Joey Leberte had a drum set (his family still runs Nuncies Music in Birmingham), so Peter Chris' seat was already filled, but they really needed a bass player. I started listening to the records and found I could pick out the bass parts pretty easily on my accoustic with it tuned down an octave. I started asking the folks about a bass. During this time I also took up trombone in the middle school beginner band and had a director, Steve Pryor, who was a trombone and bass player. He seemed to think that playing bass might actually compliment my trombone playing, too.

I finally got a brand new Encore Jazz bass copy with these big rectangular chrome pick-ups and a Peavy 120 series solid state amp and 1x15" cabinet for my 13th birthday. I was the MAN!! I had the BIG STACK!

High School and Something Better

When I got to high school, I started playing bass in the Jazz Ensemble, but was in WAY over my head on bass. A guy named Brad Quinn beat me out of the bass position after the first year, so I switched to bass trombone. It taught me that there is always someone better than you, though.

I started playing around with this new guitar player I met named Kenneth Chappell and he turned me on to some new stuff like the Police, Devo and, most importantly, RUSH.

I had heard 2112 about three years earlier, but it was kind of scary...what was a Passage to Bangkok, anyway? Then he puts on Moving Pictures and I was dumbfounded. That's a bassplayer making those sounds?!! I want to learn how to do THAT!!

I realized within a few months that the old short scale Encore was holding me back in terms of tone and playability. I started looking for a nice bass. I really wanted a Rickenbacker 4001 like Geddy Lee's, but they were just too expensive($750).

I started playing a tangerine orange aluminum neck Kramer in the local guitar store. That was the one; it had the clanking tone and sustain of the Rick and only cost about half as much ($350). It nearly killed me when I walked in one day and it was GONE. The store owner had sent it back thinking nobody wanted it!

This was a good thing in the end. I started playing around on this new bass that arrived a few weeks later. It was a from new company called DAION. It was a bolt on neck bass with a super off-center radiused neck and a cool body shape. It was deep glossy black and had a gold tinted brushed metal pickguard. It sounded better than anything else in the store and was only $50 more than the Kramer. I was smitten and started making payments to make sure it didn't get sent back, too. I picked it up on my 15th birthday and played it for almost 10yrs, until it was stolen. I literally cried for two days.

Thanks to Mayhall

When it was announced that our beloved band director, Ronnie Perkins, was leaving, we were all kind of let down. Perkins was a jovial rotund guy who was a great band director and just a generally nice guy.

Then in walks this freaky looking character that could pass for Edward Allen Poe's twin. He has long, black, frizzy hair and a little goatee and listens to a guy named Zappa. He takes absolutely no crap from anyone and pushes us to play music that is WAY too hard. He hand-writes marching band music for Earth, Wind and Fire songs and other wierd stuff. Everybody hated him, including me. I soon learned that this character was a pretty capable guitar player, and we started to get along. Most of the others started to come around, too.
We discovered that he was able to make us play that music that we thought was too hard to play, play it better than anybody else, and the crowd loved those hand written scores on the field. Nobody else was playing In The Stone but us.

He had a requirement that everyone play a certain number of scales per grading period and pass them off, or fail. There was a chart on the wall and your rows on the chart had better be full.

Ken Chappell and myself would sit outside on the bandroom porch, he with his beautiful blue G&L strat and me with my black Daion bass, and just screw around the entire hour long band lab period learning Rush and Police songs, when we should have been practicing and passing off scales. We never passed off a single scale, but we always had an "A" on the old report card. I still can't play an F sharp minor scale in thirds on trombone to this day, but I can play the hell out of a bass. I give my thanks to Michael Mayhall, fellow Montevallo Lambda Chi.

Payed to Play

My first paid gig was with the Kiss gang in 1978, Kevin, Jason, and Joey. We made $5 a piece for playing about half an hour at an elementary school sidewalk fair in 6th grade. It felt kinda weird getting paid to play. We played Firehouse, Strutter, Christine 16, and Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama (pretty much required in this state at the time), over and over again...no vocals.

The next gig was right out of high school with a country Band called the Silver Eagles. It was a husband and wife team, both of whom were named Robin, with her little brother on drums and this other guitar player/ singer who was roomates with the manager. Our first gig was in Gadsden AL at Chuck E Cheese's. I swear I'm not making this up! We opened for the mouse's mechanical band and made $50 each even after gas and the manager's cut, and all the pizza and beer you wanted.

We played around the immediate area for about a year until the family realized that they were going to have to get a real job. I was bored with the simplicity of the music, anyway and started looking for other gigs.

I spent a week out with a coverband (another husband/wife/her brother) but we all realized that this just wasn't going to work. I hated Loverboy, Foreigner, and Van Halen covers with a passion.

College or Music

I was working for the father of a friend I had met in college at the University of Montevallo the year before, doing heavy industrial construction, when I decided to see if I could get into the college music program. I applied to the band director, who was a friend of my high school band director and and a first class bass trombone player named Spencer Shaw. He granted me a full tuition scholarship, but not long after that I got a call from this guy named Kerry Pate, who was looking for a bass player. I went to audition with Kerry and Tim Bagley. They were not the same kind of folks I had been dealing with, they drank, smoked all kind of things (I learned what a Passage to Bangkok was!!), and played music that Kerry wrote himself. It was loud, hard, high energy and the lyrics didn't include the words, baby, I love you, or come on. I had finally found a place where I could cut loose and express what I heard in the song. We named ourselves the Chain Gang and started playing in some bars.

I was working, attending classes and practicing with the Chain Gang. Something had to go. I never went back for the second semester and soon was taking so many days off to play that The construction company fired me. I was now a Professional bass player. It didn't pay enough to keep me alive, though, so I was always fixing cars, or doing lawn service or some other odd job to make a living.

Life with Kerry

Kerry was almost 10 yrs older than I was and about 6 yrs older than Tim. Many people didn't like Kerry, because he was a very intense personality and very opinionated. I don't know, maybe I just didn't know any better, but I could tolerate him as a bandmate and as a friend. We had some heated disagreements between ourselves, but we both realized that the only way that either of us was going anywhere was with the other. So it was for almost 10 yrs.

Due to Kery's difficult personality and the fact that we didn't ever make much money, we had a tough time keeping members. A total of five drummers and five guitarists quit the band during the time we played together. It was primarily this unstable roster that I think led to our lack of support and a major label contract.

Last I spoke to Kerry, he was in Minneapolis, but I understand that he later moved to Atlanta, GA. He would be almost 50 now, man how time flies.

Chain Gang to Barking Tribe

Sometime in the late 80s, Kerry recieved notice that a band in NYC called the Chain Gang had released an album and the good old lawyers demanded we give up the name.

Kerry had been in a band in the early 80s called Barking Tribe before I met him. That band also included Brad Quinn on bass, the same guy who had beat me out of the jazz band. We decided that this would probably be a safe name and so we became the Barking Tribe.

A short time later, we added another guitarist so Kerry could concentrate on rythm guitar and singing. After a few demos and some cuts on compilations, we signed a deal with Rykodisc in 1989 and released "Serpent Go Home" in 1991.

Serpent Go Home

In late May, 1990, we threw all the gear into the big van and headed North to Madison, Wisconsin to record. We went into Smart Studios owned by Butch Vig, now of Garbage. One of my greatest rock and roll memories is standing in Butch's back yard by the lake, drinking Leinenkugel's beer and stuffing our faces with bratwurst on Memorial Day. I don't remember leaving Butch's house, so we must have had fun!

With Kerry, Skhoti Hamilton on drums, Tim Boykin on guitar, myself, Brian Paulson (who produced Soul Asylum's first two records) producing, and Doug Olsen as engineer, we began blasting through songs. Jeff Rougvie, our A&R rep from Ryko also came over from Minneapolis. We only had a week to record, mix and master, due to money limits. In the end we came out with a less-than-perfect first release, but it was full of energy and was very close to our live sound with a minimum of overdubs. The disc is still available and apparently has sort of drifted into the collector's realm. There were also a couple of 45rpm singles released, one in clear red vinyl.

The CD sold pretty well in Germany, but overall sales were very low, in part due to the lack of publicity by Ryko. They got their start re-releasing old records on CD and really didn't know how to promote a new band. I later found out that their publicity dept consisted of three people, uh-huh. We were dropped from the contract in 1992 and Kerry and drummer Dylan Proctor moved to Minneapolis in late 1993. The Tribe was no more.

Lately...

Since the demise of the Tribe in 93, I have played a little, but aviation has been my main focus. I started volunteering in the restoration department of the museum where I now work right after Serpent Go Home was released.

I was in a sort of Green-Day like Rockabilly outfit for about a year in 1994. I then started playing with a five piece group, consisting of folks I had known from other bands, called Swingset. We only lasted about 6 months until personality clashes(and the fact that we actually had three bass players, one of which was VERY unhappy playing guitar) reached critical mass. They only lasted a few months more before they called it quits.

I then played for a short time with Mark Reynolds, the original Barking Tribe drummer (before Chain Gang),on guitar and vocals and another guitarist. This didn't work out Mark was looking for a different style and really wanted someone who would play the parts he told them to. We parted amicably, though.

My final (so far) paid gig was on New Year's of 2000 when I played a fill-in blues gig with Mark Reynolds and former Barking tribe guitarist Tim Boykin. We made $200 each that night, which still stands as the most money I have ever made in one night playing bass.

I am currently waiting for a fellow pilot and guitar player to heal his broken finger. We met a few years ago, but only recently did he realize that I was actually serious when I asked if he wanted to get together and play. We are looking for a drummer in the area who is also a PILOT. More word on that as it progresses.

Advice, Take it or Leave it

The advice I have to offer to those who are following this path is two fold. Don't lose yourself in the drinking and drugs. I was either smart enough or lucky enough not to get caught up in the counter-culture of drinking and drug addiction that destroys so many musicians before and after they achieve success. I saw it happen all round, me though.

There are many great musicians that will never be heard of and also many who will never be heard from again because their life was either ruined or taken by alcohol or drug addiction. If you don't think you have a problem, ask somebody outside to keep an eye on you and if you do have a problem, for God's sake, get help and get back to your full capability. It may sound better to you when you are wasted, but just listen to a recording of it later. This is not a "Just Say No" campaign ad, it's from someone who has seen it, but luckily not been there.

Number Two. If you sign a recording contract, forget this noble notion of not selling out. Do you want to make a living playing or not? If you sign a contract, get a TON of money out of the company. Low dollar contracts are easier to get, but the company doesn't have as much to lose. They'll just call it a tax write-off. We recorded our record in one week for about $15,000. The guys running Ryko drove cars that cost almost three times that, if our record didn't go platinum without any promotional money, thay'd just eat the cost.

Sign NOTHING for less than $250,000. That's enough money to ensure that the record company will spen enough to promote the product in an attempt to at least break even. The more they have at stake, the more support you are going to get. Back to Home