Cleveland rock star Michael Stanley dies at 72

by 24USATVMarch 6, 2021, 8 p.m. 107
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The Cleveland musician, who ruled the local airwaves in the late 1970s and early 1980s and shattered attendance records at the Richfield Coliseum and Blossom Music Center, died Friday after a seven-month battle with lung cancer, his family announced. He was 72.

Stanley had worked for the past 30 years as a disc jockey at WNCX-FM. On Wednesday, the Cleveland radio station released a statement from Stanley’s family, disclosing that he had “serious health issues” and asking fans to “keep Michael in your thoughts and prayers.” He hadn’t been on the air since Feb. 19.

On Saturday, WNCX announced that Stanley had died peacefully “with his family by his side.” Grieving fans turned to social media to console each other and post photographs and musical tributes.

“Thanks for being the soundtrack of my life, Michael,” Linda Hochartz posted.

“Rest in peace, Michael,” Lee R. Bendel wrote. “Your music will love on forever.”

With the Michael Stanley Band, Stanley developed a deliriously devoted following in Northeast Ohio, recording albums for such labels as Epic, Arista and EMI America, but the group enjoyed only limited success elsewhere in the country.

Born Michael Stanley Gee on March 25, 1948, in Cleveland, Stanley grew up in suburban Rocky River on the West Side. He fell in love with rock ’n’ roll the first time he heard Elvis Presley, and formed a garage band, the Scepters, in 1965 as a student at Rocky River High School.

Stanley earned a sports scholarship to Hiram College, where he played baseball, worked as a disc jockey on the student radio station, majored in comparative religion and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970.

In his sophomore year, he joined the Tree Stumps, a four-piece band, and got his first big break during a gig at Otto’s Grotto in Cleveland.

“A producer, an actual record producer just like in the movies, stumbled into this club one night,” Stanley recalled years later. “He was from New York and happened to be in Cleveland visiting a friend.”

ABC Records’ Bill Szymczyk, who had produced B.B. King and would go on to handle the James Gang, Joe Walsh, the Eagles and the J. Geils Band, signed the Tree Stumps to a contract. The group changed its name to Silk and recorded the album “Smooth as Raw Silk,” which dropped off the charts after one week.

With Szymczyk in the control room, Stanley recorded two solo albums, “Michael Stanley” (1972) and “Friends and Legends” (1973) while working full time as a manager of the Disc Records retail chain. His boss fired him in 1974 for promoting his solo albums at a rival store.

The timing was awful because Stanley’s wife, Libby, had recently given birth to twin daughters, Sarah and Anna.

But Stanley, a guitarist and songwriter, still dreamed of a career in music. As he once told the Beacon Journal: “I said to my wife, ‘You know, I kind of don’t want to end up 50 years old, complaining about what would have happened if I’d really given it a shot.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want you doing that either because it’s going to be hard on me.’ ”

He formed the Michael Stanley Band in 1974 with guitarist Jonah Koslen, bassist Daniel Pecchio and drummer Tommy Dobeck. The group’s first album, “You Break it … You Bought it!” was released in 1975.

“None of this has been planned out,” Stanley said in 2017. “Even the band was kind of started by accident and we thought, ‘Well, if this goes on for a couple of years, it’ll be a fun thing to look back on.’ I certainly never thought it would be going on this far down the line.”

Managed by Belkin Productions, the Michael Stanley Band was highly prolific, releasing an album a year over the next decade.

The group opened for the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band at the Kent State Ballroom, Blue Oyster Cult at the Akron Civic Theatre and Loggins & Messina at Blossom Music Center before headlining concerts of its own, including E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron. The band’s album “Stage Pass” was recorded live over three sold-out nights at the Cleveland Agora in October 1976.

“Cleveland is now challenging America as the new capital of rock and roll and, in Cleveland, the Michael Stanley Band is the biggest name there is,” rock journalist Al Aronowitz wrote.

Known to fans as MSB, the group became the first Cleveland band to headline the Coliseum, performing May 27, 1978, with special guests REO Speedwagon and Cheap Trick. Tickets cost $7.

Its lineup evolved over the years. The addition of keyboardist Bob Pelander, guitarist Gary Markasky, bassist Michael Gismondi and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kevin Raleigh propelled MSB to its greatest success.

Kids at high schools across Northeast Ohio wore MSB T-shirts, bought MSB records and attended MSB shows. Fans knew every word to “Strike Up the Band,” “Let’s Get the Show on the Road,” “Midwest Midnight,” “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Mind” and “Rosewood Bitters.”

The Michael Stanley Band set attendance records at the Coliseum with 20,230 fans on July 20, 1979, and a two-night stand on New Year’s that attracted 74,404 fans Dec. 31, 1981, and Jan. 1, 1982. The band received the key to Cleveland after breaking Led Zeppelin’s mark at the Coliseum.

The 1980 album “Heartland,” featuring a guest appearance by Bruce Springsteen’s saxophonist Clarence Clemons, exploded on the Cleveland airwaves. It included such popular tunes as “Lover,” “All I Ever Wanted” and “Working Again,” and generated MSB’s first national hit, “He Can’t Love You.”

The song, with Raleigh on lead vocals, cracked the Billboard Top 40 at No. 33 in 1981, and was played in heavy rotation when MTV debuted in August 1981.

Stanley popularized the phrase “North Coast,” the title of the band’s 1981 album.

As he explained that year: “Somebody one day said, ‘How come it’s always either East Coast or West Coast? Why do the East Coast and West Coast get all the hype?’ There’s a Southern coast and a Northern coast to this country, too.”

The album’s popular tunes included “In the Heartland,” “Somewhere in the Night” and “Falling in Love Again.”

The band headlined 17 Blossom shows from 1980 to 1986, including a record-breaking, four-night stand that attracted 74,404 fans in August 1982 and clogged roads for miles around.

“The thing was, they sold out so quickly, it was amazing,” Stanley recalled. “Then it was like, ‘Well, you want to do another night?’ and we went, ‘Sure, we’re not doing anything, let’s make some more money and have some more fun!’ We were as pumped as anyone else. We figured somebody would break it sooner or later but nobody has.”

The band released “MSB” (1982), an album featuring the songs “In Between the Lines” and “When I’m Holding You Tight,” and followed that up with “You Can’t Fight Fashion” (1983), whose best-known track, “My Town,” became a Cleveland anthem that reached No. 39 on the Billboard chart. To top it off, MSB performed on the TV shows “American Bandstand” and “Solid Gold” in 1983.

But for whatever reason, MSB never achieved national stardom. St. Louis, Houston and a few other U.S. markets embraced the band, but it had difficulty widening its audience beyond Northeast Ohio.

“It was a joke amongst the band,” Stanley told the Beacon Journal in 2018. “It keeps you humble because you do four sold-out nights at Blossom and you’re pretty much a serious rock star, and then the next night, you’re in a club in Indiana playing for 200 people and you go, ‘OK, there’s this side of it also.’ ”

After releasing two more records, the group broke up in 1987. MSB bid farewell with 12 sold-out concerts at the Front Row in Highland Heights.

From 1987 to 1990, Stanley served as co-host with Jan Jones on WJW-TV’s “PM Magazine,” where he won an Emmy Award for his work. In 1990, he joined WNCX-FM as the drive-time disc jockey from 3 to 7 p.m.

Twice divorced, Stanley continued to perform with acts such as the Ghost Poets, the Resonators, the Midlife Chryslers and Michael Stanley & Friends. He played twice-a-year gigs at Tangier in Akron (recording the 1998 live album “Live in Tangiers”) and later the Hard Rock Rocksino at Northfield Park. Some of the concerts featured the opening act Donnie Iris & the Cruisers, the band that opened for MSB during the record-setting shows at Blossom.

So revered was the musician in Cleveland that a local comedy troupe produced a 2004 musical titled “Michael Stanley Superstar (The Unauthorized Biography of the Cuyahoga Messiah).”

“When you’re doing something you love to do, it isn’t exactly work,” Stanley said, although he acknowledged that performing concerts took a physical toll as he grew older. “At the same time, you get that hour or two when you’re onstage and you’re in touch with the audience and they are in touch with you,” he said. “It’s hard to put a price on that.”

He felt so lucky to have a career in music, to be able to entertain fans and do what he wanted.

“I realized the other day, I’ve never done a resume in my entire life and I’ve almost always had a job where I can wear tennis shoes if I wanted to.”

Stanley spent eight days in the hospital after suffering a heart attack in 1991 at age 43. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2017, the same year that his third wife, Denise, died of lung cancer. A December 2017 concert at the Rocksino had to be rescheduled when Stanley had a second heart attack and underwent quadruple bypass surgery.

In Stanley’s last years, the passage of time seemed to be very much on his mind. His last two solo albums were titled “In a Very Short Time (2016) and “Stolen Time” (2017). By then, he had five grandchildren.

Acknowledging his health issues, Stanley told the Beacon Journal in 2017: “It gets your attention and reinforces the point that it’s all pretty finite at this point. When you’re 18, you don’t see the end anywhere down the line, and when you’re this age, you realize there’s only a set amount of songs, albums, gigs that are left, so let’s make the most of them while we can.”

Stanley will be laid to rest in a private ceremony at Lake View Ceremony. In lieu of flowers, contributions in his memory can be made to the Cleveland Food Bank (www.greaterclevelandfoodbank.org) and/or the Cleveland Animal Protective League (www.clevelandapl.org).

Mark J. Price can be reached at [email protected].

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