Full Transcript
Pete Lane:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. This is Pete Lane. My guest today is Mike Kelly, and his story promises to evoke an emotional response on the part of you, our listeners.
Mike Kelly:
I got hit by a car. I was in traction for a couple months, then I was in various casts.
Pete Lane:
Mike has experienced more than his share of hard times during his life, the decisions he made.
Mike Kelly:
I drank way too much in my 20s. I quit cold turkey, and I kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in the liquor cabinet, and I just quit. I said, “You know what? If I can’t have it right now just because it’s not in the house, that’s not real. It’s only real if it can sit there and I can ignore it.” And I did, and it was hard. There were a lot of long, gray days. That was a big fight. I don’t want to downplay that at all. It was a heck of a fight.
Pete Lane:
The losses he has endured.
Mike Kelly:
In ’07, my wife passed away. The music business had broken my heart, my wife dying broke my heart.
Pete Lane:
But like many others, he found a lifeline.
Mike Kelly:
I goofed around with a lot of different instruments, but by the time I was 16 I only played with my bass.
Pete Lane:
From his early years.
Mike Kelly:
There was a little 19 dollar acoustic guitar in the closet at my grandparents’, and I picked it up and started immediately trying to pick up bass parts.
Pete Lane:
And he persevered.
Mike Kelly:
With all that time on my back, I would play the bass for hours and hours and hours.
Pete Lane:
And perseverance, as it often does, paid off.
Mike Kelly:
And then I went into this gig with Michael Gregory. Michael’s a ridiculous, virtuoso guitar player.
Pete Lane:
Valuable lessons learned.
Mike Kelly:
And I just got up again and kept going. I learned a long time ago, when life hits me hard, the best thing I can do is dig into whatever it is I want to do and do it and not think about it.
Pete Lane:
And then by far his biggest challenge.
Mike Kelly:
I was stage four right out of the gate. For the past three years and change, I’ve been fighting that.
Pete Lane:
Pause for contemplation.
Mike Kelly:
And I was wondering why I have to go through that. With everything I’ve been through, why did I have to go through this?
Pete Lane:
And introspection.
Mike Kelly:
I had so much love for so many people. Some friends started a GoFundMe to pay for an alternate treatment ’cause the chemo hasn’t worked. People that I didn’t even realized cared, and it helped me.
Pete Lane:
But his story ends on a high note.
Mike Kelly:
I walked into a coffee shop I frequent, and there’s a little brunette with a guide dog in front of me.
Brooklyn:
He turned around, and we started talking and realized that we had a lot in common.
Mike Kelly:
We’ve been dating on and off for a long time, and we decided to get married. So I was marrying Brooke on Friday actually.
Brooklyn:
We went down to the hall of records, and we invited a bunch of friends, and we did it. Family was there, friends were there. We just had a great, small ceremony. It was wonderful. Couldn’t ask for anything better.
Pete Lane:
More lessons learned and optimism in our hearts.
Brooklyn:
You have to carry on and just laugh. Love conquers all, doesn’t it?
Pete Lane:
Now, sit back and relax and listen to my chat with Mike Kelly, a consummate bassist, a fighter persistent in his drive to fight any and all challenges and ultimately persevere.
Pete Lane:
Hi, folks. Pete Lane here. Welcome to Blind Abilities. My guest today is Mike Kelly. Mike, good afternoon. Welcome to Blind Abilities. How are you doing today?
Mike Kelly:
Hi, Pete. Doing well.
Pete Lane:
Hi. Welcome aboard, man. Great to have you. Mike, tell us a little bit about yourself. Feed into your blindness, when it occurred, what the condition is, and how it’s affected you in your early schooling and childhood.
Mike Kelly:
I’m a 58 year-old musician. As far as my blindness goes, it’s kind of a typical story in the blind community. I was born premature, and I got retinopathy of prematurity. And my vision has slowly deteriorated. In about ’09, it went all the way. I have one prosthetic, and that’s really about all there is to that story. I think we’ve all lived it.
Pete Lane:
When did it start affecting you? In early childhood? Did you notice it in school? You did tell me earlier that you went to a blind school in Illinois. Talk a little bit about that and what accommodations they made for you there.
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. When I was about eight, my parents just couldn’t handle me. They had trouble handling their own lives. They sent me up there to Jacksonville, Illinois. And I spent about five and half years there, and they tried to teach me. I was a very angry child, although they did the best they could. I was a little difficult. But I did gain my love of music there.
Mike Kelly:
I had some African American friends from the Chicago area that were up there too for the same reason. One of them played the bass. When I was about 12, I heard Tower of Power “What is Hip.” I loved that. I just couldn’t get enough of it. And I goofed around with a lot of different instruments, but by the time I was 16 I would stay with my bass. That is what I was doing.
Mike Kelly:
When I was 13, my mother finally left Thanksgiving of that year. They flew me out, and I was living in California ever since with just my grandparents. We got a house.
Pete Lane:
You’re in northern California now?
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. I was actually born here, and then my mother married another man, so I was with a deadbeat. And we moved to Illinois till I was 13.
Pete Lane:
You were a troublemaker, huh?
Mike Kelly:
In the schools that I attended in Chicago, I noticed black kids getting picked on. They were trying to placate these kids, and the kids would just run over them. So I tried a different approach. I stood up to them, and I got kicked out of two elementary schools. And then when my mother and stepfather put me in boarding school, I was angry. I thought, “Nobody cares about me. I’m just going to do what I want.”
Mike Kelly:
Those people in that school in Illinois were good people, and they did their best, but I was really difficult for a long time. But when I came out here, there were lots of reasons to treat my life differently. My grandparents provided a really great home. My mother finally got out from under the heel of a really annoying man, so things got much better.
Mike Kelly:
I attended my last year of junior high and high school here in Sacramento, and I started playing, got with some friends and started playing. That’s all I wanted to do there after a while. At first, I was into the bicycle thing. I was racing bikes. But that was always going to be temporary because of my vision.
Pete Lane:
Yeah.
Mike Kelly:
And as my vision deteriorated, it just seemed more and more ridiculous. I broke my jaw.
Pete Lane:
Oh. On your bike?
Mike Kelly:
Oh yeah. They used to have these garbage cans that were bolted down to this concrete pad, and I hit one in a park. I was doing a stunt, I was up on the back wheel, and the pedal snapped off. I just sort of shot off to my left and hit it instead of rolling by it.
Pete Lane:
So this is in the 70s, right? Let me get a time check. So you were born in the, what, early 60s?
Mike Kelly:
Sixty.
Pete Lane:
Yeah, 60.
Mike Kelly:
I was born in 60. Yeah.
Pete Lane:
So you were in on the ground floor of stunt riding.
Mike Kelly:
Yeah, the bikes were both heavy and cumbersome.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
And the stunts weren’t developed. But we were having a blast, you know? I think just about every blind person has been asked, “What do you miss about being able to see?” My answer’s always, “I miss tipping a bike into a corner. I miss watching a great pair of legs do what they do.” These are the things I miss, you know?
Mike Kelly:
I don’t miss nose rings and bad tattoos.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
People wearing clothes that are three sizes too small for them.
Pete Lane:
No kidding.
Mike Kelly:
I don’t miss that. But I do miss those things.
Pete Lane:
Mike, you’ve been migrating toward your music like two or three times in the 10 minutes we’ve been talking, so let’s jump onto music right now. You did say that you heard Tower of Power. I was going to ask what your early musical influences are. Obviously, Tower of Power. Any other bands, musicians, artists?
Mike Kelly:
Well, yeah. When I was in Chicago, of course it was R&B. That’s what my friends listened to. But when I came out here, it was really weird. I had to be kind of a closet R&B fan. Everybody was into rock and roll, you know? Especially in the late 70s. But I was sneaking around listening to the funky stuff on my own time.
Mike Kelly:
Early influences, Tower of Power and James Jamerson.
Pete Lane:
A Motown icon.
Mike Kelly:
I didn’t know who he was at the time, but a lot of that old Motown stuff just really spoke to me.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
It took me a long time to develop my ear. That was not a natural gift for me. I had such rhythm from day one. If somebody could show me what the notes were, I could play it pretty well, even three or four months after I got myself a bass. I didn’t have all the technique I needed, but if I had enough technique to get through the song, I could play it pretty rhythmically.
Pete Lane:
What kind of bass did you start with? Upright or electric?
Mike Kelly:
Oh, electric. We all started with electric in those days.
Pete Lane:
Yeah.
Mike Kelly:
When I was at the school back in Illinois, they tried to get me behind the piano. And I didn’t want to be a blind piano player. What a cliché. To this day, I just laugh at myself ’cause Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are still some of my favorite artists. I came out here and I finally got a bass.
Mike Kelly:
There was a guy, he attended the school in Illinois, and he had a bass. And he used to just tease me, and he’d leave it with me, “Don’t you wish you had one of these?” kind of thing. He’d be doing something else that weekend. I just stared at it. I didn’t know what to do with it. I pick it up and strum on it a little bit and make all kinds of racket. And that was the beginning.
Mike Kelly:
I came out here and I didn’t have anything to play on. There was a little 19 dollar acoustic guitar in the closet at my grandparents’. And I picked it up and started immediately trying to pick out bass parts. That’s how I started.
Pete Lane:
Did you take those two high strings off and just use the E, A, D, G?
Mike Kelly:
No, I left it alone. I left it alone. It was a nylon string acoustic, so it had wide strings [crosstalk 00:08:51]
Pete Lane:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Kelly:
And I had that for a couple of years. And my freshman year of high school, I was borrowing everybody’s instrument I could just for 15 minutes here or 15 minutes there. It didn’t matter if it was a guitar or a bass.
Pete Lane:
You must’ve gotten into bands as you got better in California.
Mike Kelly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Pete Lane:
You’d play rock music, you’d walk the walk and talk the talk on the west coast.
Mike Kelly:
I got hit by a car.
Pete Lane:
Oh.
Mike Kelly:
And I spent eight months recovering.
Pete Lane:
Wow.
Mike Kelly:
Shattered my left leg, broke my femur, my tibia, my fibula. I was in traction for a couple months, then I was in various casts that got smaller as I healed up. They had the [inaudible] up my side so that it wouldn’t move while it was healing. In those days, they didn’t do it the way they do it now. They end up pinning your leg, and you get out of the hospital a lot faster.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
But with all that time on my back, I would just play the bass for hours and hours and hours. And I was limping around on some crutches, went into a local music store. And my neighbor who played pokes his head out from around a stack of speakers after a few minutes while I’m trying out a guitar, and he’s like, “Hey, you can play now.”
Mike Kelly:
And as he was a working professional, that was just a big deal to me. I was like, “Oh good. Finally, I got somewhere,” you know? By this time, I’m 17, I’m playing within garage bands in my high school. I was playing with guys from Burbank High School in a band and guys from McCutcheon High School in another band. And that was a big education for me. That was me just trying to learn 30, 40 songs with each band. And then one band was a trio, and I was the lead singer. And the other band, the guys hadn’t already been playing for a while. They were a little older. That was pretty cool.
Pete Lane:
And was that rock?
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. That was mostly rock, well, classic rock now. One band played popular stuff, and the other one just tried to play the hardest stuff we could find. We’d jump on the Pat Travers Band and things like that.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
And then try to play music that was right at the edge of our ability. We used to practice four nights a week though. Eventually, I gravitated to the band of the guys who were a little older and little better. Two of us went on to work professionally for years.
Pete Lane:
Well, let’s talk about your entry into the professional ranks. What would you consider your first professional gig or band?
Mike Kelly:
The band I was just describing was the first band I was in that worked professionally. Played nightclubs. We did the auditions, we played around town. The audition circuit was usually Sunday, Mondays, and you’d play to a smaller crowd. But in those days, that’s how you got started. We really pushed ourselves hard, and it was a very competitive thing inside the band. We were pointing fingers when people were making mistakes. And it wasn’t a great way to do it, but we didn’t know any better.
Mike Kelly:
And all this time, it’s still classic rock, but we’re going more towards the radio play stuff at this point.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
‘Cause we’re trying to work. And then I just started bouncing from band to band, and I kind of became a good bass player. Eighty-six, I landed a job at a talent agency booking bands and comedians. That’s when I got well-known. I was 25, 26 years old. Then I got better known around town, and I started to develop my chops.
Mike Kelly:
After going out on the road with that first band, I had a bit of a drinking problem. That’s one of the real pitfalls of this business is the drinking and the drugs. They’re always around. And drugs never really carried much interest for me. I tried this and that, but there’s was much ado about very little.
Pete Lane:
Yeah.
Mike Kelly:
I just never was that interested. But I drank way too much in my 20s. When I was 27, I started lifting weights and pushing myself physically to get back in the kind of shape I was in in high school, ’cause I was a bit of a jock in high school. It was always part music. I was racing the bikes, and I was on the wrestling team. But I got tired of the whole locker room thing. Music was something that was keeping me more popular around school.
Pete Lane:
Where were you in your vision evolution? Was it declining steadily through here?
Mike Kelly:
I didn’t have any mobility at all. No change. Ironically, I married my high school mobility instructor.
Pete Lane:
No kidding.
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. She and I had this eye contact thing going on in high school, but she wouldn’t cross that teacher-student barrier. She was just too conservative. And the day I got hit by the car, I told her how I felt about her. I was 16 then. And she went home and ended her marriage. It took us a while to get back together ’cause of course I was in traction and all the rest of that. I was 17 when we got together.
Mike Kelly:
She was fantastic. She encouraged me. When gigs were short, she supported me. As I was pushing on trying to get my act together, she was there for me. And then about 10 years later, when I was 27, we decided to marry. I needed to straighten my act out, so like I said, I started lifting weights and studying the bass, studying music much more intensely.
Mike Kelly:
I pushed on through those early problems. I don’t know what she saw in me in those days. I swear, to this day, I still laugh.
Pete Lane:
Did you actually come to grips with your drinking problem and quit cold turkey?
Mike Kelly:
Oh yeah.
Pete Lane:
Did you jump on the program?
Mike Kelly:
I quit cold turkey. And at the time, she thought it was strange, but I kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in the liquor cabinet. And I just quit. I told her. I said, “You know what? If I can’t have it right now just because it’s not in the house, it’s not real. It’s only real if it can sit there and I can ignore it.” And I did. And it was hard. There were a lot of long, gray days. That was a big fight. I don’t want to downplay that at all. It was a heck of a fight.
Pete Lane:
Yeah.
Mike Kelly:
The only thing I’ve done in my life that was harder as far as quitting something was quitting smoking, when my asthma came up years later in my 40s and I quit smoking. And I think it took six years from the time I quit smoking until I stopped having the cravings. But that was worse than alcohol.
Mike Kelly:
And I was able to go back and have a drink. To this day, I can have a drink. I just … I never enjoy it after about two or three. I start feeling what the hangover’s going to be. It’s a food aversion. I was a drunk, but I wasn’t an alcohol. I just got lucky.
Pete Lane:
So we’re into the 80s, late 80s.
Mike Kelly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)- I’m playing, I’m studying hard. I decided I’ve got to distinguish myself in some way from the other bass players in town. And as a general rule, they’re going to hire the sighted guy.
Pete Lane:
Why do you think that, Mike?
Mike Kelly:
As a general rule, they want the guy that can-
Pete Lane:
Pick up a sheet of music.
Mike Kelly:
Well, not so much pick up a sheet of music, although there is that crowd too. What I was facing was the fact that I couldn’t make eye contact with the audience.
Pete Lane:
Maybe couldn’t pick up the visual cues from the other band members.
Mike Kelly:
That wasn’t a problem. At an early age, I just went, “Look, don’t follow the drop of the sticks. Follow the drop of the hit stock of my bass.”
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
And I became that guy in every band I was in. I managed the endings and the break.
Pete Lane:
Yeah. Took the lead, right?
Mike Kelly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)- It wasn’t all that accepted when you’re trying to be in that glam hair band sort of era to have a blind guy around them. It was like, “Ew.” I had to start my own band. Despite the fact I could play any of the material better than a lot of the guys that were doing it in some of these bands, I had to start my own band. That became very easy. Everybody wanted a gig, so, “Oh, we’ll work with Mike.” Now, all of a sudden I’m popular, you know?
Pete Lane:
Ah, right.
Mike Kelly:
That was the time when the business was really brutal to me, but I pushed through. At that point, I didn’t have anything else I wanted to do. I didn’t want to go back and retrain. I did go to college for a while thinking about doing something else. But I was playing in two or three bands, and I did something a lot of players wouldn’t do. I would play any music. I’d play in a country band one night. I’d play in a pop band the next night and what was considered metal then is now more pop another night. It was just whatever worked, you know?
Mike Kelly:
And all that time, my love of R&B was percolating in the back. By the early 90s, I’d accomplished something. Technically, I started to separate myself from some of the other players. I could clap, I could tap. I think I’d have to explain tapping to the average person. I learned to play a separate bass line with one hand and play chords or a melody with the other hand on the bass. And there was some extreme bass players, guys like Stu Hamm and Michael Manring, that were early proponents of that.
Mike Kelly:
It started with the whole Eddie Van Halen thing, running the hands up and down the neck tapping single notes. And what I discovered is that I could drop chords with one hand and play a bass line with the other. And playing a trio, where you made more money because you had fewer people to pay, and drop the chords behind solos and things like that. And that was in the early 90s.
Mike Kelly:
And then I landed this gig with Michael Gregory. Michael’s a ridiculous virtuoso guitar player.
Pete Lane:
Absolutely.
Mike Kelly:
He’d be embarrassed to hear me say that, but he’s not here and he has less palsy.
Pete Lane:
Yeah. And we’ll be playing several of his clips and your clips throughout this interview. I’m sure our listeners have heard him by now, and they agree with you.
Mike Kelly:
He saw what I was doing as a little different than the other players in town. And once I got a whiff of quality of players like that, like Michael and Roger and Gordon Stizzo in that band, all of a sudden other jobs came easily. All of us guys were good. Roger Smith from Tower of Powers on keys, that piano solo on 11/22/63 was Roger. And he’s still playing to this day.
Mike Kelly:
Musicians would come out to see us. What had what I consider a better class of people come see us, and they came to see the music, not just to dance and pick up the opposite sex.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
They really came to see the music, and it was great. And that went on all through the 90s, and I did a few albums with other people. By that time, I was getting well-established. I had a couple of shots at the brass ring. Kind of screwed them up myself. The drinking got in the way in my early 20s. There was band called Steel Breeze that was a one-hit wonder.
Pete Lane:
What was their one hit?
Mike Kelly:
You Don’t Want Me Anymore. You don’t want me anymore. It was popular about 1981, and I had turned them down, which was silly. But I just thought I was more than I was at that time, and they were older. They didn’t really feel I was a fit for them. I felt like I was going to wind up being temporary anyway, so I just passed on it.
Mike Kelly:
There was a band called Cake that has been very popular, with a crowd maybe 10 years younger than I am. I was offered an audition with them, and I didn’t even go to the audition. I passed on it. I was playing with this ridiculous fusion band, and I didn’t see any reason to go play what amounted to me to be See Spot Run music. But of course, that’s what’s popular. And they took off. Four platinum albums later, here I am sitting talking about it.
Mike Kelly:
The only thing I ever did in the late 80s and early 90s is I played with The Drifters.
Pete Lane:
No kidding.
Mike Kelly:
One of the original Drifters lived in Rancho Cordova, which is a suburb of Sacramento. I played with him quite a bit for about three years, and I think he retired. That’s about as close as I came to hit the brass ring.
Pete Lane:
Good stuff. So we’re into the 90s and you were with Michael Gregory for a number of years in the 90s, right?
Mike Kelly:
Seven years.
Pete Lane:
Seven years.
Mike Kelly:
I met him in 91, we started playing almost immediately. At the end of 98, Michael moved to Nashville. Roger joined Tower of Power, and the band just sort of melted. I had other projects I was on, and I was playing with a band called Symposium that had had a hit on the jazz charts. That went on for a few more years, and my wife became ill. And I kept teaching, and I quit playing.
Mike Kelly:
In 2002, I just gave up gigging. It’s so hard when you have real problems and you have somebody that’s got a real issue.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
Like my wife had. It’s not the lifestyle that I was living at the time, and I wasn’t really a part of it anymore. I was just working in that situation, you know? I wasn’t much of a partier then. I quit all the bands I was in, stayed home during the day, and just taught for a long time. That went on for about five years.
Mike Kelly:
In ’07, my wife passed away.
Pete Lane:
Ah.
Mike Kelly:
When she passed away, some friends just dragged me back on stage. They were like, “You can’t mope. You have to just do this.” And they were good friends. And I’ve just been bouncing from band to band ever since. I’ve done a lot of tribute bands. I’m playing with Michael again. That feels good. We’ve been playing together for a year now.
Mike Kelly:
But it’s fairs and casinos and things like that.
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
It’s not like there’s anything there that’s going to take me to another level. That almost doesn’t exist anymore.
Pete Lane:
Yeah.
Mike Kelly:
And this business has changed so much. It’s not a very lucrative business, and you have to find a niche. And the tribute bands pay well.
Pete Lane:
So you said your wife passed in ’07 and your blindness pretty much kicked in in ’09. So how’s that transition? ‘Cause you’re getting back into the music around that time. How was that different with your declined vision?
Mike Kelly:
I don’t think it affected me as much as it affected a lot of people. After going through the loss of Becky, I just burrowed, I grew thick skin. I’ve watched people lose their vision and panic, and I don’t blame them. It’s a scary process. Mine had already gotten so bad and I’d been through so much, I just didn’t care. So it wasn’t as much of a trauma for me.
Pete Lane:
Well, you’d been through hell and back.
Mike Kelly:
Pretty much. The music business had broken my heart, my wife dying broke my heart, and I just got up again and kept going. I learned a long time ago, when life hits me hard, the best thing I can do is dig into whatever it is I want to do and just do it and not think about it.
Pete Lane:
Let me ask you a question. We always ask this of our Blind Abilities guests. What advice would you have for young, blind, transition-aged teenager who is coming into the music business, thinks they’ve got a bunch of talent? What advice would you give them as they enter this new music business?
Mike Kelly:
Well, Pete, it’s not a very … It’s a joke as a business. I want you to remember it’s a popularity contest for the most part. And I say this because there are plenty of people that have accepted me over the years. They’re not very accepting of handicaps. I would get the education, I would get that degree so that you have a fallback plan. Don’t stop your music, but also know that you can wind up living on ramen.
Mike Kelly:
I got lucky. My wife had a good job. I learned to flip houses. We flipped four houses and made some money, so I’ve done okay. Not great. I’ve got a little tiny house, 864 square feet. But it’s in a nice neighborhood. But a lot of my musician friends now are hitting their 60s, finding they have no pension and finding that they have nothing but the next gig in front of them. And people are always trying to get you to play for 100 bucks, and you can’t live on that.
Mike Kelly:
I know that some of my colleagues have gotten a teaching degree and become temps. That’s a good fallback position because you can always work for a school district as a substitute teacher. And gigs come, you don’t have to quit your day job. But find the niche some way that you can make money outside of music, because some of the best musicians down through the centuries have wound up teaching or doing something else to make most of their money.
Pete Lane:
And you’re teaching music these days too, right?
Mike Kelly:
I’m giving private lessons at our little music store here in town. When you become a professional musician, there’s a lot of compromise. You don’t get to play the music you want. You have to play the things that people want to hear, and it’s almost exclusively … if you love pop music, you’re okay. But times change, and the next thing you know you’re going, “I don’t really like this stuff.” But you’re playing it anyway ’cause you need to make a living.
Pete Lane:
Yeah.
Mike Kelly:
I played Okie from Muskogee, and I played some Metallica tunes. Whatever you got to do to bring in a check.
Pete Lane:
Country tonight, air band metal tomorrow.
Mike Kelly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Hey, you never know. And jazz when you get a chance, and some R&B. When I get to play what I want, I’m happy. I tend to charge more when I don’t get to play what I want to play. It costs quite a bit to get me to play country music these days.
Pete Lane:
I’ll bet. Good for you.
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. Some of those bands are pretty good, but it’s just not my cup of tea.
Pete Lane:
Yeah. Well, Mike, talking about going through hard times, you’re going through some hard times right now, aren’t you?
Mike Kelly:
Oh yeah. I’ve been fighting cancer since 2015. September of 2015, I was diagnosed. And I had known of the symptoms for a little while, so by the time I found out that I had cancer it had metastasized, so I was stage four right out of the gate. And for the past three years and change, I’ve been fighting that. I was wondering why I have to go through that. This has been a theme just recently in my life over the last month. With everything I’ve been through, why do I have to go through this?
Mike Kelly:
And I think the jaded attitudes that I had for so long about people needed to be corrected, and that’s why I’m going through this, because I’ve had so much love from so many people. Some friends started a GoFundMe to pay for an alternative treatment ’cause the chemo hasn’t worked. Pretty much all of them have been indicated to this point from the doctors for me. No surgery. And they haven’t wanted to do radiation.
Mike Kelly:
And I’ve had great experience with some of my band mates, people who I didn’t even realize cared. And it helped me.
Mike Kelly:
Last summer, during the whole season, by the time we’d finish a gig, I couldn’t move my gear. I was exhausted. I’d be sitting on a drum throne rolling cords. In the past, I told you how things were. It was very dog eat dog. And these guys know, and it’s not been like that. They’re grabbing my cabinet, it’s a hundred pound speaker cabinet, dragging it off and throwing it in the truck for me, you know? That’s been going on now for a few years.
Mike Kelly:
And I’m going to try to do it again this year. I suspect this will be my last season.
Pete Lane:
So your friends came back and showed up for you and turned it back around.
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. A couple friends from old bands and just old friends and some new friends. I don’t know if I’ve gotten better at picking my friends or what, but people have started to be a lot different towards me.
Pete Lane:
You know, Mike, it might have been that deep down inside they saw who was really Mike Kelly all along, and maybe your recollection of how you treated them isn’t really accurate. Maybe you were good to them, and they saw it.
Mike Kelly:
Some of them, I think you’re dead right. I got over myself a long time ago. I think every musician goes through a period where they think they’re all that and a bag of chips. I got over that early in my 20s. Yeah, although sometimes I think back to what a jerk I was at times. That was an awful long time ago.
Pete Lane:
So we’re talking about lung cancer?
Mike Kelly:
No. This started in the colon.
Pete Lane:
In the colon and-
Mike Kelly:
And metastasized to my liver.
Pete Lane:
And metastasized to your liver.
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. And last PET scan I got, they couldn’t find any cancer in my colon. But the liver is just inundated. I’m in danger of that shutting down. That’s my biggest hurdle right now. I’m not too freaked out about it. It is what it is. We live as long as we live, you know?
Mike Kelly:
And I sleep a lot more. When I’ve got the energy, I get up and do, try to maintain my house. I own a house. Although I have to admit I’m paying somebody now to do the outdoor work.
Pete Lane:
Is there any hope in sight as far as liver transplant, anything along those lines?
Mike Kelly:
Yeah. I don’t think so. I’m trying alternate treatments now. I’m already going back to Kaiser. I’ve got an appointment on Thursday. I’ll probably do a lot of water with a lot of lemon in it and … what’s that stuff called? Tumeric, iodine. There’s a powder, I’m taking a supplement, and I can’t remember the name of it right now. I’m doing the chemo brain thing. That I’m taking. And these things are all supposed to shrink the tumors, and we’ll see if they do.
Pete Lane:
We are pulling for you, my friend.
Pete Lane:
Let’s talk about something a little bit more uplifting. Let’s talk about a lady named Brooklyn. Tell us about Brooklyn.
Mike Kelly:
Oh, Miss Brooke. Yeah. A couple months after my wife passed away, I walked into a coffee shop I frequent, and there’s a little brunette with a guide dog in front of me. And I’m not thinking anything of it, just going to mind my own business. I’m still getting over Becky. And my dog says hi to her dog. Next thing you know, she and I are talking. We started to talk on the phone. And over the next few weeks, we started going out. Slow at first. It was still too soon for me. But she had also been through losing her fiance.
Pete Lane:
Let’s meet Brooklyn.
Brooklyn:
I walked into a coffee shop, like he said. Our dogs introduced each other. I went up to stand in line, and his dog turned around and was staring at mine, and they both kind of said hi. And then he turned around, and we started talking and realized that we had a lot in common. We both had had a loss. Both of our mates had passed away, and ironically I think his wife passed away that day three months prior, and then mine passed away two years on the day before.
Mike Kelly:
We understood each other that way. And she’s a lot younger than I am. My wife was older than I am. And she was 13, almost 14 years older than me. But Brooke’s much younger.
Brooklyn:
We just kind of started talking. One thing led to another. The funny thing is he wasn’t sure if he wanted to pursue me or ask me out ’cause I didn’t order a beer right away, so he was like, “She might be too young for me.”
Brooklyn:
My girlfriend that we were hanging out with, she had gotten accepted to Leeds. And two weeks after she left, that was it. Mike and I were inseparable.
Mike Kelly:
We’ve been dating on and off for a long time, and we decided to get married. It was crazy. I told her, it’s very sweet, it’s a tough, tough thing she’s going to see. If I can’t beat this, you’re stuck with me. She stuck by my side through all of it. I’d say we got together in 2008, and in 2015 I found out I had cancer. And I said, “Go.” And she just, “No. It’s okay. You might beat this. And if you do or you don’t, I’m with you.”
Brooklyn:
Knowing that I had gone through this before and he’d gone through it himself with his wife that he’d been together with for a long time, over 30 years. When he got diagnosed, he looked at me and he said, “Just walk.” He said, “If I were you, I would just walk.” He said, “You’re too young to deal with this.” And he said, “You’ve already done it once.” He said, “Just walk.” And I said, “No. I’m walking with you, together, in this. I’m not walking away. There’s no way. And if you make me walk away, I’ll still find out what’s going on.” You can’t make love just go away because of diagnosis.
Mike Kelly:
I had vowed I’d never marry, and then I just went, “No. I’m going to do it this time.” So I’m marrying Brooke on Friday actually.
Pete Lane:
Yeah. Today is Tuesday, and your wedding is on Friday, and the party’s on Sunday.
Mike Kelly:
Exactly.
Pete Lane:
She is a special lady. I know her from a connection with Ira. I’ve met her a couple of times and spoken with her quite a few times, and she is a very special lady.
Mike Kelly:
She’s working over at Guide Dogs for the Blind. She comes home on the weekends. We do what we can. Sometimes I go up to the bay, but usually she comes home. And we’re doing what we can, you know? She comes out to the occasional gig, but mostly we keep that separate from our lives a little bit, you know?
Pete Lane:
Right.
Mike Kelly:
That’s my job. That’s not her job.
Brooklyn:
He proposed to me in October. We didn’t want to do anything big because with him being sick. We’ve been together 11 years, so we just wanted to make it simple and sweet and intimate. And then we got the news that things were a little harder with his diagnosis, so we just wanted to make it sweet. So we went down to the hall of records, and we invited a bunch of friends, and we did it. Family was there, friends were there. We just had a great small ceremony. It was wonderful. I couldn’t ask for anything better.
Speaker 4:
Michael, do you take Brooklyn to be your wife?
Mike Kelly:
Yes.
Speaker 4:
Do you promise to love, comfort, and honor through sickness and health, prosperity and adversity, and forsaking all others be faithful to her?
Mike Kelly:
I do.
Speaker 4:
And Brooklyn, do you take Michael to be your husband?
Brooklyn:
Yes.
Speaker 4:
Do you also promise to love, comfort, and honor through sickness and health, prosperity and adversity, and forsaking all others be faithful to him?
Brooklyn:
Yes.
Brooklyn:
And then on Sunday, the only thing I asked of him was I told him I wanted a reception. And so we did. And we put that together, and that was awesome. We just had a bunch of friends get together and family, and it kind of turned into a musician’s concert because of course all the musicians that Mike works with showed up. And they just kind of jammed a little bit, and we had a great time.
Pete Lane:
Here’s good friend, Tiffany Menage.
Tiffany:
Brooke got up and she said a few thank yous and so forth, and then Mike got up and he started playing. And it just was real music. You could tell that he was in a zone and was just having an amazing time. And Michael Gregory, he got up and was playing. And then Jimmy got up. And the three of them have never played together before, never practiced before, never done anything together before. And it was like they’d been doing this for years, and it was just beautiful.
Tiffany:
He said, “I felt like I was in haunted heaven. I’m having so much fun playing with these guys.” And he was grinning from ear to ear all night long. Oh, everybody had a fabulous time. There were people from all over that came, from the Bronx. One gal came all the way from San Diego up. One of her teachers came. His mom was there, his aunt, a lot of musician friends. It was standing room only at one point. A good time by all.
Brooklyn:
It was standing room only. There were people going, “We love you, but we’re going to go so that way people can sit.” It was wonderful.
Brooklyn:
I pray and hope. I pray and hope. It’ll be great. It’ll be wonderful. You just cherish the time you have, and you laugh a lot. We laugh a lot. You have to laugh about everything. You have to just have a good sense of humor. You can’t be sad. You have your up and down days and you have your moments, but you have to carry on and just laugh.
Brooklyn:
Love conquers all, doesn’t it? I feel like you’re given opportunities in life, and sometimes opportunities have twists and turns. And I really love him. When you love somebody, you take the winding road and you take the mountains and you try to make the best out of everything. That’s the goal, you know? The joy of it is to just kind of … it’s just, when you love somebody, how do you just walk? You don’t. You carry on with them and you love them. Yeah. He’s not going to get rid of me.
Pete Lane:
Well, Mike, we really appreciate you sharing your story, your musical career, and most recently your diagnosis, but then the great news that you and Brooklyn are going to be connecting. And nothing but good can come out of that. Once again, my friend, thanks a million for sharing your story. Your musicianship is very impressive. And as I mentioned earlier, we’ve been playing clips from the Michael Gregory Band throughout this interview. Our listeners can clearly tell that you’re a talented guy.
Pete Lane:
You’ve been through quite an ordeal throughout your life, and most recently a challenge that you’ve got to double down on and fight as hard as you’ve ever fought in your life to beat. But we are pulling for you, and we have every faith in the world, Mike, that you will beat it. So we wish you all the best, and we’re praying for you too.
Mike Kelly:
Well, thank you, Pete.
Pete Lane:
All right?
Mike Kelly:
My pleasure.
Pete Lane:
It’s our pleasure. Thanks again, Mike Kelly. You have a good day, and hang in there, buddy.
Mike Kelly:
All right.
Pete Lane:
This concludes my interview with Mike Kelly. Once again, we wish Mike all the luck in the world. All music inserts were provided courtesy of the Michael Gregory Band. You can find the Michael Gregory Band music on most popular music outlets. And for more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out at www.blindabilities.com. We’re on Facebook, and we’re on Twitter. And don’t forget to download our apps free in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. That’s two words, Blind Abilities.
Pete Lane:
Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.
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