The Music Gods are Real: Vol. 3 - The Winter Tour

By Jonathan Fink

In this book, The Music Gods are Real: Volume 3 - The Winter Tour, I travel on a short trip of just a few months further down the road on my spiritual path. The Music Gods guide me to a Post Malone concert with my kids at Sprint Center in downtown Kansas City and a Mihali performance opening for Chadwick

• Language: English
• Publisher: Polo Grounds Publishing
• Release date: Aug 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9780578937267

Jonathan Fink

Jonathan A. Fink is the author of The Baseball Gods are Real series, The Music Gods are Real series, The Football Gods are Real and The Republic Baseball League.

Book preview

THE INTRODUCTION

I LOVE MUSIC. I ALWAYS HAVE. IT STARTED VERY EARLY for me, dancing in our living room as a toddler with my mom and dad, Beth and Jeff Fink, and my sister, Jamie, listening to the rock and roll and country music my parents loved. It stayed with me from elementary school through my college years and beyond. This included a part-time job at Record World while I was in high school living on Long Island. In college at Tulane University in New Orleans, I worked as a radio disc jockey and as a music writer for The Hullabaloo, the school newspaper. I also had a part time job working for EMI Records as a field representative. After graduation, I worked for two years at a music management company in New York City.

The first book in my Music Gods series, The Road to the Show, was autobiographical in nature and traced my love of music from childhood. In that book, I brought readers along for the ride on my own road to the show featuring many of my favorite bands and recording artists, including Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Phish, the Black Crowes and Twiddle. I used the road as a metaphor for life and the show as a metaphor for the goals we hope to attain, such as a student earning his or her college degree, a minor league baseball player making it to the major leagues, or a rock and roll band playing at the music venue of their dreams, like the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, or Madison Square Garden in New York City.

In my second Music Gods book, The Religion of Music, which also covered an extended period of time in my life, I travelled all across America on my spiritual path, including a vision quest to the Crow Tribe Reservation in Montana, a trip to the Tumble Down music festival in Burlington, Vermont, and visits to Branson and St. Louis, Missouri to attend concerts and interview singers and musicians. Again, I featured some of my other favorite bands and recording artists, including The Beatles, The Oak Ridge Boys, Pink Floyd and Chadwick Stokes. In this edition, I also explored the religiosity of music and the important role music has played in world religions past and present. I conclude that we are all musicians in a global orchestra.

Unlike the first two books in my music series, this publication focuses on a very short period of time, the first few months of the year 2020. This book, The Winter Tour, takes me back to my college roots as a music journalist, letting the Music Gods plan my itinerary. After you finish reading the book, I hope that you conclude, as I did, that — The Music Gods are Real.

CHAPTER ONE

The Road to Blueberry Hill

Music can change the world.

—- Beethoven

TWIDDLE IS AN OUTSTANDING JAMBAND THAT INCORPOrates rock, reggae, bluegrass and funk into their music. The band is known for using instrumental improvisation in their live performances. After hearing Twiddle for the first time a few years ago, I knew they were special and going places, and the group became one of my favorite bands. Since that time, I have followed Twiddle’s career and their music has always been essential in my rotation. In The Music Gods are Real: Vol. 1 - The Road to the Show, I devoted a few chapters to them. There, I described Twiddle’s 2019 Winter Tour and their visit to my hometown of Kansas City where I met the band and its management team. The book also included my interview with Mihali, the band’s lead singer.

Mihali had been talking about recording a solo album for almost ten years. Whenever time permitted between his Twiddle obligations and fatherhood, Mihali connected with his friend, Eric Krasno, also a musician and a producer, to record some new songs. Slowly, but steadily, Mihali released new singles on Spotify, including Stubborn Smile, Storm Tossed, Over Land and Sea, and Strongest of Our Kind. By the end of 2019, Mihali had accumulated enough outstanding material to complete his long-awaited debut solo album, Breathe and Let Go.

Back in the early days, when Mihali was performing solo shows in local bars in Vermont in between Twiddle tours, he appeared on stage with nothing but a chair and his acoustic guitar. These shows were intimate and minimalistic. However, late in 2019, when Mihali embarked on his solo tour in the Northeast, it was clear to his fans that he was no longer just a solo act. His live show incorporated multiple musical instruments which the extremely talented Mihali played all by himself. His live show had blossomed into a one-man-band.

Luckily for me, I got to see Mihali at the very beginning of my winter tour. Mihali’s one-man-band was scheduled to perform at the legendary Blueberry Hill, a landmark restaurant and music club in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, near the college campus of Washington University. Many music legends have performed at the music clubs’ internationally-known Duck Room, including Chuck Berry, known as the father of rock and roll. Berry is said to have performed at the Duck Room more than 200 times during his illustrious career.

By way of background, I had more than one reason to make the almost four-hour drive on Interstate I-70 from my home in Leawood, Kansas to Blueberry Hill on December 14, 2019. In addition to seeing Mihali perform solo, I was also heading there to interview Chadwick Stokes for my The Religion of Music book. We had previously arranged to speak before his performance that night and Chad’s tour manager Asa Patterson was nice enough to have a ticket waiting for me at the will call booth.

I had recently gravitated to Chadwick Stokes, the front man for Boston-area bands Dispatch and State Radio, because of his human rights activities with the non-profit organization he founded with his wife Sybil Gallagher called Calling All Crows. That night at Blueberry Hill, Chad would be backed by his third group —The Pintos. I was really looking forward to seeing this bluegrass quartet perform.

As a Mihali fan who had not yet been to one of his solo performances, I was pleasantly surprised to see a new suite of complicated technical musical wizardry on stage. His guitar rig included a board with several pedals and mixer buttons, an electronic bongo kit, and even a bass guitar to add to his acoustic guitar. Perhaps all that time spent with Eric Krasno in the recording studio rubbed off on Mihali because he started many of the songs during his hour-long performance just like a music producer would, laying down tracks and recording the loops in real time.

Throughout his set, Mihali carefully crafted songs, one intricate layer after another. First, he laid down some guitar to capture the melody of the song. Then he walked over to a different microphone to beat-box a drum track. Then he pulled a set of drumsticks out of an Air Jordan sneaker and performed more drums tracks before putting the drumsticks back into the sneaker. It seemed that by the time Mihali reached the chorus of each song, it sounded like he had a full band supporting him on stage.

Mihali’s highly technical stage setup was not the only thing on this tour that would have looked different to his loyal fans. When I first met Mihali in February of 2019 at the recordBar in Kansas City on Twiddle’s Winter Tour, he hid under a flat brim hat and had very long hair that draped over his shoulders and down his back. He also sported a long, scruffy, unkept beard. On this