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!