GB ::: ivan ::: Name Droppings

Review amazon customer
If the name Chris Michie rings your bell, you either lived in Madison in the late 1960s, or you've memorized the liner notes for albums by Van Morrison and the Pointer Sisters. Now living and producing music in the San Francisco Bay area, Michie was a fixture on the Madison scene from 1965 to '69 as lead guitarist for the Grapes Of Wrath and the Mendelbaum Blues Band. His memoirs of those years -and of the years since- are now available through his Web site at www.cmichie.com in the form of a publication called NAME DROPPINGS or IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, ISN'T IT?.
With e-mail contributions from former bandmates Willie Collins, Greg Loeb, and Keith Knudsen, Michie offers a unique perspective on those turbulent years.
There are anecdotes about playing the area's VFW halls, Langdon Street fraternities (where beer "Was served in tall cans that had the top cut out"), the Memorial Union's Great Hall, the Factory and the Dane County Fairgrounds, where the Grapes opened for the Beau Brummels.
The Grapes disintegrated in 1968 amid the frustrations of trying to be original at a time when their audience wanted covers of what was playing on the radio. "By the time the Grapes broke up, all my relationships were in a shambles." Michie writes.
He found salvation in the Mendelbaum Blues Band. "Within a few months we were the hottest group in the area, if not all of Wisconsin and the surrounding states." Michie writes. "Wisconsin was an 18-year-old drinking state, so all the college kids from Minnesota, Iowa, Upper Michigan and Illinois swarmed into Wisconsin nightly to hear music and get drunk. We worked every night of the week, sometimes doing two or three shows a day, and we made good money."
The band would arrive home at dawn after an out-of-town gig and "have breakfast at Vi's Grill, just around the corner from where we all shared a big house on West Main Street. Vi's generally catered to the early morning workers, truckers, and hotel help from across the street, but we were her favorites."
Their abode on West Main was home to as many as fourteen people at a time, not counting such overnight guests as Big Joe Williams, one of the Chicago blues acts for whom Mendelbaum opened under the auspices of the University Folk Arts Society.
"A stipulation of Joe's contract was a place to stay and a bottle of Jack Daniels," Michie writes. "Joe was accompanied by Otis Rush, who was in town for another show the following night, and after the show we all convened to the Mendelbaum house. We all sat in the living room until four in the morning, listening to Joe tell stories as Otis translated for us. The combination of the liquor and Joe's thick accent made it impossible for us to understand him. Eventually we rolled out the sofa bed for Joe, said goodnight and thank you to Otis, and headed off to bed. By then, Joe was already asleep in our living room."
Mendelbaum produced its own shows at the Broom Street Theater and the UW Music Hall, but after a series of outdoor gigs-cum-anti-war rallies turned increasingly violent and confrontational, Michie and company headed for northern California.
They quickly broke into the Bay area music scene, jamming with Buddy Miles, Carlos Santana, and members of the Velvet Underground, opening for Albert King and B.B. King before disbanding in 1971.
Michie has gone on to the kind of below-the-radar music career you don't often read about. He's opened for the Eagles and Procol Harum, played with Boz Scaggs and other Bay area heavies, toured the world, and recorded with Van Morrison and the Pointers. He now has his own production company and record label and says he's found a happy balance between recording his own albums and composing music for radio and TV.
The title is apt. Michie drops dozens of names, and has an anecdote to associate with each, including Mama Cass Eliot, Muhammad Ali (whom Michie met while in Zaire with the Pointers as part of the "Rumble In The Jungle"), and Stevie Wonder (whom Michie observed sucking on Anita Pointer's fingers during a studio session).
Memory is a filter, of course. Sometime Michie's recollections are screened through cheesecloth. Other times they're poured freely through a sieve. But NAME DROPPINGS is an entertaining read, and its chapters evoke a music scene nearly two generations gone.

biography
Chris Michie
Name Droppings
It's All About Me, Isn't It?

publisher: Xlibris	published: 2001	ISBN: 978-1-4010-1482-8
language: english	format: paperback	pages: 212 (relevant: 126-134)
*dimensions (whd)[mm]: 141 217 * 13**