Remembering Michael Stanley by Anastasia Pantsios

When I first got involved in the music scene in northeast Ohio, my world revolved around the Youngstown-based band Glass Harp, one of the most magical bands this area has ever produced. By late 1973, the band was on its last legs and broke up. Shortly after that, bassist Dan Pecchio was asked by a Cleveland musician named Michael Stanley, who’d released a couple of solo albums in 1973, to join him, along with guitarist Jonah Koslen, to play some live gigs.

I may have seen them earlier (I may have even met Michael when we both worked at Disc Records in 1972 but I don’t remember), but the first time I recall seeing them was in July 1974 at the Cleveland State University gymnasium. Coincidentally, original Glass Harp guitarist Phil Keaggy opened the evening with a duo he then had with singer/guitarist Peter York. That show was an end and beginning for both Michael and Phil.

Phil would soon break up the duo to move to Freeport, New York to join Scott Ross’s Christian commune, Love Inn. As for Michael, I shared with him and Danny that evening my antipathy for acoustic music (I’ve always been a headbanger!) and said I didn’t plan to hear them again until they dumped the stools they were sitting on and got a drummer.

It wasn’t long after that — less than a week probably— that Michael and Danny showed up at my door saying they were going to go out and listen to some drummers. It must have been a Thursday night because they asked about going to hear Tom Dobeck who played with Circus; at the time Circus held down Thursday nights at the old Agora on East 24^th.  I said he was great but that he’d already given notice to Circus, saying he was tired of the rock & roll grind and planned to go back to school.

It turned out he was just tired of Circus and was open to Michael’s offer to join what became the first lineup of the Michael Stanley Band. Michael was fond of saying that Tom never formally joined the band, but he played every band show Michael did for the next 46 years.

I guess I could recite the linear history of the Michael Stanley Band and Michael’s post-MSB ensembles (The Ghost Poets, the Resonators, the Midlife Chryslers) and his many releases, which he continued to put out almost annually. But I’ll leave that to others. He performed his final show just before the pandemic shut everything down and alas, didn’t outlive it, dying of lung cancer March 5; he would’ve been 73 in late March.

He was such a towering figure in Cleveland — Michael Stanley Band held the attendance record at every Cleveland venue back in the early/mid 80s including four sold-out nights at Blossom Music Center one summer — that a local improv group built an entire show satirizing his legend. It was often remarked that he was a star in Cleveland and unknown elsewhere, which wasn’t quite true. While the crowds weren’t as large, I heard him play for enthusiastic audiences at Chicago’s Navy Pier and the Palladium and the Ritz in New York City. Speculating on why he never “broke out” was a popular parlor game in town, but it was really just luck of the draw — record label accidents and politics. The Michael Stanley Band surely could’ve been as big as REO Speedwagon. They were way better.

Michael was such an institution in northeast Ohio, both with the wildly popular MSB and with his enduring popularity as a solo artist, that it’s hard to describe how his being gone feels. It’s like a vast hole blown in the heart of the Cleveland music scene, an emptiness. Of course, the Cleveland music scene isn’t about any one person or, for that matter, any one scene. It’s always teemed with talent even if the outside world has seldom taken note. But Michael was its biggest success story rooted in northeast Ohio soil (Trent Reznor was passing through from western Pennsylvania on his way to L.A.; Chrissie Hynde’s success grew in London soil), someone who embraced all aspects of Cleveland culture and never derided it or acted above it.

In the fall of 2019, my friend and fellow photographer Joe Kleon and I held a photo show at 78^th Street Studios’ Survival Kit Gallery. We invited Michael to come to the gallery to complete an oral history, conducted by his former manager David Spero, that we’d begun six years earlier at the Space: ROCK Gallery on Waterloo. He shared reminiscences of his career with humor, self-awareness and affection for his hometown and its loyal audiences. Joe has posted both interviews for public viewing here.

I photographed many Michael Stanley Band and Michael Stanley solo events over the years, including those Blossom shows, sold-out New Year’s Eve shows at the old Richfield Coliseum, a multiple-night run at Playhouse Square’s Palace Theatre over Thanksgiving 1979, the taping of the Stagepass live album at the Agora in fall 1976, and some of the band’s final dates, a 12-show run at the long-gone Front Row Theater in Highland Heights out by I-271 over the 1986-87 holiday season. Joe picked up the ball in the early 2000s, shooting Michael and the Resonators at dozens and dozens of gigs. We’ve both been going through our archives, thinking back on those great times and all that great music, and we’re sharing some of our favorites here with you. Click here to see Joe’s; click here to see mine.

Rest in peace, Michael. — Stacey

 

 

Post categories:

• Music: Popular
• Performance
• Music: Rock and Roll
• Anastasia Pantsios
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