Posts Tagged ‘#themerchantsofdeath’

The Merchants

Posted: May 19, 2023 in MUSIC, My Tunes
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I have referenced members of my originals band many times in this blog. I was fortunate to meet Tom Robinson in my senior year of high school. It was a rough time in my life. Just finding people even similar to you was difficult let alone finding friends. TR and I became friends immediately. He let me borrow a guitar so I could learn how to play and we could play guitar together. That became the core of a song-writing community that would span decades. A number of local musicians, songwriters and interested observors orbited that core. Separate core members were discovered and their songs were also shared.

I moved up to Dayton, Ohio and became part of the Merchants of Death. (….story to that name and it is really cool but no time for that now) With percussionist/vocalist Tom Gorman and bass guitar genius Mike Wheeler, TR and I blended the Cincinnati sound with the Dayton sound. This was my first real band in that we only played out a few times for friends and family, but we listened to each other. We wrote great songs together. Members filled in for core members as needed. I recorded almost everything with two Radio Shack condensor microphones (that I still have) sitting somewhere on a coffee table on my 4-Track Tascam/Teac reel-to-reel tape deck. Yes, this was 50 years ago.

We got back together on-line during the Covid 19 lock down. The latency was difficult but the connection was priceless, and we started jamming regularly. Eventually we were brave enough to meet in person and had a blast dusting off the old tunes. From that we decided to begin where we left off and started to record our first album project entitled Reinstated. Thinking the ‘Death’ reference in our name was a bit too close to home, we refer to this project as The Merchants.

We have a collection of original songs and a few tasty cover tunes that we perform in our own style. I think you will like a number of these. The project includes 18 songs (18!!) and that might give you the impression that we are done. As logical as that might seem for a bunch of old guys, we are already recording our second album project!

TR was goofing around with some old pictures and I decided to make a short video to introduce the Reinstated project release. Unfortunately I do not have a whole lot of flashy media from those days but there are some pictures that are worth a thousand words. To visit Youtube click here.

I have an easy web page that links to most media streaming services so you can get an idea what we were playing last millenia. To hear more of The Merchants – Reinstated, click here.

Thank you all for the years of listening and sharing. MIDIMike.

Music for “Peanut Butter Hill”

Posted: February 19, 2021 in family, My Tunes
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The path to Peanut Butter Hill in Lindner Park covered in snow 2021

This is a song I co-wrote with a friend of mine from Xenia, Ohio. I sent him the basic tracks via the Internet and he uploaded to his home studio. Scott Hadley from “The Little Hippies” then sang the vocals and helped with arrangement to make this song click. Then he added keyboard parts and harmony tracks and sent individual tracks back to me……

To help me with this song I asked a friend and The Merchants of Death band-mate Mike Wheeler to play bass guitar. He is in Dayton and got the tracks back to me faster than I could have driven there and back! He has a way of finding grooves within the melody of a song that ties it all together.

I wrote “Peanut Butter Hill” on 1-21-2021 as I was walking through the woods near our home. I take walks in the same park almost daily now that I am retired. We spent a lot of time here when our kids were growing up. Walking past a steep hill in the park next to a creek I thought I should write a song about this park. (Well, what about?) As I walked I started thinking that this song is not about me but about the kids that tried climbing the bare-mud side of the hill. A fence stood at the top where the real path was and at the bottom of the hill was a creek that remained mostly dry. Soon the melody hit me and I knew this was a song about peanut butter hill.

Decades ago I challenged my kids and all the neighborhood friends to climb up the hill – but they could not use their hands! When they failed and said it could not be done, I put my hands in my pockets and climbed to the top. So did my daughter TK. The hill is not what it was back then, but I think we were the only ones to meet the challenge, but everyone had fun trying!

“Peanut Butter Hill”