... & OTHER ODDBALL STORIES |
The person that did get the job was a young, red-haired, 17 year old kid named Mike Uzelac, who hitch-hiked out in the middle of a snowstorm to try out. Mike lied to us about his age. He told us that he was 19. He also fibbed to us about not doing drugs. Quite the opposite was true. He once told me that the first time he did amphetamines that he did twenty-seven at once. When I asked him why he would do so many, he told me, "Well, I had never done them before and the guy who was with me had, I asked him how many I should do, and he told me twenty-seven!" He then told me he was up for about three days.
We were just about to start touring the U.S. for the first time seriously, and here we were, scrambling to get a replacement for Mike. Mike had done a complete 180, and he wanted out bad. We'd be coming home from a gig and Mike would be in the back seat playing guitar and singing some Christian song.
We ended up getting some guy named Pete from London, Ontario. He was a nice guy but a bit of a wimp. The rest of the band were these "in-your-face" type of individuals, and here was Pete, Mr. Nice Guy. We had no choice however, so off we went to the U.S., where we ended up playing with the heaviest band in the world at that time, Motorhead. We were playing the roughest clubs I had ever been in, and attracting the roughest crowds. Motorhead was so loud, that one night after watching their show I puked because the sheer volume had made me feel ill.
The only Canadian date on the whole tour was in Toronto at the Masonic Temple. When we went to return to the U.S. for our next show at The Metro in Chicago, Pete couldn't get back in. Seems he had a pot record he failed to tell us about. In desperation, Bill Seip (our manager) calls Mike, (now a born again Christian living with some wierd religious organization) and begs him to come back until we get someone else. Mike relunctantly agrees after Bill bribes him with cash, and he insists that it be no more than two weeks.
If Mike had had even a small inkling of what awaited him in Chicago at the Metro, he would have never came. The Metro is just a couple of blocks down from Rigley Field, in a not-so-nice section of Chicago. It's an old theatre in a state of disrepair. Upstairs where we had a dressing room there was a little 50 seat theatre from the 30's which hadn't been used in 20 years and in a state of decay. All the rooms were deserted and destroyed. A crowd had been gathering on the street some 3 floors below. They were waiting to get in, but Motorhead was notorious for being hours late doing their soundchecks. This meant the doors had to stay closed for that much longer. The mob outside was the heaviest audience I had seen in my life up till that point. They were rude, crude, tatooed, and ready to roll. One guy with a green Mohawk was carrying a real chain about 10 feet long. Almost everyone was openly drinking and smoking dope. They were starting to chant, "Motorhead! Motorhead!" and smash bottles on the street when the cops showed up and started yelling through bullhorns for the crowd to get up on the sidewalk and off the road. We were watching out the window 3 stories up and I really thought I was going to witness my first riot. Mike arrived in the middle of all this, never having ever played a concert date with us or anyone else for that matter. He must have thought he'd parachuted into hell.
The stage at The Metro is about six feet off the floor. Motorhead had taken almost all of the stage. There was so little room for us that Fritz, our drummer, had to set up off stage where no one could even see him. They miked his drums and run the cables to the board. If things weren't bad enough, we only had about one foot of room to stand on. By the time we went on the crowd was growing increasingly restless and were pressing up against the front of the stage, pounding on the stage with their fists and screaming, "MOTORHEAD! MOTORHEAD! F#!%K OFF! MOTORHEAD!"
We all had to run a gauntlet of arms to get to our positions onstage and when I looked back at Mike he was backed up against his amp, his face a deathly white, and his eyes as big as saucers. We started the first song at about double speed, and I remember yelling over to Brent, "JUST PLAY AS FAST AS YOU CAN SO WE CAN GET THE F#!%K OUT OF HERE!" I kept looking back at the drum kit and forgetting that Fritz wasn't even onstage with us. We banged out the set in record time and got our asses off stage without getting lynched. Mike got his wish and wasn't with us too much longer after that. That's when Daryl Gray joined the band, and he and I have been together ever since.
Mike ended up living with some church group. After that things get hazy. I had heard he had married but the marrige had broken up. While we were in British Columbia someone told me that he got busted out there for drugs. Lots of rumours. Our office and manager tried to locate him to give him royalties. All to no avail. Fritz ended up running into him around the 1998 time period at a concert at Pine Knob, outside of Detroit, Michigan. Mike said he'd come back and talk to him but disappeared into the crowd never to be seen again...
