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The losses of Mikey Dee and Robert McCloskey, plus poetry, film and star sightings
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Mikey Dee, 1962–2003 The last time I saw Mikey Dee before he suffered his stroke, we had an argument about a local band he liked more than I did, but I think he offered to buy me a beer anyway. I felt pretty sure I’d run into him at some other gig a few nights later, when he’d have a few more choice bits of local rock gossip and the names of a couple more bands I needed to check out. He was one of the few people I knew who managed to hit more clubs than I did, to find out first when somebody got signed or dumped by a record label, and to listen to stacks of demo tapes without getting paid for it. Mikey Dee loved the local scene, and the local scene loved him right back. After a long struggle, Mikey Dee Linick, just 40 years old, passed away early Sunday morning. He’d been hospitalized for more than three years after suffering a brainstem stroke following surgery for a congenital heart defect on February 7, 2000. An e-mail statement issued by his friends Adam Lewis and Eleanor Ramsey and posted on Mikey’s Web site said that he had been weakened this winter from several bouts of pneumonia and that that had left him resistant to antibiotics. Although his illness was long and frustrating and left him unable to speak or walk, Mikey fought hard and made considerable progress, and many on the local scene were holding out hope for a recovery. Mikey’s passion for local music found a number of outlets. He wrote frequent pieces for the Noise, did publicity with the Planetary Group, played drums in the band Butterscott, appeared in a few Boston Rock Opera productions, produced shows at the Kirkland CafŽ, and did the Wednesday-night Tufts-based WMFO 91.5 FM radio show On the Town with Mikey Dee, which has continued under his name. The extent of his popularity became clear during his illness as friends and musicians came together on his behalf. A series of tribute/benefit shows over the past three years featured virtually every headliner in town — Letters to Cleo played their final gig during the first string of benefits, and his all-time favorite band the Barnies reunited. Shows staged in 2000 and 2001 under the title "For the Benefit of Mr. Dee" raised more than $75,000 for the Mikey Dee Musicians’ Benefit Trust. Mikey was given a Hall of Fame honor from the Boston Music Awards; the ska band the Allstonians recorded an instrumental number named after him. His musical pals kept him stocked with videotapes of the shows he missed, and he made it into town for a number of shows — even getting invited on stage when the Sheila Divine played at the Hatch Shell two summers ago. Although confined to a movable hospital bed, he turned up most recently at last month’s Boston Rock Opera anniversary show at the Middle East. A few hours after his death, the Web site mikeydee.com was already heavy with tributes from writers, DJs, musicians, and fellow fans; Corin Ashley of the Pills wrote, "Nobody has ever loved Boston music as much as Mikey." Expect details of tribute shows to be finalized in the coming weeks. Brett Milano There will be a nondenominational memorial service to celebrate the life of Mikey Dee at the Main Chapel at Marsh Chapel at Boston University, 735 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA on Monday, July 14th at 7PM. Reception to follow at The Paradise, 967 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA. In lieu of flowers, tax deductible donations can be made to The Mikey Dee Musicians Benefit Trust, 580 Harrison Avenue, 4th floor, Boston, MA 02118 For further information, contact Adam Lewis at (617) 275-7665 or adam@planetarygroup.com. Chronicle of an Unsigned Band Twenty-six-year-old filmmaker Brendan Clarke recently ditched his life writing screenplays for horror movies and softcore porn flicks in LA and returned to Somerville to pursue indie filmmaking. He started spending time with high-school pal Joe Welsh, guitarist for the Boston-based power-popsters Fooled by April. And as he hung out with the band, Clarke realized that "there was something about their story that wouldn’t go away." He decided to document the trials and triumphs that eventually led up to their gig at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Festival last March. Inspired by what he’d learned from his Holy Cross film professor, Phoenix contributor Steve Vineberg, Clarke picked up his camera and caught the vulnerability and insecurity of a band trying to make it big. The result, Nobody Knows: Chronicle of an Unsigned Band, premieres on July 23 as part of the Allston Cinema’s "Turn It Up! Music Meets Movies" series, which runs July 11 through 27 with films about Tom Waits, Wesley Willis, Shane McGowan, the Real Kids plus a weekend-long hip-hop film festival. Although it does incorporate the requisite performance footage, the 82-minute Nobody Knows is "more about the people in the band than the band itself," says Clarke. And the people include Gordon Wright, Jordan Siegel, Pete Galea, and Welsh. They’ve brought their bright and happy pop song hooks to the Middle East, the Lizard Lounge, T.T. the Bear’s, and New York’s Luna Lounge. The songs on their self-released homonymous debut EP (it was produced by ex-Whiskeytowner Mike Daly) have been compared with the work of Nick Lowe, the Gin Blossoms, and the Lemonheads. "They’re really sensitive," says Clarke. "That’s what struck me first." He goes on to explain that there are "no hookers, no coke, no whiskey bottles thrown against walls. They’re not that kind of band." Instead, he says, before each rehearsal, you’ll see them do "this thing called ‘check in’ where they check in with each other’s feelings" and talk about "simple stuff," like the pressures of a girlfriend’s birthday, homesickness, and suffering from a cold. Despite their anti-rock-star attitude, Fooled by April admit that they care about making it big. Clarke points out that "most bands say, ‘Aw, we don’t care what people think, we don’t care if people like us or not.’ These guys say, ‘We care about that stuff, we want to be on MTV, we want to be on magazines.’ " And he sees courage in that, "because when you fail, you don’t have that ‘We don’t care’ to fall back on. There’s a real heroism in that. It’s inspiring." Nobody Knows: Chronicle of an Unsigned Band screens July 23 at 8 p.m. at the Allston Cinema, 214 Harvard Avenue in Allston. Tickets are $7. For more information about the "Turn it Up!" series, call (617) 912-8626. For more information about Nobody Knows, visit www.brokengatesfilm.com. Team Poetry Slam The Boston area’s vibrant poetry slam scene will heat up next Saturday (July 19) when the Cambridge Center for Adult Education hosts a competition for a quartet of local four-member poetry-slam teams: Amazon Slam, Bridgewater Slam, the Cantab Lounge, and the Lizard Lounge. The winners will go on to compete in the National Poetry Slam championship in Chicago next month. Slam poetry, like a rap competition, is about eliciting a response from the audience, and for this event, judges will be drawn from the audience. "There are no hidden or pre-selected judges," says Jeff Robinson in a statement from the CCAE. Robinson, who’s the coach and "Slam Master" of the Lizard Lounge team, points out that "people who have never been to a slam can make great judges. . . . Everybody is involved — the rest of the audience is applauding, and they can let the judges know what they think of the scores" — before and after each performance. The format will have each of the 16 poets performing one poem; the team with the highest cumulative performance score will be the winner. Robinson, an actor and playwright whose one-man show Bird is about jazz great Charlie Parker, hosts the poetry slams every Sunday night at the Lizard and, with his own band, has long mixed spoken word and jazz. The CCAE competition will take place from 8 to 10 p.m. at 56 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $10; call (617) 547-6789 extension 1. More Ducklings Children’s book author Robert McCloskey died on June 30 at the age of 88, just a few days after the Boston Landmarks Orchestra gave the world premiere of Daniel Pinkham’s musical setting of McCloskey’s 1941 children’s classic, Make Way for Ducklings. Now the Boston Public Library is remembering McCloskey with an exhibit of his sketchbooks, with their pencil studies for the book. The sketchbooks will be on display at the BPL, 700 Boylston Street in Copley Square, through July 31. Call (617) 536-5400. Meanwhile, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra continues its free concerts of Pinkham’s musical narration throughout the summer. The next performances take place July 14 at 10 and 11:30 a.m. at Riverside Press Park on Memorial Drive in Cambridge and July 16 at the same times at the Fuller Museum of Art in Brockton. Call (617) 520-2200. Berkshires Law & Order Aside from being an esteemed home for summer theater, the Williamstown Theatre Festival is also a key location for celebrity sightings, both on stage and in the audience. Jesse L. Martin, of Law & Order fame, just finished his run as Macheath in Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Martin received visits from L&O’s Sam Waterston (Assistant DA Jack McCoy) at the July 2 performance and from Jerry Orbach (Detective Lennie Briscoe) at the July 5 show. (Orbach himself played Macheath in the ThŽ‰tre de Lys production.) The Williamstown production, which also starred Betty Buckley, Melissa Errico, and Karen Ziemba, closed this past Sunday. Now up: a revival of John Guare’s Landscape of the Body, with Lili Taylor, Sherie Rene Scott, and Michael Gaston, that will run through July 20. Call (413) 597-3400.
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