You know how music is one of those things that permanently gets fixed into a time and place in your life? You can hear it so many years later, and it takes you right back there? That’s why The Michael Stanley Band is permanently fixed in my mind with being a teenager in Ohio in the early 80s. But my fascination with MSB as they were known, started a couple of years earlier.

It’s 1978. I am solidly in the “weird” group in high school. The group that loves Star Wars, monster movies, and comic books. (If only I’d grown up during the current era…I might have been cool! But then the Star Wars fans were decidedly uncool.)

Just a year earlier I decided to join the high school marching band. Not because I wanted to play an instrument, but because all of my friends were in band, so it seemed like I needed to make the move. Friends were like air to teenagers…you need them to stay conscious.

Thankfully, a young and crazy band director welcomed my lack of talent weirdness into the fold, taught me the basics of how to play saxophone, and suddenly I spent most of my time surrounded by friends. Most of whom were considerably cooler than me.

Enter into the picture one of the drummers, we’ll call him Max. Max was a real cool cat, someone who played the “quads”…a set of four drums that you carried around…and he was the person who introduced me to this new band from Cleveland Ohio….Michael Stanley Band.

Now for context, growing up in the late 70s in the Cleveland area meant that you had some….um, interesting……cultural influences. For example, there was The Buzzard, WMMS FM. It’s hard today to explain what The Buzzard was in a way that will make sense in this world of Spotify and podcasts….but The Buzzard was so powerful that to simply have a record played by the station almost certainly meant huge success. Bruce, David Bowie, Heart….they all owe significantly to the influence of The Buzzard early in their careers. And if you lived daily life in the sphere of The Buzzard, they were more than just a radio station. They determined what was cool, what you talked about, even slang. Although you’d find lots of folks who might argue about it’s origin, the Ohio term “North Coast” was certainly popularized by The Buzzard if not invented by them. “Turn Before You Burn” was a summertime staple. All from The Buzzard. And The Buzzard LOVED MSB….which meant so did we.

So, in 1978 Michael Stanley Band released an album called Cabin Fever. Now remember….I am NOT cool. So I don’t pick up on this record at first. But Max….oh man, Max was obsessed with this record. And his enthusiasm for MSB resulted in my buying an 8-track of the album so I could play it in my Plymouth Duster. (We’ll have to discuss that car and my “genius” changes to it in a later post.)

“Baby If You Wanna Dance” was the first track I heard. And it is pure late 1970s awesome…heavy on guitars, but with just a hint of the synths that would dominate pop music in a couple of years. But for me it was Michael Stanley’s voice….very rarely in pop music did I hear someone singing lead who had a deeper voice…Stanley’s baritone really said “rock and rebellion” to me at a time when ELP, Rush, and others were singing notes so high they shattered glass. I was never a fan of those high-voiced leads, and Michael Stanley was definitely my “particular brand of vodka,” as one of my friends would later put it.

MSB became the defacto soundtrack to my last couple of years in high school. They sold out Blossom Music Center for an unprecedented four nights in a row in 1982, outdrawing other huge rock stars. Whenever they played anywhere in Ohio, especially from say 1978 until maybe 1984 or so…they were bigger than anyone else in the world.

But if you went to an MSB show one state over, they were nearly unknown. And we all hated that. We wanted MSB to rule the Earth like The Beatles and Zeppelin had. But it was never to be. For a variety of reasons, the band never really got much traction nationally, despite being on American Bandstand and a couple of Top Forty chartings, they just never really became the entire U.S.’s “particular brand of vodka.”

The Defining Song For An Ohio Boy: “Lover”

During this crazy run in Ohio, MSB released the album “Heartland” in 1980. And this one song is why I will never be able to separate MSB from Ohio and my youth. The album included a song called “Lover.” The track featured Clarence Clemmons of Bruce’s E Street Band on sax solo, a sign of MSB’s increasing influence nationally…but even this didn’t help the song break out.

But it was the combination of the swelling chorus, Clarence’s aching sax solo, and the lyrics that fused this forever into my teenage brain. Mostly the song is a simple breakup lament. But it’s framed around the cold Ohio winters…about snow, existential cold, and loneliness. Three things that are viscerally painful to an Ohio teenager.

In concert, when Michael would sing about cold Ohio nights and deliver the line “Thank God for the man who put the white lines on the highway”, every single human in the audience who’d ever spent a second on Ohio roads in the winter knew this feeling….and would shout out in appreciation. We all shared that experience, it was a very specific moment framed in a story line about loss and heartache. And being alone. We could all relate to it in some way.

To this day, I never pass up a chance to listen to that song. I still own the vinyl I bought in 1980 and still spin it frequently. And this track has never left my side, after more than 40 years. Amazingly, it’s not even that scratched up..a sign of my steady handed reverence for the track despite countless needle drops.

MSB went on to release an album called “You Can’t Fight Fashion” in 1983…a winking title recognizing that in a time of synth pop and hair metal, MSB’s music was not going to gain any more traction. But the album including a song called “My Town,” an unflinching Cleveland home town anthem that only cemented his status as a local legend who coulda been a contender. The song continues to echo throughout football games and events through Northeast Ohio to this very day.

When MSB stopped playing as a unit, Michael continued to make new music and perform live all the way til his death in 2021…and spent nearly the entire time as a popular DJ on WNCX, Cleveland’s solidly Classic Rock radio station. (His dad was a DJ too, BTW.) After he left us, all across town billboards sprang up….honoring a hometown hero who almost….almost….found a way to become a huge star. But he was always a star to us. And in the end, maybe the rest of the country didn’t need to appreciate him….because we did so much.