An Interview With Kim Michael

 

There are still people around in the small town of Glasford Illinois who know of Kim Michael because of his life in the entertainment industry having worked with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Orchestra, to local and regional venues such as featured entertainer at the Garden Room of the Ramada Inn (Peoria, IL) , to a regional TV special entitled a night with “Kim Michael and Gemini,” to working as an actor at the famous “Little Theater on the Square” in Sullivan Illinois.

He has also appeared in professional plays, operas, and as a featured entertainer in nightclubs throughout Los Angeles, and yet few know him as a serious writer with several books on Amazon, as well as numerous business articles featured in “The American Businessman” and other professional magazines.

Here are just a few questions that, over the years, people have asked, and they come with answers that you might find interesting.

First off, it sounds like you have done a lot in your career.  

I have been lucky in that I have had the opportunity to do a lot of different things in my life, go a lot of places, meet a lot of different people. Even so, life rarely works out for any of us like we plan, it didn’t in my case, but that’s not really a bad thing. 

What do you mean, life didn’t work out like you planned?  

When I was little I remember seeing a guy on TV (I don’t remember who) singing “They Call the Wind Maria”.  I remember thinking to myself, “If I could only do that!” And so I tried. I grew up on a farm and so I’d go out to the barn , or hide in the garage or basement, anywhere I could make a lot of noise and not be noticed–but never in front of people, not even my parents. I’m sure they heard me. How could they not? But I don’t think it ever occurred to either of them that I had any talent, probably because of the retched, awful noises coming out of me. At the same time, I began listening to music, trying to mimmic what I heard.  Around the same time my mom insisted on me taking piano lessons, which I hated, really hated. Eventually she let me quit but I secretly kept trying to sing and in time I started to actually get better. 

One day things changed dramatically. It happened at Lancaster West Grade School, my school, located just a couple of miles outside of a town called Glasford, Illinois. The school had only four classrooms in it, two grades in each room. I think I was in the eighth grade at the time.

So one day all the teachers were called into a meeting somewhere in the building, and we (my classmates and I) were left in the classroom by ourselves. I was working on something-I don’t remember what, and I forgot where I was and started singing to myself. Not loud, but loud enough. All of a sudden I noticed the room had gone silent and looked up. They were all staring at me. Embarrassed, I stopped.  

Then one of the girls came up to me and smiled, “Don’t stop… sing something else.”  The room grew quiet. I gathered my courage and began to sing with no accompaniment other than keeping time with my feet. The theme from some TV show I think, though I really don’t remember.

When I finished I heard my first applause…ever. There is something magic about applause. Once you experience it, you want it again and again. They asked me to sing more and I did, probably for an hour. I sang every song I knew and some I didn’t. I even sang “They Called the Wind Maria”. I probably wasn’t all that good, but I think it just surprised everyone that I could do it at all. Any way, by the time the teacher came back I had long finished my performance, so he did not know what had happened, but word traveled around school like the flu in October.  

That night at home the phone began to ring. I don’t know how many calls my mom got, but she caught me by surprise; told me that kids went home telling their parents about what had happened at school, how I sang and entertained them. That might have been the first time that it actually dawned on my parents there might be something to all the noise I was making. 

Not long after that my small grade school class melted into a much larger Freshman class at Timber Township High (which later became Illini Bluffs High School). By then my fifteen minutes of fame in grade school had long since faded until one day, out of curiosity, I stopped after chorus class to talk to the teacher. Cautiously I asked if she ever gave voice lessons. She asked me to come down between classes and sing for her, which I did. I don’t think she expected what she heard. She asked me if I would do a solo in front of the music class. Reluctantly I did it. I sang, “They Call the Wind Maria.” Like before, it surprised a lot of people. I never really sang out in chorus, so no one knew. 

Mike Naylor (an upper class-man and friend) cornered me one day in the hall and asked me if I had ever thought about trying out for a play. The school did a spring musical every year and the tryouts for South Pacific were coming up. I had never done theater or acting before, but I thought to myself, how hard can it be? So with almost no experience and even less of an idea of what I was doing, I auditioned for the lead and to my surprise I got it.  

I remember thinking, “Wow… I got it” which quickly changed to, “Oh crap… I got it.”  To make matters worse the leading lady was the prettiest little blond I had ever seen, Debbie Oedewaltd. She was absolutely radiant on stage which made me even more self conscious. I stumbled through six weeks of weeks of rehearsals, several nights of dress rehearsals, and I think two or three performances (I don’t remember how many we did).  

That was a long time ago, but I still remember it. I’ve done some professional theater since, with some really great actors, but I can honestly say that the people involved with that high school production were every bit as good as many of the professionals I’ve worked with… and some even better.  Cindy Gass, Denny Johanson, Debbie Oedewaltd, (and a lot more I don’t remember off the top of my head) were great. The real surprise I think; a guy by the name of Mark Slover who played the part of Luther Billis, literally stoled the show, and surprisingly, I don’t remember him ever doing another play.

Later the following year Mike Naylor called me again, this time to be the lead singer for his rock and roll band, “The Runaways” (see picture–Doug Spenny, Mike Naylor, Randy Voss, Gordon Zeine, Rick Brag and that’s me on the end with my hair slicked back).

Garage bands were big in America at the time. Everyone was either starting a band, or wanted to be in one, and there were some good ones that came out of the Peoria /Pekin area (Dan Fogelberg, REO Speed Wagon).  There was one local called the Shanks (the Young Brothers) that I thought were great. I think the only thing that kept them from becoming really big was they needed that one big hit song to make it. If they’d gotten it I think they could have gone all the way. 

Anyway, I think the Runaways played together for a year or two but when Mike graduated, the band fell apart. It was not long after that, that I formed my own band and kept playing mostly school dances until I went off to college.   

Being part of a band, and then having my own band, forced me to open up in front of people, but even then, though I had been the President of the Sophomore Class; had the lead in the school play; and performed regularly with high school rock and roll bands– I don’t think people really realized how painfully shy and self conscious I was, and to some extent, still am. Despite that however I kept at it. The summer of my Senior year I won the grand prize at the Heart of Illinois Fair Talent Competition, sponsored by a local radio station in Peoria IL-WIRL. That fall I began my first semester at  Bradley University majoring in music. I also joined a 1950s rock and roll band (a Shanana type band) which preformed nights and on weekends, when I wasn’t singing opera roles.

One day in the fall of my freshman year at Bradley, I saw a sign posted on the Music School bulletin board. Open auditions for a professional summer stock theater in southern Illinois. Twenty positions were being held open and people were literally coming from all over the country to audition. The “Little Theater on the Square” is a small theater literally out in the middle of nowhere, but as I found out later, incredibly well known and respected in the theater industry.  I auditioned and got the job. Again it was, “Wow…I got it” and then “Oh Crap…I got it!” 

 

 

 

 

The schedule was grueling. One show a night, Tuesday through Friday, with two shows on Saturday, and two shows on Sunday. During the day you rehearsed the next play coming in so you literally worked all day and then late into the night. I think I did a total of about 96 performances in plays like Fiddler on the Roof with Tom Poston (from the Newhart Show), The Most Happy Fella with Bruce Yarnell (who was a periodic guest on the TV show Bonanza), and Hello Dolly with Virginia Mayo, who was an old time sex symbol movie personality in the fifties. It was a hard twelve weeks and even though I enjoyed it I think I realized that it was not something I wanted to do forever, and I never went back after that first season, though they asked me to several times. I learned a lot in those days, what it takes to go out night after night and perform, and what kind of sacrifices you have to make to have that kind of life.  

So you ended up working with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Orchestra?

 Actually I did, but not as a performer. I moved from Peoria to Los Angeles the summer of 1976. Through I friend I heard there was an opening for a background singer with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Orchestra and I auditioned for it, but didn’t get the job; but they liked me and asked if I would like to work for Doc’s show on the road, moving amplifiers and such. I think the word is “roady”. I needed a job and it put me within shouting distance of what I really wanted to do, so I did it.

I liked Doc, he was genuinely a nice man, very introverted and shy, not at all what you’d expect with all the outlandish outfits he was known for wearing. He always acted like he had fun with it, but to tell you the truth, my impression was that he hated it, the idea that he was famous because of a gimmick and not his amazing talent. Still, he became wealthy and successful because of it. The one thing I do remember about Doc was how hard he worked at his craft. He literally practiced five hours a day (every day) in addition to whatever performances or shows he did. 

Anyway, Doc soon learned that I had a good ear for sound and music which I had acquired from my days working with high school rock and roll bands, and what I didn’t know about production I picked up fairly quickly. Within three months I managed the entire road production, everything except lighting and personnel. If you saw Doc in Las Vegas or across the country in those days, everything you saw and heard was me behind the scenes. We even played Bradley University once, my old Alma Mater. Doc introduced me from the stage with my parents in the audience, and when I walked out everyone in Roberston Memorial Field House got to their feet–a standing ovation…for me. Few memories stay with you for a lifetime, but that one will.   

So when I wasn’t traveling I shared an office with Doc in the Tonight Show “Bungalow” located directly behind the NBC Studios. I could hear Ed McMahon in his office next to mine sometimes in the afternoon, before he went to make up. They started filming the Tonight Show at 5pm.

Just outside my office, someone moved an old wooden chair, and I would regularly see either Jay Leno or David Letterman sitting there, just killing time, joking with the office ladies. I think they liked to hang out with some of the writers who were housed in bungalow as well. 

At the end of the day, when in town, I’d walk over to the studio where they taped the Tonight Show and stand in the “Green Room” where celebrities waited before going on camera. When the Green Room was too crowded, occasionally I would just stand back stage. I talked with Johnny a couple of times before he went on, but never really got to know him, though I don’t think many people really knew him. On camera Johnny always came off as this shy boy from Nebraska, always funny and laughing, but there was another side to him. Off camera he was a complicated and intelligent man who found it difficult to relate to people,  particularly people he loved. 

After a number of failed marriages, problems with alcohol, estranged from his kids; his story was a sad one. He died years later, alone on his two hundred foot yacht, “Serengeti”, looking at the empty shoreline, having everything and nothing at the same time.   

I think that it was my time with Severinsen and the Tonight Show that I began to see the whole idea of “celebrity”, in a different light. Until then I saw it like most people: the glitz, the glamor, but up close and personal, you see the flaws in the gem stones.

There is a “trade off” I think to making it in show business.  Life is less grounded in reality and public adoration becomes almost an addiction. It changes you, no matter how grounded you think you are, and at some point, without realizing it–you change. I’ve seen people on the way up and then on the way down, desperately trying to hold on to where ever and what ever they were, like winners at a gambling table who can’t walk away when they’re losing. They just keep trying to get back on top, but they can’t. They become junkies for the spotlight.  

And it’s not just you that changes, the world around you changes as well. I think of John Lennon, shot five times in the back by a fan who just minutes before asked for his autograph. People love you and hate you, often at the same time. 

I remember watching an awards show on TV a few months ago and cringed as I saw Taylor Swift walking up a staircase on stage when suddenly some guy comes out of no where and actually gets within a few feet of her. Security got him but not before he’d gotten close enough that he could have hurt her if that was his intention. Thankfully he didn’t, but it reminded me of just how dangerous and surreal life is on that level, and how strangely affected certain people can become.  

Sometimes, the trade off for being hugely successful, is that you can never truly be happy. I know it is not always the case, but I’ve seen it more times than I care to remember. 

As much as I enjoyed working for Doc, I found my heart just wasn’t in all the traveling. I had lived and worked in and around Los Angeles for about seven years and needed a change.

I met Joann (my future wife) just three days before I left Illinois for Los Angeles. She was this pretty little Italian girl with eyes so black you could get lost in them. I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight, but I knew the first time we went out that one day I would marry her. I met her on a Friday night and I left for Los Angeles the following Monday.  

We wrote and called each other for almost a year and a half. She came out to visit twice and on the second trip I asked her to marry me. By that time I had already been working with Doc for several years. I can’t even imagine what the printers of the wedding invitations thought. They went out to Doc Severinsen and most of the Tonight Show Orchestra.

My best man was an undercover agent for the TBI, which is the Illinois State version of the FBI. Looking like  Serpico with long hair and a beard, he  showed up to be fitted for a tux in his work clothes which were an old sweatshirt and jeans. The fitting lady’s eyes bugged out as she watched Joe take off two guns strapped on either side of his chest under his sweatshirt, a knife he kept up his left pant leg, a pair of handcuffs on his belt and another gun strapped across his back. Even when he showed her his badge she was so badly shaken that she could hardly take his measurements. I still laugh when I think about it.  

At any rate I decided to leave the show just after Joann and I were married, and my last concert was just three weeks after our wedding in January, so we had to hurry back to LA driving in snow storms most of the way. Making it even worse for my new bride, a day after we got there, Joann had to drive me to Los Angeles International Airport to catch a flight to New Orleans to do the last show, and then back to our apartment, alone, in LA traffic. I can’t even imagine how terrifying that was for her but she did it.   

I continued working in nightclubs in the evenings but I had to get a day job, because we couldn’t really live on what I made performing (not in LA). It was around that time that I started writing music, and not too long after that signed with a prominent publisher in town, “ Over the Rainbow Music”.

My music went out to to ten top recording artists and to my new publishers surprise, I was the only new song writer who had holds put on every one of his songs, meaning the artists they went to were interested in recording them. At the same time, a few days later, Anson William’s from “Happy Days” showed up with a friend at my daughter’s second birthday party and while we talked it came out that I was a songwriter and he asked to hear some of my music. We went to my office and I played him several songs; the last cut, a song I came in fourth with in the American Song Festival. He loved it. Said he wanted his wife Lori to hear it. She was a singer who had just signed with Kenny Roger’s manager and was putting her first album together. When she heard it she instantly wanted to record it. Everything thing was going right. I just knew I was on the verge of making it, at least as a songwriter. 

Then came the week from hell. The tabloids were the first to report it. The top agent at Over the Rainbow Music (my agent), disappeared. Some Hollywood scandal I never completely knew about and my music… everything… fell through. Several days later Lori Williams called me to say she was no longer with Kenny Roger’s manager, which meant everything was off the table, including the album she was supposed to record, and my songs…a dead deal. I still had my music because of my insistence on having recision clauses in my contracts, but once the pathways disappeared it meant starting over or walking away from it. 

I was tired and burned out. I had to walk away or go crazy. I talked it over with Joann and some close friends, and we all decided to leave LA; both families; we decided to move somewhere in the south, out of the kind of bad weather we grew up with in Illinois. Joann suggested Nashville, thinking, if at some point I wanted to go back into entertainment that it would be a better place to start over. We quit our day jobs, I shut down my music business, loaded everything in a moving truck and left California forever. We didn’t even have an address to tell the moving company where to deliver our stuff, we just headed east to Nashville. When I think back on it now I can’t believe we did it. Talk about gutsy. 

So did you go back into music when you got to Nashville?  

Actually no, at least not at first. I did a few odd jobs to help keep us afloat, but after a while I wrote a couple of gospel songs with a friend and the songs seemed to be getting a lot of interest. One was even recorded by a local gospel group in Nashville and within a year I was asked to join a nationally known gospel group called The Downings. I had never really worked in  gospel music before and it was a totally new experience for me, but the sad part was, I was back on the road again. What was supposed to be only a few days each week turned into months at a time and it was hard travel, driving mostly. And now with a wife and little girl at home, the travel became almost unbearable. 

Years later Joann finally told me that Denisha (our daughter) cried for me almost every night. It broke my heart and still does even now when I think about it. I hated the travel, I hated performing and I knew I had to get out. I left the Downings the following year. I took a job selling cars at a local Toyota dealer. That too was an experience, but at least I came home every night to my wife and little girl, and I slept in my own bed. I had missed so much and was determined not to miss any more. From that day on I got up every morning and took my daughter to school and every day off I had I spend with her.  When I left the road, I left it for good, and never looked back. 

So you never went back into entertainment then?  

No. I would do small performances here and there, and I worked as a vocal coach for several groups in recording sessions, but for the most part my performing days were over. 

So let’s shift a bit and talk about your writing. How did that all begin?  

Even though I loved music, the idea of writing always appealed to me. I had written a few short stories in high school, but it wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I tried to write something serious. My first attempt was a short treatment for a movie. I showed it to a friend who got excited about it, and he in turn, introduced me to a friend of his, a television executive who was the producer of the then TV show, “Remington Steel”. He’d also produced several other TV shows, but at the moment I don’t remember which ones. He liked what I had written, but he also was quick to point out that the story was not ”fleshed out” and he thought it might be best as an animation for TV. I appreciated that he even took the time to meet with me, but a cartoon was not what I had in mind, and at the time I did not have enough experience or skill to actually write the screenplay, so the idea just sort of died…but the idea of writing didn’t.  

I think from that moment on a whole new world began opening for me. The one thing I didn’t like about music was it was always the same, even performing my own songs. I missed the thrill of creating something new and exciting, and with writing, I found that outlet. I could let my imagination run wild and I could do it all with a pen and paper, (actually I use a word processor) but the idea is the same. 

If you think about it a movie often takes millions of dollars to make, employed a virtual army of technicians just to put it on the big screen– and a writer can do it with a simple pen and paper. How many times have you heard people walking away from a movie saying that they liked the book better. That to me, is amazing. 

Now… I will tell you this, learning to write and write well is probably one of the hardest things you can do. Certainly one of the hardest things I have ever done. Everybody thinks they have a book in them, but few ever sit down and actually try to write it, and even fewer actually finish, and of those who do, only a handful will write something that is worth reading.

By the time I got around to writing my first book, I was already a published author of numerous business articles and short industry pieces, but a book—a novel—that was a different animal entirely. Even though “The Chrysalis” is the third book I published, it’s actually the first book I tried to write. I started experimenting with it over twenty years ago. I tell people the book took twelve years to write, but in reality I started years before that, starting and stopping, giving up only to go back to it again. I had the main story in my mind, a child born with serious physical impairments, unable to speak, autistic, Down syndrome; and no one knows he is actually an angel (not even his parents).

As he grows older he nears the time when a transformation must occur in which his human side rises to the surface of his body forming a chrysalis shell (like a butterfly) while the angel inside completes the change. The Chrysalis finally opens freeing the newly evolved angel inside by way of a mysterious trigger known as the last Pillar of Creation, and much of the final half of the book revolves around the protagonist (the child’s protector) trying to discover what the last Pillar of Creation really is.  

The story in my head was so complex I wasn’t really sure I could write it, so I decided to pick what I thought would be the most difficult section and try to write that. It actually appears in the middle of the book and is called the “Miracle in the Public Garden”.

The story of how I wrote it and what happened after is in the blog post which you can read if you go to my blog (above) or just click on this link: “What if Angels Are Real?”

 

So you mentioned you wrote several other books while working on The Chrysalis?  

I did, the first actually began as a children’s story. I originally wrote it for my grand kids. Some years ago we went to a Christmas display in what was then known as Twitty City ( a compound that country music star Conway Twitty built for himself and his family). At Christmas they decorated the grounds with thousands of lights and invited the public to come in and walk through to see all the Christmas scenes on display. Near the end you would come to this huge statue of Santa Clause knelling at the manger of the new born Christ child.

When I saw it I was mesmerized by it, what a great idea for a story (I thought) and I wondered why no one else had thought to write it. After many years of waiting for someone else, I decided to try writing it myself.

The story idea came very quickly, an unknown fourth king from a country far to the north ( a Nordic country), traveling south,  following the Christmas Star. As he travels the breadth of ancient Europa to reach Bethlehem, he gives away all that he has  to those in need. When he finally finds the child, to his dismay, he finds he has nothing left to give the new born king. He has given everything away only to find that through his kindness, he has given the greatest gift of all.

I wrote the story in about two weeks and when I put it out on the Internet, I was amazed at the reaction (the first weekend it had over five hundred people read it). Surprisingly, I received tons of emails, mostly from parents who loved it. I decided finally to publish it in a short book. It is out on Amazon now—It’s entitled; A Christmas Story:The Fourth King.  

To my surprise many people bought the book (which cost about as much as a Christmas Card) and gave it to friends in place of sending a Christmas Card, signing the inside cover with their personal holiday message. I never thought about it at the time, but later realized what a great way to celebrate friends and Christmas–a card that is actually an original gift. 

 

So there was yet another book also.…

Yea, another something that caught my attention many years ago. We were in Gatlinburg, TN and wandered into an art store. It’s funny that all these stories come out of the past like they were just waiting to be written.

We went to this little art shop on the main drag and there on one wall I saw a picture of an old man, holding a goat in his arms, and behind him an old wagon with a sign on top, “God is Not Dead.” The picture by Larry Martin was of Ches McCartney, America’s Goat Man. I was intrigued with it and bought it on the spot, and it still hangs on my living room wall today.  

Now, even years later, it surprises me how many people knew of The Goat Man. Many newspaper clippings touted him as being the last Johnny Appleseed—an urban legend traveling around the country in an old ramshackle wagon pulled by a team of goats. He went from town to town, criss-crossing American and people remembered him coming to their towns almost like the way they would remember a circus passing through.

I began tracking his journeys through old newspaper clippings and books, and at the same time another story came into play, a story that came in part from my wife’s uncle who we lovingly refer to as Uncle Smitty. Jim (Smitty) Smith served in both the German and Japanese theaters of World War Two and by all accounts is a true American hero. 

I began with two stories that could not have been more different, but to make them work I knew there had to be a third  story, something that tied them all together. Being a writer myself, I thought “what if” the central figure is a new writer, someone, who in his innocence, fails miserably, and the story becomes his journey to redemption. That was the beginning of E. Alex Fleming, a down and out young writer, accused of plagiarism on his first book, looking for the story that would be his salvation-a story that would become “Searching for the Goat Man”.

Interestingly, Alex’s story was the hardest to write; falling in love with his young agent/publisher Kimberly Siecrest, who also looses everything when Alex’s career crashes and burns. And though I tend to write predictable endings that rely more on the originality (and fun) of how you get there, the ending of Searching for the Goat Man is different, it is something totally unexpected. Some have even called it “haunting”. 

I really don’t know if there is something unique about my writing. I do try to stay away from formulas. I know when some artists are successful, they tend to use that same formula as they move forward, and inevitably at some point, all they end up doing is creating the same thing over and over again. I don’t set out to do things differently each time, I just try to avoid falling into a routine. That makes writing a new idea or a new challenge interesting for me. 

If there is something unique about my writing I think it may be the stories. I also like using real events and real people in my stories, even if the story is fiction. It connects with people in a way that something totally made up can’t, and without that connection even the best story is lost.  

I know some writers don’t know where the story is going when they start. Faulkner for example. He called it writing in the stream of consciousness. There is a benefit to that in that you don’t skip over important character building points in an effort to get where you’re going. I have never been able to do that. I begin knowing where the story is leading even before I know what the story is.  Starting “The Chrysalis” in the middle, as I mentioned earlier, gave me a north star to aim for when I actually began writing the beginning chapters.   

Where do your characters come from?  

That’s a really interesting question. I think one of the pitfalls of a new writer is all their characters can start to look and sound the same. In the beginning I struggled with that. Somewhere along the way I read an article about Leonardo da Vinci. I guess painters have the same problem and he solved it by patterning his characters using people in his hometown so they wouldn’t look alike. I found it interesting in his painting of the Last Supper the man he patterned Judas after was a local tax collector that no one liked. William Faulkner did the same thing in his novels, using people who lived in his town, often upsetting some of his neighbors.  

So what’s next on the agenda?  

With this new WordPress site I am excited to experiment with ideas. I wrote a lot of articles previously on another blogging site, but it really didn’t have the reach or the functionality that this WordPress has. I plan to do posts on all of my books, a kind of “behind the scenes” look at how I created them. I just finished one called “What if Angels are Real?” which is the behind the scenes look at how I created the “The Chrysalis”.  It is already on my blog. 

The Fourth King got such great response when I released it that I would really like to do an audio version of it. Maybe even make it into a play. I have already written some of music for it and will continue to develop the idea.  

I also still write business and healthcare articles and will be releasing a co-written ebook called “The Seven Deadly Sins of Managed Care Contracting”.  

I also have another Industry book about half finished entitled “The Quintessential Salesman” that I have no release date set for but there is a little bit about it on my books page. And I have another children’s book that I would like to release later this year as well.

Moving forward I also plan to do some public speaking. I have an invitation to do an event later this year and hope to do more as we go along.  

There will be a lot happening in the months to come and my hope is that this new website will be a great platform for me to connect with people. People who join my mailing list will be the first to see the release of each new project, and from time to time, I hope to offer some specials along the way. 

For people wanting to join my “Mailing List” it can be found at: JOIN MY MAILING LIST