Phil Coultrip Talks About the 2007 Mountain Music Festival

                                              

Phil Coultrip

 Remembers 2007

The Mountain Music Fest

 

 

Phil Coultrip is a survivor. As a teenager he booked acts like Bob Seger, The Amboy Dukes at the brand new Midland Center for the Arts and when the powers to be shut down rock & roll at the Center, Coultrip shrugged, thumbed his nose at convention and booked Apple records protégés Badfinger at the Midland High School. It proved to be a huge success. He was a shaker and mover before he even realized how deep he could go, hanging out with Bob Seger and learning the gospel from Punch Andrews, Seger’s manager. Phil had his own cross to bear as the lead guitarist for Breadfruit, a local Midland outfit that seemed destined for big things. Coultrip was a talented musician yet his vision went much deeper than Midland. He saw a wider vista of opportunity through building alliances with promoters as well as talent. Through the years Coultrip has rubbed shoulders with Country Music’s elite, stars as well as agents, writers and producers. Phil Coultrip is a man with soul. He’s been on the top and fallen hard. He’s real, resilient unassuming and just stubborn enough to do it all over again.

 

 

 Can you tell me about some of the decisions that led you to develop the Mountain Music Festival?

 

I was moving back to Michigan. I was living in Florida. I had a nice house down there and everything. We were doing great, and I couldn’t be away from my son. We were just starting school up here. He’s in his second year of high school now.

So I was looking for something to do, and I happened to be driving past a sign about eight mile lake so I drove to the property and I saw it’s for sale. I’d been thinking about putting a festival together. I drove in there, and there was this big huge natural landscape and I bought it for $650,000 and then proceeded to put 2.9 million in it for renovations. It’s got the biggest stage in the state of Michigan… completely covered. It’s got 350 acres for camping. I put in all the electricity, put in all the water, put in all the rooms, cut down all these trees, cut down everything, replanted everything. I put in filling stations that happened to be there and it was a perfect layout to the stage and made it easy set-up. It had a capacity of 75,000 people. It took me a year and a half to get all the permits, zoning, and inspections. It was very difficult to do but I finally got approval. There were two counties and two townships, and the biggest problem was the local township, they were not quite convinced. But we got it through, and it started snowing that night. Perhaps it was a signal. I had already wanted to have all the grass planted and everything for the next year. I spent a whole year on it. I had 12 different partners and none of them were in the music business.

 

                                                                            

 

Did you have a board of directors?

 

Yes,  but when it comes down to it the only person that mattered was me because they were outside of Michigan. They didn’t really know the community and they didn’t really want to participate. They weren’t involved in the management of it at all and they weren’t involved in the building and construction of it from the ground up. They were just all just, “You made it, you run it, you do it.” None of them were in the entertainment business before or after. They weren’t really partners. They were the investors… they were purely investors. In fact, there was nobody from Michigan involved at all!

                                                                            

Were the investors the same folks who knew you when you promoted country shows?

 

Yes and no, I was very comfortable with them and myself. But on hindsight I’d never have done it at all because I would’ve been my albatross for the rest of my life. The bottom line is I was highly involved with other things. They investors were making a fortune…it was so incredible because instead of renting the building, we kept everything. We kept the parking, the ticket charges, all the alcohol sales, all the food sales, all the parking sales. There was nothing we had to give away. If we had just rented the building, we’d have had to give all that away. The real true bottom line story was the crash of 2008…Lots of people, hundreds and millions of businesses went out of business, and Michigan was extremely hard hit by it. Detroit was just going to crap…that’s what happened.

                                                                            

I read an article about your almost frantic efforts to promote the Mountain Music Fest

Well, nobody knew about Farwell, it was off the map so to speak. I traveled to radio stations all over this nation and did a ton of interviews but nobody ever heard about us. I don’t think it really hindered what happened in the second year when the economy just hit the skids. It wouldn’t have mattered where you were…Minneapolis any of the major markets, they all were hit so hard. Disposable income was gone. People weren’t partying. People weren’t buying tickets in advance. Everybody was holding back. The housing market crashed, and everybody was losing their housing. Nobody could borrow any more money. It was much more severe that anybody realized at the time. It still has a huge effect on everything. I couldn’t set things in motion until we finally had approval from all the participants. Conditionally, we held all of that land and properties which allowed us to run.  We had a time frame and we had to get our liquor licenses in ASAP. We were very late. October 31^st  was the first country show. We ended up doing all of this in the middle of the winter. There were people up on the stage blown sideways, and it was a terrible winter.

                                                                      

 

You a great line-up of talent. Did you personally sign the contracts with all of the artists?

 

Yes I was used to doing that. I mean that’s what I’ve done for several years. We had contracts

But we were better off starting the year in advance, and I was doing it less than six months out. You know I was in Las Vegas until then with the International Association of Fairs and Festivals which is running right now, this weekend. I was just trying to buy up everything I could.

                                                                      

 

I recalled an episode in which you were getting searched, investors folding . Did that happen?

 

They just went out of business like hundreds of other business during this time when banks were failing and the Feds were bailing them out. One of my investors had a big family, had three nurseries, nurseries that were quaint, right? I mean for a hundred years they had these businesses set up and running. All three of them went out business in 2008. The reason is because nobody was landscaping any more. There was no new construction so you had no new income.  He had two million dollars worth of stock sitting in those nurseries and he went from $400,000 a month to $20,000 a month to $10,000 to $5,000.

How many associated businesses were like that? … It was always done legally. There was no, there really weren’t any lawsuits at all.

 

 How did it go so wrong for you?

 

Well, we weren’t selling anything in 2008, plus we were being audited. We had two customers in June and July of 2007. The recession started in August, one month later. I was down in Louisville with my investors, and they were saying “We can’t borrow any money now.” There were credit crunches here. We couldn’t borrow a nickel if we had to, nor could anybody else. The bankers said, “We have no suggestions for you whatsoever.”

 

 

This was your vision. You had to be devastated.

 

I was devastated! I had some people that came to me before I did it, and said, “You know the only thing you can do is walk away from it” - I wanted to own it! I wanted to have my own place. I convinced myself that I could work so hard that I could make it happen. Ultimately  the creditors got all the money. We couldn’t sell a pop if we had to. We couldn’t sell a beer if we had to. We couldn’t sell a parking space. They were screwing us on the ticket charges. You know, you’d have a $50 ticket, and they’d have a $35 surcharge on it. It was ridiculous.  I hated it. I wanted so bad to do it on my own and it was just the wrong moment in time. I don’t think we did anything wrong, but it was bad timing. We got hit by the recession.

 

What could you do about it? Did you make the investors angry?

 

The bottom line is that I tried to pay everybody I possibly could, but when you go out of business, you’re out of business. That’s all there is to it.  I went to the investors and said, “That’s all there is. Good bye. Good luck. No hard feelings. We lost. It’s done.” If you were still in business, you’d still be paying all your creditors, but when you’re out of business, you can’t pay your creditors. I would’ve loved to, and I tried to. I did everything I could to pay them back but I had to take the punishment.

 

What kind of punishment did you have to take?

 

Besides losing the Mountain Music Festival… which only lasted one year, you know, it’s the terrible feeling that you built all this in such a short period of time and see it disappear so quickly. It came and went so fast that it was kind of like a dream. I decided to move forward, to start something new.

 I’m trying to rebound with electronic dance music, EDM. There’s a big musical movement in the world right now. A lot of people don’t even know what music is. They don’t care who the stars are. I could name you artists that you’ve never heard of yet they are making 25 to 50 million dollars a year. They have their own prioduct line. They’re world-wide stars. In fact, they’re smaller stars in the United States than they are in the rest of the world. I don’t mean that to be mean, but I’m sure you’ve never heard of any of them… I’ve been there. Las Vegas is like a bigger carnival. They have 300,000 people there just for the music EDM, and that is not a lot. Every hotel room is sold out. Now the second-largest gathering of people and the most profitable gathering of people is in Las Vegas. All of the events, all of the hours, and they’re number two.

 

The music, the dancing I couldn’t make heads or tails of it

 

It’s exactly this. You like the music, you like the song, you gotta dance, you’ve got to have big, large crowd areas, you have a need for a theater, you have need for an arena, and they get that stuff from head to toe. It’s just what it is. It’s peace and it’s love, it’s taking care of each other and so I’m very drawn to it.

 

Are you part of this now?

 

I’m trying to be…I’m looking at dates. That’s the truth. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to build from scratch, making a lot of money. I’m going to be in other cities. I’m not going to compete against what they’re already doing. I’m not going to even think about it, but there are lots of cities and lots of connections that aren’t over saturated - Los Angeles and New York, Atlanta, and Miami. I have some investors interested, the productions and the video are so over the top…everything, everything is generated by that one autograph, that one signature.

 

                                                                   

 

The Flies - Our Greatest Bands Series

 

 

Our Greatest Band Series

The Flies

 

 

 

 

Duane Miller, gtr, vocals

Mark Miller, bass, vocals

John Krogman, lead vocals, gtr

Tom Dolson, drums, vocals

 

The Flies were one of the great iconoclastic bands that came out in the eighties. They were the prototype for crash and burn yet their music was heavenly. The guys were green and fearless. They would try anything that felt good, fretless bass – check;

 

acoustic/electric guitars- check; electric blues guitar; spare kit rock& roll drums-check. I was turned on to the juice by a Frito-Lay Salesman who delivered the juice. He regaled me with tales of John Krogman and his immense talent, raw and unencumbered. He told me that Krogman possessed a singular talent for singing. He could go high or low effortlessly…his vocal range was incredible. He could sing like an angel and reach the high notes like a healthy Brian Wilson (soprano and falsetto). But alas, I sucked it up in the eighties and nineties to get some scratch going, head up looking for a score. Still…I had that image of John Krogman, his plain spoken working man’s credo; his belief in creating something bigger had an almost religious fervor. He sang the gospel and I was a true believer. His gift inspired me to walk the eightfold path and it was Krogman who brought me back to my love for music, harmony and truth. The Flies created a strange magic and balls up courage. They were at the precipice of fame, ready to take on anything, anywhere, anytime.  At one of their very first gigs they tore up Hamilton Street with a set that included original songs;  O, O, Blackout and I Oughta Know as well as some chesty covers by the Kinks (She’s Got Everything), Stones(Time is on My Side), Beatles (She Loves You and Tell Me Why) and the Romantics (What I Like About you). Their manager Fred Reif recorded the show and after 35 years the recording is now on compact disc. I have read articles about all of the Saginaw’s best bands…I was most impressed by the Flies!

 

Johnny, can you tell me about an early period in your musical journey that helped you develop your skills

 

I was always into art, drawing, you know, visual art. But I would say as I grew up my sisters were at the age when my first experience was the Beatles. That was what I grew up with… like the shadow on the wall, you know? That’s what I did

I really liked the Beatles, and I really liked the music. I mean it really gripped me. Revolver might have been the first album I ever got.The first album I ever bought was Willie and the Poor Boys, but I got access to all there music and my sisters were the perfect age for the Beatles. I listened to that stuff – British Invasion, and for a long time Buddy Holly. George Heriter played around here. He wrote a song way back in the day called the Bay City Bridge. It was on NBC, the Today Show, about when the Bay City Bridge fell in. George played the 12-string, and he did a lot of country at the time. He was playing on the weekend and I was playing during the week. When they put me in there with him, that was my first gig. I quit my job at Frito-Lay and went over there that afternoon and got an audition and I got the job!

 

 

When did you start playing with other people and finding         that voice?

Well, I didn’t find it… I tried out for choir in second grade or third grade and I didn’t make it, probably because I couldn’t sing harmony or some backup.  When I got in high school and I took a class for seniors. It was an experimental class where they had student instructors that taught the class, and the band director, who was supervising…he didn’t care if we learned to read music. He said, “That’s not what you’re here for. If you can show me that you can play something, I don’t care what it is, you’ll pass.” So I took it because it was a class! I tried guitar at just the right time, they were doing guitar lessons and showing me chords. I knew the Beatle records. I could sing them just acapella because I listened to them so much.I had the songs in my head, so it was an easy transformation once I got my hands to working. It just kind of took over from my love of sports. I always wanted to be in music anyway. When I was first in the Flies, people were telling me that I would be the most unlucky person to ever get in a band I was out of a job. I wasn’t a real popular … you know. Nobody would think that I would do that, that I would be a musician.

They couldn’t believe that voice was coming out of me… because of my look so I don’t know.

 

At what point in time did you realize you had this great voice?

 

I never did. To this day I don’t see it …a lot of people are like that.  Even when I’m watching a video of myself, I don’t like any of that stuff, I can’t watch myself without being critical and when I listen... I don’t know. It’s just the way I am. If I don’t think it sounds right, it’s not right. When I got out of school I was 18, and I wound up playing guitar. It was me, Duane Miller. I think we were known by Lone Star. We did a two-piece band that was big at the time. The Gaslight became the Old Town Saloon. Then it was the Fordney Lounge and we played in the Old Town Saloon. The fire department limited seating to 99 people could get in, though we would have 100-200 people come to our shows.Istarted playing solo and Duane Miller started sitting-in and getting the vibe and somehow or another Mark Miller saw us playing this light acoustic music and he wanted to join the band. At the time he was playing with the Piles with Tom Dolson and Jerry Roundtree.

 

(Krogman)We were practicing at Duane’s and we told Mark to come over and jam with us. So he started to come over every night. We didn’t have a whole lot of money to pay him for the gigs but he kept coming and sitting-in and he eventually became a part of the band.At the time the Old Town had a real small stage. We didn’t even know if we could fit everybody up there. Tom Dolson brought a little bass drum/snare drum kit. Mark was played bass and Duane and I played guitar and sang.

The first gig was exciting, no rehearsal, just hitting the spots and playing music that the band loved. From the first night on we were the Flies, it was just the four of us playing on the stage together, we just went with the feel.

 

The Flies were an exceptional band

 

(Dolson) Well, you don’t realize that until after the fact. I think that’s why a lot of bands come back, the come-back tours, because they didn’t realize what they had the first time. Yeah, we deprived ourselves then we got Jim and then we came back bigger than ever. There was still a lingering of hurt feelings. It’s always like that, any kind of group you’re in. Somebody disagrees with somebody, and that goes on. It wasn’t like anybody hated anybody. I think it was a case where we were burned out.  We were together seven days a week for two years! We had burn-out going, and we needed a little break to go do bigger things. There was a time when we got together and said, “Should we try this?” Instead we put another band together.

 

 

(Miller) Tom and I played for the last five to eight years, like three-quarters of that we all played together… we still all work together, but the Flies were too special to change the original lineup and original songs. We got together and tried to do it, but it wasn’t the same. It’s something rare and precious. Yeah, two years and you make a mistake and the whole thing crumbles.

 

 

                         

(Dolson) We changed, If it wasn’t us, it would have beensomeone else. We happenedto be that band that changed. Itwas getting pretty dry. We opened it up to people who got itstarted on Hamilton Street. There were these guys who’d come out and watch us in suits and ties, like “Here’s the future, got to keep that party going down on Hamilton Street. Hamilton Street was hot back in the ‘80s when I was running back and forth between Ojibway Island and those party stores, that was cool. I had my Ginger Blue era. But I’ll tell you after those places closed down; the Fordney got a lot of recognition.

 

(Miller) John and I started playing Old Town on a regular rotationIt was me and John. It was massive. We did double the capacity. Nobody would be upstairs. They were all downstairs listening to us… people just kept coming down. Then Mark comes in and says, “Hey, you got something going.” You know, we were bringing in people from out of town who would watch the show on a regular basis. Again, if it wasn’t us, it would’ve been somebody. There would’ve been a band there. We just happened to be there.

 

(Miller) It was a unique scene at the Old Town…the Piles had played upstairs one night in the big room, the hotel. I think it made a huge difference with the Piles coming in. It was pretty wild, man. Jumping on the tables, guys jumping up and slide across the floor or whatever. The pile were showstoppers

I remember one gig at the Rock Bottom on Bay Road, we all decided to get these silver exercise suits and we got these strobe lights going. We didn’t stop to think at that time that the suits were going to get hot. We would sweat like pigs.

We were willing to try different things. I remember when we got our hair cut off. Johnny looked Bob Seger. Then everybody said, “Great, great,” so everybody cut their hair off. All of a sudden everybody’s looking at us like we were weird. I forgot about that. Yep, we cut our hair, we dyed it. We did all kinds of shit.

And then there was a rise in people getting earrings. There weren’t any pierced ears, and then all of a sudden half the people on the dance floor would come in with their heads shaved or their ears pierced except for the bikers.

 

 

                 

(Krogman) The Flies were not a fast rush from the Beatles as far as name-wise. The Beatles were my inspiration… not that we’re going to be the next Beatles but “they’re the Beatles, we’ll be the Flies.” That’s cool. That was kind of the same type of whatever.

 

 

The Flies were different from other rock bands by using acoustic six-string guitars with electric rhythm. How did you come about doing that?

 

(Krogman)Well, we were always into Neil Young. So really that’s where it came from and at the time they came out with these augmented chords and sounds and  a lot of people said that they didn’t know that an acoustic guitar could do that… now a guitar can sound like a piano. That’s what happened. We were playing rock with acoustic guitars which kind of lightened it up a bit. We were different than everybody else because other bands band played dance music, disco music or they were playing rock and roll. Several people tried to talk us into going electric which I think we did after a while and I think it was a mistake!We did have our own sound though our sound did eventually change. We started listening to everybody else telling us that we should do this and that and this and that so we did some new wave music. It worked great…for a little while.In the beginning Duane and I were playing ‘60s music. We were into it. That’s what I grew up listening to and that’s what I went on to play, Stones, Beatles. I loved that sixties music. That was my music! So the newer stuff in the seventies and eighties, I had to get turned on to it. What I did, Message in a Bottle was a hot song! We just started listening to the new music. I mean it was an exciting time because it was closer to 1980 than 1970. We grew up in the ‘60s and all of a sudden there’s this new wave music coming and we’re playing it and we’re going back to the ‘60s. That was cool because we played that music and listened to it when we were children. Essentially we had two years of massive popularity. We had all these big crowds and a lot of support, number one in Saginaw, but it stopped after two years.As a band, we didn’t appreciate what we had, we were young.

And so there’ve always been missteps…That’s only human.

 

Did anyone influence your music or the arts scene in general during the eighties

 

(Miller, Dolson) It was Bob Martin hands down. Review came out just about the time that we established Flies. Bob wrote insightful articles, and he liked John. He would meet friends at The Hut Restaurant. We would all hang out. Bob was just starting to develop the Review paper with Jeff Scott…and he never stopped. He’d write a lot of stuff you didn’t see in the Saginaw News. He’d tell you about the bands and artists. He’s had the entertainment paper for years. A lot of bands have made that cover and been in that paper. He’s a great supporter of music. He did the same with us. We are friends this day, personal friends. Bob’s done a lot to help the music scene! He wants to help everything, even politically. He’s not afraid to print something about what he thinks.  He doesn’t have to worry about advertisers. I work at the news and you’ve got to worry.

(John) He was a friend and I always trusted his judgment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Miller)When we had the Flies, Bob would be hanging out in the lot at AHHS high school, Bob had that fine tuned sense of where it’s at, what was popular and what was bogus Bob, Jeff Scott, Mike Hanley and me. We had a school newspaper. I was only in about the 10^th grade when they were seniors. Dick formed the Democratic Voice at Arthur Hill and they’d print stuff in there. They’d get in trouble with the school system, you know. They went over to Jack Kelly’s, Dr. Kelly, who was on the school board.

 

(Dolson) I’m the oddball in all of this. The Arthur Hill group included all those guys – John, Bob, Jeff and all them. I’m an east side guy. I went to Saginaw High and Holy Rosary. So I didn’t feel like I we had the Prize going. I didn’t have people coming to see me because I was in the flies, they were coming to get cheap (cut outs) records at Rock –a-Rolla. I had a few friends but my input was just basically musical. I wasn’t drawing a whole lot of people, but we had a multi-cultural experience and things were good. There was this 1967 riot which was a problem. I just played basketball. I stayed on the side of the road and watched Schnauzer roofing go up in flames.

 

Did you guys write any songs about that era?

 

(Miller) We made attempts at writing and I had a couple of things that were okay. I wrote a blues song with Johnny Krogman actually, and I played it with TNT. We used to play it all the time. Every time we do that song I say, “Here’s a song about Johnny, we were sitting in a hotel. All in all, it was a good time in our lives, you know. We were in our twenties and we had a lot of fun, we got women. I don’t even know if I was drinking at the time, but I partied all the time. I wouldn’t give it up for the world. That was one of the best times of my life, playing with Johnny Krogman.

Right before the band started, John and I would do that two-piece thing. We were working all the time. We were going to go out west. John and I went out to California. You know, we were out there all summer checking things out. We got a couple jobs, got on TV in Los Angeles. We were talking to people who knew the score; looking at work in a restaurant to make more money. These dudes are like, “It took me this many years to get in there.” They’d been playing around town, but they’d always had these other jobs. You had to pay to work. You want to book this bar,

You have to guarantee these many seats. We knew this isn’t like Michigan where we’re working all week. You come out here and it’s a rough time. So we came back and hooked up with Tom and Mark. It was just like pow, pow, pow. We couldn’t have a bit of a day off. We had some days off. We were a working band.

                  

 

                    

(Dolson) It’s not like, go get some drums, take some lessons, get great on the drums and get in a band. I mean, it was like I some drums and a week later I was in a band. I just played rock and roll. You do what you’ve got to do. I’ll tell you what, as far as being a drummer, I don’t know how this sounds, but I always, my peers were always the black peers from the east side of Saginaw. If you couldn’t play with those guys, you got the hell out of Dodge. I thought that was the real shit. Even though I played in the rock band, I usually had a good time…

We had a lot of shit started up in Saginaw. Something comes out. Sometimes it’s something totally new or nobody’s ever heard and probably never will. That’s what creativeness is about, it’s the same thing, whether it’s music, poetry or whatever; art is art, one way or the other.

 

(Krogman) After Fred Reif left, I got tired of booking so I hired Rob Anderson to be our manager. Rob was going to handle all the details on that. I didn’t have to worry about that so I could concentrate on playing and singing. He was going to organize us like we had a business. Some people didn’t like that because it would cost money, take money out of their pocket…so the pot got smaller.

 

Did you have any other management

 

(Krogman)There was a guy that worked at the Saginaw News and I don’t remember his name, he really helped us. He wrote an article in the paper about the Flies. He was talking about our music, that we were not just playing the top 40…and that’s what he liked about us. So we started getting a little notoriety, and then we did a WSAM rap. It went nationally. At that point Bob Cheevers approached us and Fred Blondin became our manager.  I didn’t really know Fred very well. If I would’ve been a little more mature, more business-minded, cooperated more with him, we might have gotten more notice. It was like when you’re a big fish in a small pond…it’s a whole different animal.

 

On a typical gig what would you make?

 

(Krogman)I think at the time we were getting probably about $40 apiece a night; $200 for the band. There were different amounts, but I would say half the time we made $50, $60 a night. That was pretty good money.

 

Can you talk about the originals and some of the covers that you did, for the fans

 

(Krogman)We started with an original song because our way of thinking was that in order to get them to like the originals, they got to hear them a lot; In order to hear them a lot, we’re not going to call them originals. We’re just going to play ‘em. We’re not going to say, we just wrote this song. We’re just going to say, “This song is called blah-blah-blah’ and then we’re going to play it. Then we’re going to the next original song, and we’re not going to say who wrote it. We’re going to say, “This is the name of the song.” We’re going to play it. Once we get people asking for the song by name and we know they like it, we’ll start telling them; songs like Lions, Into the Sunset. We tried to come out with regular volume and then we got more intense as we went. Another thing we tried to do, was deal with Michigan hecklers, so to eliminate that we’d just go from one song to the next. We’d just go “boom, boom, boom, boom.” Some nights we’d play 80 songs, and we weren’t using a set list. I never used a set list. The only time I used a set list was when I had something important like a show or I had 10 songs wanted to do, and I’ll make up a set list for it.

 

But at a bar, I don’t have any set list. There’s such a thing as reading the crowd, reading the room.  I can’t perform a pre-program of this, this and this. That’s not going to work, unless you’re playing top forty and this is what people are coming for, I want to follow the room, you know? I’m not going to come out and play the first song of the night because it’s the first song on the set list. There’s one person sitting there and I’m going to play this wild-assed song, no. I’m going to look at the crowd and figure out what is going to be the most appropriate song. That’s what we did and when you do that, you might have a set list in your head that’s fluid. “Yeah, okay, Message in a Bottle was the first song…tonight’s going to be a ‘90s song.” It may be the first song or it may be the thirty-first song, but if that’s what they’re calling for and that’s what I feel we should do, we’re gonna do. Look at the crowd If they’re screaming at each other, you’re too loud. Tone it down.

 

(Krogman)We did this tape at the time at the Old Town Festival. We went on first and we started playing and the first song that we did, the PA problems started. Maybe we just should’ve just let it go but we recorded it, and it was copied and sold. Fred was selling the recordings, and there were two originals and several cover songs on there, and the folks that owned the rights to the music threatened to sue us if we didn’t stop selling that tape; it was a big hassle.  I had a private video tape of that whole thing.

 

Any final words about the Flies?

 

(Dolson) We all had a couple different off-shoots but we all grew up in the same town. Pretty much our whole generation, we grew up around the same thing, just a different community. I listened to all the rock and roll, but I listened to what my parents would come up with. We’re all in this generation that was influenced by Viet Nam, everything. As musicians we’d branch out and we’d check the scene and try to learn a different style or approach to our music. And sometimes it would work!

 

What was your final straw?

 

(Krogman)When it came to the final straw I was at a meeting at the old Schuch Hotel. Tom Dolson was there and told me he was going to quit the band. So at that point I just stood up and told him that I quit the band too!

 But as I look back the biggest thing about the Flies we just wanted to be different from everybody else…we tried to be original. I think that when the original four of us put it together and saw what happened, we could not sustain that kind of pressure. I maintain that there was more suffering in that band.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



The Mick Furlo Band - Our Greatest Bands Series

Our Greatest Band Series

The Mick Furlo Band 

 

Mick Furlo is a legendary presence in the Great Lakes Bay Region of Michigan. In an interview with Review Magazine, Mick lays it all out from the rush of success in the eighties to the brush national exposure in the nineties to the insouciance of brought on by the new millennium squeeze. Nothing mattered anymore when tea parties and stock markets crashed and our dreams became smaller. We were taken in by the dark knight of the senses and the rot set in, even our music could not feed us. In the digital world, songs became spare change. We were all drifting. Mick Furlo knew it instinctively; he’d seen it before, it was the rot that opened the wound… but lens had changed again. Mick gave up the poison nectar and his vision cleared and he was aware of an inner “presence” of something or someone and it felt like love and healing. This led to Mick Furlo’s Old Friends and New Beginnings show @ White’s Bar on October 10^th with special guests The Fabulous Retreads.

 

 

Mick did a phone interview in anticipation of the event. Here’s his story.

The Mick Furlo Band was one of the top draws in the eighties alongside, the Flies, My Dog Bob and the Burdons. The musicians were incredibly gifted; Donny Brown, drums and vocals; Rick Brown, bass guitar and vocals; Bob Merrill guitar and vocals (later replaced by Dean Vanston); Iris Furlo, violin, keyboards and vocals. Mick was the singer and guitarist and he wrote many of their original songs.

 Mick explained the dynamics of the band. “Everyone sang and had a good ear which made the vocal harmony easy. Donny was especially good at arranging vocals. In those days we liked to cover modern rock, the type popular among college students. We also knew we had to be in touch with the top 40 charts to play in the tri-city area.”

 

The band’s popularity soared almost immediately. They could play and perfect different styles of music from country rockers like Charlie Daniels Marshall Tucker to classic rock to power ballads and old time rock & roll rock & roll. Iris’ incredible versatility allowed the band to stretch out and take chances.  She had a great voice with a powerful range. Mick knew that Iris was a strong presence in the band. He explains, “Iris’s voice was a strong point  at the time so I started to write a few  for her to sing. The songs went over pretty well and we kept them in the playlist.” 

 

The band was on a roll between 1983 and 1990. They mixed originals with covers of Joe Jackson, The Tubes, the Motels, the Police, Heart and the Pretenders. However, things changed when Iris left the band. Mick explains, “When Iris became pregnant with our son Cory, we knew we had only a short time to revamp the song list, knowing we could never replace her we remained a four piece and that’s when we decided to put more of a focus on original material.”

In 1988, the band wrote over a dozen songs and went to Chicago to record their first album. To this day, Mick recalls that time fondly. He recorded at the Chicago Recording Company on Dearborn Street. Tom Hanson recorded the band. CJ Vanston (Dean’s brother) was part of the recording process. Mick recalls, “CJ added keyboard parts to about half of the songs. He’s been living in Chicago doing session work for the huge advertising market out there. At one point CJ said I never listen to anything and then he put his rig up on the control booth and blew everyone’s mind. He’d tell the engineer what to do – a little more ambience please, more bottom etc. He was fabulous. It was a graveyard shift – 8pm  to 3 or 4 in the morning for a couple of weeks, it cost $10,000!”

Shortly thereafter Donny and Dean decided to move on so Mick replaced them with two excellent musicians, Brad Silverthorn on drums and A.J. Dunning on guitar. It brought different points of view that helped the band find its own mark. Mick felt the band was different but still very good. They recorded a mini album of original songs that enabled them to do a few showcase gigs in Chicago. The promoter was Prism out of Ann Arbor. “We opened for a few national acts and my favorite was opening for Adrian Belew in East Lansing.” Marty Essen from Twin City Talent was Mick’s manager and he did get Mick and the band on a tour in the winter of 1990. They had a big stretch van and toured several southern states. Mick recalls it as a great experience but then the rot set in. Mick recalls, “We never got a deal. We were told that we were being shopped around. Kelly Millionis was part of it. He made contacts with the Chicago Recording Company, MTV and then he bounced to Los Angeles. He knew a lot of people like the Rapanos family who were prominent in Midland. Kelly had a flat in the Town House in the Marina Towers and worked from there.Millionis Industries produced, manufactured and marketed Invisible to You, a great album chuck full with great singing gorgeous harmonies and lyrical sophistication. The song list included:

Dream of Our Own, When Will We Learn, Let It Rain, It’s a Beautiful Day, See You Walk Away, Calling Out Your Name, I Feel Good, Starting All Over (Again), Say Goodbye, and Invisible to You.

 

 

Several of those songs are on You Tube. Check it out and astound to the great harmonies, musicianship and Mick’s incredible vocals.

On the cusp of something bigger, the band fell apart and went their separate ways. Mick took like a boxer who got sucker punched. He could only say,  “All things come to an end and we were done by 1990.”

 

 

Mick was devastated; his dream had become a distant dark cloud in his horizon. In his mind’s eye, he looked for salvation, music was his life,it coursed through his veins like blood to oxygen. Gradually he regained his his focus to developing the club scene through his time at Zinggers and other clubs. He brought in national bands and had a great time getting swapping stories with Rick Derringer who gained fame from  his hit making years with the McCoys (Hang on Sloopy) and Johnny Winter (Still Alive and Well and Rock & Roll Hoochie Coo.

CODA: Mick Furlo has something to say…

 

 

Now some 25 years later I started writing again. Being much older now I figured do it now so I’m not sorry later. The people I’m working with are a joy to be with. I want to introduce the band; My old friend and Bro Mark Krawczyk, bass; Jeff Coty drums, Tim Borocko, guitar, Maye Donovan (vocals), Cheryl Lyons, vocals, percussion and guitar. The material is a bit different than anything I’ve done before. It’s a sort of blues funk. It’s the Mick Furlo Band!