Stanley’s other band enjoys making music on the fly

By John Benson

Michael Stanley has been in a number of bands with varying success — the biggest of which was the Michael Stanley Band — for more than four decades. But he has always been a garage musician at heart. Just give him a stage and he’ll play. It was this mind-set that six years ago helped form cover band Midlife Chryslers.

“It started out with a couple of the guys in [my backing band] The Resonators wanting to play some more,” said Stanley, calling from his Cleveland-area home. “We weren’t playing enough, so we decided to put something together and just go play bars and clubs. We had two rules: The first was we never rehearsed, and the second is we could not do any of my tunes. From there it’s sort of morphed into other guys in the band would stop by to sit in and they never left. And so it started out as a three-piece, and I think it’s a seven-piece now.”

He added, “And basically it’s to get back in touch with why we started doing this in the first place, to just play and have fun. Throw your stuff in the back of the car and play at a bar for four sets a night and try to make people dance.”

The band — Stanley (vocals, guitar), Marc Lee Shannon (guitar, vocals), Gary Jones (keyboards), Rodney Psyka (percussion, vocals), Eric “Eroc” Sosinski (bass, vocals), Paul Christensen (sax, vocals) and Tommy Dobeck (drums) — is rooted in the blues, with its repertoire including everything from John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed to Buffalo Springfield and the Rolling Stones. However, there’s always room for a surprise, which explains why Stanley said the band even kicked out a bluesy version of Prince’s “Purple Rain” for fun.

“The cool thing about it is if somebody wants to do a song, they just come to the show and they have to know the words to it so they can sing it,” Stanley said. “And it’s got to be something relatively simple, so you don’t have to do a lot of rehearsal and something that everybody is familiar with. You just tell everybody what key it’s in and you count it off and you do it. And if it works, you keep doing it, and if not, you go on to something else.”

He added, “It’s not the type of band where you’re like, ‘Roundabout’ by Yes. That’s not going to happen. We’re not interested in that.”

In a sense, with all of the band members taking the surname of Chrysler, the Midlife Chryslers sound like Stanley and company’s own version of the all-star Traveling Wilburys.

“Similar,” Stanley laughed, “except we’re not doing original tunes and I have a feeling they may have rehearsed.”

The act averages 30 shows a year, and is hoping to expand around Northeast Ohio and beyond. This includes a Saturday Tangled Up In Blues show at the Boulevard Stage/Dash Inn on the west side of Youngstown.

“This is the first time we’re getting out of the Cleveland and Akron area,” Stanley said. “So hopefully, we can open up something down in Youngstown. And again, it’s just a whole thing of trying to play like a band that we’d want to have play at a party that we were at.”