Early Mikey
Check Out the Chick and These Dudes
Second from the right is me. Gotta love the frilly shirts. Canadians know who the attractive young lady is but only a few remember her as a singer.
I played lead guitar in a few bands during my teenage years. We made some money playing school dances around Toronto. So in a sense I was playing professionally at sixteen years old. But my career didn’t really start until I was twenty, switched to keyboards and joined this band pictured above. This picture was taken in late March 1974.
For those in the US: At the time of this picture Dini was “Sweet City Woman” a popular talk show on CITY TV in Toronto. She went on to host a long running and very successful CTV network program, “The Dini Petty Show”
Priorities and realities forced her to abandon this idea. We hired a girl and a guy as front people and went on the road for almost four months playing lounges and bars, six and sometimes seven nights a week.
We managed to get a record deal based on songs written by Art Hine (guitar) and myself. The band imploded in January 1975 as a result of a conspiracy to fire the two front people.
Next I joined one of Ronnie Hawkin’s satellite bands. It was managed by Hawkin’s former bodyguard, Heavy Andrews. A tough son of a bitch, he conducted business from his cell at the Don Jail for a while. I was at dinner in a restaurant with him one time and he ordered the virgin lamb “well fucked”. Not a bad band, we had our moments. But they were crazed. We bought used red velvet tuxedos so we could play at Ottawa’s exclusive Chateau Laurier. We looked like the drapes on the wall. They gave us rooms which was a mistake. A senator who was on our floor riled the guys when he snubbed them after they had said hello. One of our rooms was next to the senator and they placed speaker boxes against the wall they shared and intermittently blasted The Band and Tower of Power at him for most of the night. He left the next day.
I managed to escape that band in July 1975 and joined my first disco band. It was short lived partly due to a polyester rebellion. We objected to suits that you could never get the BO out of after worn once.
In September 1975 I joined a band called Atlantis. It was a funky show band that included a James Brown set, Kung Fu demo with strobe lights, and a Dianna Ross tribute. I suppose it was marginally entertaining but even at the time I wondered why people weren’t asking for their cover charge back. The bass player in the band was Brent Eikhard. His sister was Shirley Eikhard. She was 19 when I met her and already a high profile singer-songwriter in Canada. When the Atlantis management decided to fire the whole back-up band at the end of 1975, Brent told me his sister was looking for a piano player and would I be interested? This began a five year incredible musical journey with an incredible lady.