Michael started out in music in high school and church choirs in the 60's in El Paso, Texas. He was the drummer in an original music garage band. Guitar came into his life when the lead singer and he started a duet to play original folk music in coffee houses. In the middle seventies, Mike moved to Lubbock, Texas to play in a Blues band which never started. He ended up doing solos in coffee houses, sometimes lead guitar jobs with Tom Woodruff, taking guitar lessons from Jesse Taylor, and playing sessions with his roommates at the 9th Street Commune. As Duane Allman put it, Lubbock was a place to "Build those chops and build those chops." Mike also managed to sit in with a young Joe Ely from time to time. The Stubb's Bar-B-Que Sunday Night Jam gave Mike a chance to play and get blown away by some of the best. Lubbock was a great learning experience. Lubbock is also a place where words flow on the wind, waiting to be plucked from the air and molded into poetry. Lubbock is where writing became a burning passion with the birth of "The Ballad of Amos Guthry" and "High Sierra Train." Lubbock is also where music became such a chore that the joy of performing left. The guitars hid in their cases and only came out to write.
Bryan/College Station was a place to eventually have the joy of music come back. Through friends I managed to meet quite a few mid-level musicians like myself and have fun jamming, trading songs, re-learning a lot of hard won licks and chords. It was also a time to dust off old tunes and try to write anew. As luck would have it, Lyle Lovett was a good friend of my roommate and picking partner, Joey Smith. We started jamming and playing some of the open stages together, and discussing poetic philosophy. We would sit around the parlor of "The Big House" and trade tunes. Lyle and Joey playing rhythm guitars, Mike lead, and Bonnie Beale playing the flute. It was this period when Bonnie introduced Michael (who was in-between a couple of failed marriages) to Alicia Gill. Mike was interested, Alicia can barely remember the evening.
[Insert the beginning of Alicia's Bio]
A group called the "Side Effects" was about to get Alicia and Michael performing together. Alicia's sister, Mary, was about to get married to Lawrence "Bear" Mayer and Alicia needed musicians to back her up in the wedding. Bear knew of a group of musicians who got together for Thursday night pot luck dinners and picking. The sessions were at Bob Atkins house, the lead singer was Don Hancock. Bob played rhythm guitar along with Don, Doug Duryea played bass and harmonica, Doug's most-significant other, Ellen Moore, played viola, Michael was on lead guitar, back-up vocals, and Dobro. This was the nucleus of a group which Don called the "Side Effects." They played here and there around Bryan/College Station until Don had to quit. Alicia recruited the band to play the wedding, then the band recruited her to be the singer lady. "Mr. Ed" McGuinness joined on to play drums he built out of Baskin-Robbins wooden vats and to do promo. The band started to make money, sometimes. Alicia and Mike started a 20+ year collaboration of making music together. They both shifted gears and began writing better material.
Alicia and Michael married June 25, 1994.
In 2006, Michael ended up in the hospital and for the most part bled to death. As he fought the voices telling him to go to sleep and the pain would be gone, he touched the energy that binds everything. A door opened. The universe is poetry. Writing not only became easier, it sometimes became a darned nuisance. Where not too many years earlier a good song came every now and then, now he is bombarded by words, by paintings and photographs, movies, inventions and history.
A major Monkey Wrench was thrown into the works: Mike woke from the induced coma and had lost all of the motor skills that enabled him to play the guitar. The simplest G chord was beyond his skill. Good friend and hero, Vince Bell, imparted hard learned knowledge remarking the only way to get it back was to start from the beginning and work like hell. He pointed out that it wasn't a bad thing. Just think back to the line "if I only knew then what I know now." Now Mike had the rare opportunity to know then what he knew now!! He is still fighting to get back to playing without having to think about it. He is a long way from there, but there are new directions to be explored. He feels beyond blessed to have gotten a second chance at life and another chance to play music.
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