No Boss
The endless fumble of Michael Stanley.
By Rodney E. Griffith
“Then, I remember it’s because he sucks.”—a teenager’s punchline
“I'm sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”—Neil Young, actual rock star
I was standing in a Manchester record shop browsing exotic promo CDs and singles (neither of which were something US record companies had cared to produce with the same excitement or quality) while my wife conversed with a familiar member of the staff, explaining that she had moved to Cleveland, Ohio. He began enthusing over Cleveland’s punk scene, which, as a teenager in the broadcast area (albeit a more rural than urban township in Lorain County), was kept from me, a veritable suppressed history. Instead of playing punk, the city’s perenially-competitive commercial radio stations, many years before Clinton-era deregulation decimated them, nevertheless found a unifying cause, repeatedly pinning their audiences’ hopes on one local musician and the band that bore his name.
When said musician, one Michael Stanley Gee, died in 2021, there was an ocean of showy tears from local boomers. In addition to the expected coverage in what remained of local media, not one but two hagiographies appeared in Variety, referring to him as “the very symbol of rock ‘n’ roll for decades in the city of Cleveland.” Unless you’d lived in the surrounding area, you’d have to be forgiven for having no idea who this person was or why the residents of the city had such a chip on its shoulder about being the “capital” of a musical form it could only define in terms of blue-collar consumers (mainly of tickets, not discs).
If you have never heard of Michael Stanley or the Michael Stanley Band, there’s a good reason for it. Stanley was dead average, a big fish in a small pond who fronted what amounted to a Springsteen tribute band with connections. This piece could effectively begin and end with the preceding sentence; there is nothing overly notable about the man or the music he wrote and recorded. 1972’s “Rosewood Bitters”, probably his signature tune, was bettered by any number of country/western songs at the time of its release (which, to the consternation of the classic rock audience and their claims that country and R&B are beneath them, is all “Rosewood Bitters” ever was). The story is in how (and why) Michael Stanley as an act was driven into the ground when there was so much more on offer. That the March 6, 2021 Variety column was written by “fellow Clevelander” Holly Gleason speaks to the issue that has underlined the entirety of his career. While many locals continued to solemnly incant the same talking points—namely claims that Stanley was of equal artistic standing to Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, and Bruce Springsteen—they were all too willing to ignore the fact that those established performers had quickly developed their own unique selling proposition and that Springsteen in particular, having rejected the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s for the pottage of basking in the wasteland of the industrial revolution, commanded an unbeatable market share. By the time The Michael Stanley Band started eking out low chart hits in the early 1980s, there was never any danger that they were on the cusp of being The Next Big Thing in popular music. By then, Springsteen’s imperial phase was coming to a close (the 1986 set Live 1975–85 was his last unqualified success).
It must also be noted that the most recognisable recording industry names to have come from Ohio—Scott Walker (when he died in 2019, the reaction from Cleveland media was negligible, and Variety ran only a single, perfunctory obit), The Pretenders, Devo, The O’Jays, and latterly Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails—transcended their borders. I know that Pulp came from Sheffield and The Beach Boys came from Hawthorne, but those groups never let their hometown become their albatross. The Michael Stanley Band, on the other hand, had no clear identity apart from the city where they lived.
Noted in each account, band history and biography was one highlight: that the MSB sold out Blossom Music Center, the area’s local outdoor venue, for four consecutive nights in 1982. To sell out local amphitheatres speaks only to a well-trained local thrall (and the local promoters who did whatever they could to exclude anyone else from competing: his fans are right that the game was rigged, but it was rigged in Stanley’s favour, not the other way around). It lacks the significance of The Clash holding a 17-night residency at Bonds International Casino in 1981 or The Beatles’ unprecedented concerts at the Budokan, or Squeeze selling out Madison Square Garden in 1982 despite lacking a single US hit. (“Tempted” barely got into the Billboard top 50.) There is a crass irony in Gleason’s position that Stanley alone epitomised the “feeling, the reality of how it felt being the great unseen and never-heralded” when acclaimed (and beloved) bands like Squeeze (who still record and tour) were effectively blacklisted by Cleveland media.
Not that Cleveland’s media outlets should be accused, in hindsight or at present, of objectivity or equal time. This was a major television market whose network affiliates routinely dropped scheduled programming without logic or warning. The city is quick to claim regional bows for being the birthplace of superhero comics by virtue of the local origins of Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, but CBS affiliate WJ(K)W refused to air the 1977 live action Spider-Man series (thanks to a grant from local oil executives). The NBC affiliate had earlier refused to air the original New York run of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Infamously, ABC affiliate WEWS pulled the premiere episode of Turn-On halfway through its airing1. (To this day, Matlock reruns will mysteriously preempt first-run network programming on Cleveland stations, a problem only recently ameliorated by the availability of streaming services.) Backhanders and politics have always held Cleveland television by its throat, and post-1960s rock radio was no different; neither top 40 nor AOR stations seemed concerned about what records were in actual demand and the genre’s history had been crudely pasted over by WMMS-FM, who dismissed artists like Chuck Berry and much of the British Invasion as irrelevant and had even consigned psychedelia as an embarrassing artefact that got in the way of playing the latest Loverboy track. WIXY-AM had been well-regarded in the 1960s but by the 1980s its reputation had similarly been airbrushed away. WMMS had one narrative, and that was bleached blues derivatives for boomers. In only that sense was Michael Stanley’s work “symbolic.” No organic spokesman for a generation; he was effectively the mascot in a campaign for passive servitude.
There’s a reason why rock music was so quickly turned from “Tune in, turn on, and drop out” to “Punch in, shut up, and clock out”—particularly in what was at the time a steel/manufacturing city where dissent was seen as something to have contempt for by rock’s target age group. The pop music of the 1960s was largely aspirational (boy meets girl and vice versa, “Up, Up and Away”); even protest songs carried with them an implicit call to action that suggested a better, more equitable life was possible. (Maybe not “Eve of Destruction”.) Riding the wave of Springsteen’s dingy worldview, the MSB rubber-stamped the mediocre lives of its audience and validated disappointment as a lifestyle. The marks drank it down and have resented, ever since, anyone who didn’t take the Kool-Aid with gratitude. Punk, which resonated with the message of the 1968 Paris revolution, was not going to get a fair opportunity on commercial radio no matter how much of a following local groups had, because rock ‘n’ roll rebellion had been terraformed into a vehicle for doing what you were told and passively accepting things as the way they always had to be, and Michael Stanley’s oeuvre was an encapsulation of this. Being “the great unseen and never-heralded” wasn’t, as they used to say, a bug—it was a feature.
There’s also a presumption that Stanley’s failure to break through on a national level points to Cleveland being relegated to eternal status in popular culture’s friendzone, but such self-pitying nonsense only obscures the city’s actual successes. During the time Stanley had a major label record deal, The Dazz Band had a Billboard #5 hit (“Let It Whip”) and a Top 20 album. LeVert was in the Billboard top five in 1987. The aforementioned punk scene had (and has) a strong international following and the history of Cleveland’s Boddie Recording Company (also seldom if ever to be mentioned by local rock media) was the subject of a recent multi-disc set by The Numero Group. Of course, the obvious difference is that Stanley was a white, middle-aged man (I honestly do not recall any point from 1981 onward where he was not middle-aged and haggard; he was a kind of Dorian Gray in reverse) who effectively stood up for The Man.
Thus a critical overview of his recording career is difficult to separate out. His album catalogue is filled with hokey, nudge-nudge titles (You Break It…You Bought It! and Greatest Hints) and tacky, sexist cover images (Stage Pass, Ladies’ Choice). The group recorded with Mutt Lange—the man who’d produced the single version of “This is Pop” months earlier—but having a defining album like Dark Side of the Moon was not on the cards, because (with some degree of irony), in Cleveland, “Album Oriented Rock” basically meant greatest hits played from LPs. To the extent they were known at all, album rockers MSB were known for A-sides like “He Can’t Love You” (neither written nor sung by Stanley), “Lover”, a croaking vocal accented by a carbon copy Clarence Clemons sax solo that might well have been flown in from an outtake from The River, and “My Town”, later turned into an unintentionally meta advert for the Cleveland Indians: a fading band shilling for a losing team. Those four nights at Blossom, endlessly mentioned, were even symptomatic of the erosion of Stanley’s record sales. By the early 1980s, concertgoing boomers were becoming increasingly unmotivated to enter a record store and adamantly rejected singles (an attitude the American major labels had been coaxing into them since the end of the 1960s2). A comparison with the UK charts at the time the MSB was a going concern reveals a significant age gap—artists were ten years younger, and were more varied and prolific3. As a final act of petulance at the end of an unusually patient contract, Stanley named the group’s last EMI America LP You Can’t Fight Fashion, as though the popularity of groups then in rotation on MTV were somehow to blame for the group’s inability to appeal beyond its borders, when in reality, they could not compete on a nationwide or international basis against aspirational themes. Even if riding an elephant in Sri Lanka while ruminating on a one-night stand was out of reach for most Gen Xers, such things were better life goals than being willingly trapped in the feedback loop of settling for a job where you were little more than an extension to machinery, then moaning about it while The Michael Stanley Band played affirmations to justify your lack of vocational judgment.
After he exhausted his appeals with the major labels (in under ten years, he’d bounced from MCA to Epic to Arista to EMI/Capitol; Seger and Springsteen have stayed on their same respective labels for 4+ decades) and entered a lengthy period of diminishing returns in self-publishing, Stanley landed on television (PM Magazine, see “Eye on Springfield” for the closest comparison) and finally the afternoon slot at WNCX-FM, by then a classic rock station whose library reputedly consists of a Time-Life CD set and a copy of Freedom Rock. His gig there also suggests that for all of his lauded local touring successes and publishing royalties, being a rock musician wasn’t as lucrative as his 1970s audiences were led to believe; the ouroboros of Cleveland failure had consumed its own tail.
The later stages of his biography make Stanley seem like a Krusty the Clown figure, a pale, bitter, cigarette-dangling local superstar, four-time bridegroom, and pedantic letter writer. Reading the fawning tributes that poured in after his death gives the impression of a musical “god” (Gleason) or at the least a “great rocker” (Stephen King) and one might wonder why Michael Stanley isn’t as popular as these people think he should be.
Then, I remember it’s because he sucks.
1 George Schlatter has stated that WEWS general manager Donald Perris had actually campaigned for Turn-On’s cancellation before the first episode aired because he resented ABC’s cancellation of Peyton Place.
2 In a buried lede in one of Bruce Spizer’s coffee table books on Beatles label art—an inarguably expensive equivalent to a website—a Capitol Records staffer offers that the label’s investment circa 1968 in a company that sold vending machine flexidiscs owed to a corporate goal to eliminate manufacturing singles altogether, something that eventually came to pass when “…Baby One More Time” became a US #1 chart hit without a physical single in 1999.
3 Simon Frith (now OBE) observed in The Rock Yearbook 1982 that British pop musicians were “determined, one way or another, to have fun; American musicians are concerned only to give no offence” and that American singles of the era “were no fun (and) offered no surprises at all.”
©2022 Rodney E. Griffith. All rights reserved.
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