Mikey Dee
by Corin Ashley

The Noise
September 2003

I'm not sure whether it's a measure of my optimism or my naiveté, but I never thought I'd draw the heart- heavying short straw of writing an obituary for my friend, Mikey Dee. I suppose his stroke after an elective heart procedure three and a half years ago might have put the hint somewhere in my noggin, but he was such a vibrant, thoroughly alive person that it seemed inconceivable that his locked-in state would be anything more than a setback. I don't know if I expected him to recover in my logical mind, but I wishfully assumed that I'd eventually see him back in his rightful spotxat the front of an audience at a local rock show, air drumming and singing along to every song.

I don't purport to have been Mikey's best friend, and I sure wish I had visited him more while he was hospitalized, but he was a constant. Mikey lived in an apartment below me on Park Drive in the early '90s when I was just beginning to dip my toe in the fertile waters of the Boston rock scene. Mikey expertly guided me through my earliest attempts and was the very first person to ever play one of my songs on the radio. Kids today might not believe or understand this, but I grew up at the tail end of a time when radio was really magical and I never, ever dreamed I'd actually hear one of my songs played. I mean, the whole reason that I moved to Boston was that I knew an older kid who had escaped from our small, cow-tipping Pennsylvania town and had gone to Boston. He told me that a college radio station had played one of his songs once and it totally blew my doors in. I'm not sure I even believed him. It sounded like he'd been to Oz.

Mikey validated. He wrote about bands that he liked in the pages of this magazine and booked them on his long-running series of shows at the Kirkland Café. Mikey also played bands on his WMFO radio show and his zeal for discovering exciting new bands was unmatched and unflagging.

In The Tempest, no less an authority than Shakespeare said:

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve

\Perhaps more importantly, Elvis said, "Have you heard the news? There's good rocking tonight." Mikey was a news spreader, a buzz starter, a fanner of flames. He was always the first to latch on to any promising Boston band and spread the word to his myriad of friends and acquaintances. On street corners, at clubs, on the T, he'd pass you a flyer and say "Have you heard...?" and he was usually right on the money.

A death in our local scene brings up uncomfortable existential pondering on the value of what we do with our own short lives. As Dodge vans with gimpy doors are loaded up every weekend, and Boston bands set their tractor beams on yellow lines leading to low-paying gigs in shabby clubs, the one thing that they universally want is for someone to care. We've all reconciled ourselves to the fact that indie bands that are struggling to sell that first pressing of their CD don't even exist in the eyes of music industry, but take some comfort in the network of people who care in different cities. There's Marty in Buffalo who will let you crash at his place and even cook you breakfast. There's Dawn in NYC who will quote your own lyrics back to you and JJ in Toronto who will hype your show for you and let all four of you crash at her apartment. Whenever a band is paying the Allston/ Cambridge toll at 5am, and they still have to load into their space and take a shower before work, they should take heart for a second because Mikey really cared. He really believed that Boston rock matters and that the rest of the world would love each and every one of us as much as he did. Nobody has ever cared about Boston rock as much as Mikey didxand it was a pure love. He wasn't in the scene to promote his own music or to feel important, he just found his calling in life and ran with it.

Personally, I'm getting too old for this shit. It feels like this town has had the wind knocked out of it, it's in tatters (sha-doobie) and there comes a time when you hear yourself telling a friend "Well, we're on third so you could come after the PTA meeting," and you just feel silly. But that's perfectly okay because there's some kid out there right now who has just recently gotten his pimple problem under control. He's starting to get it together on that Mexican Tele he got for his birthday a few years ago and he feels like he might have something to say. He's never heard of The Barnies, The Gigolo Aunts, Letters To Cleo, The Shods, or The Pills and, frankly, he doesn't really care what people have done before him. He's going to play faster and louder than I have, he's going to jump more times at the end of songs, and he's going to knock even more ceiling tiles out at T.T.'s and Mikey is gonna love it. He's going to be up there just smiling down and watching it all go on.

Heaven is a cotton-candy cloud where all your dreams come true and you get all your loaned-out records back. You can eat BBQ as often as you like up there, they never close, and every body has a pronounced proboscis. There's always a Woody Allen film just starting on TV, as luck would have it, and it turns out that everybody getsto be a Beatle for a while. And we all shine on.