Welcome to a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. Hello and welcome to the show. We’re checking out the 80s this week by chatting to the founding member of a band I’m sure you’ll know.
They were bred on the streets of Detroit’s East Side where Motown was already making a big noise and their signature sound gave the Romantics a ranking as one of the best 80s tuneful up-tempo rock bands around. They were inspired by the British Invasion, American rock roots and that late 60s Detroit scene and they favoured short hair, shorter songs and leather suits. I’m excited to introduce you to the Romantics founder and guitarist Mike Skill who fills us in not only about the band’s rise to fame and fortune but about the whole scene when punk music reigned supreme.
Sandy, thank you. I’ve been very well. Yeah, you’ve been working a fair bit.
I think the last time we spoke was during the pandemic when things were really slow. It’s certainly picked up for you, hasn’t it? Yeah, well I’m really picking through things, letting people get to see the music in the best possible situation. 70s, 80s acts are in huge demand again which is fabulous because obviously that’s what both you and I specialise in.
Yeah, the honest music that came out from the 60s, 70s and 80s I think is enduring. I mean mass media wasn’t really playing the blues but we were influenced by that through the avenues of popular music and so it’s rich and true. I think it’s a rich and true background in pop music as well.
I often think of how music went from 50s rock and roll to 60s Dylan and Birds and Beatles and your group, the group that did Friday on My Mind. Even my own mind looks good When things just don’t go When things go too slow I like Friday on my mind Gonna have fun in the city Be with my girl, she’s so pretty She looks fine tonight She’s all the time to me Be my friend tonight I’ve got to get tonight The way these songs were constructed and I think back to, of course you go back to Elvis but then it was still rhythm and blues but to get to pop I think it was probably Buddy Holly had a lot to do with it because Beatles sounded a lot like Buddy Holly but I’m thinking, I’m asking friends, we had talks about this. How did Buddy Holly get to form pop songs, actually form, where would he have done that and he lived in Texas and in Texas we figured that he heard a lot of the Mexican groups.
The Mexican groups had a lot of very melodic music and he played a lot of those shows so I think from the Mexican folk songs and so he got a lot of the chord changes and turnarounds and melodies and then turned him, hooked him in with the American blues and that. So that’s true, which sounds very feasible to me. How do you get from Elvis or even Chuck Berry and all that to pop music of the Beatles and then Birds and all that and I think it’s through probably Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly and that kind of thing.
Well that’ll be the day When you say goodbye Yes, that’ll be the day When you make me cry You say you’re gonna leave You know it’s a life loss That’ll be the day When I die away I was very young then, I was five years old when I heard Buddy Holly and I would stand on the back hump on the floor of the car when my parents would be driving the radio I remember that and I’m trying to sing Buddy Holly songs. You were into music very young, weren’t you? Little, I heard my brothers were teenagers so they had all the records, you know I’d take them out when they were gone from the house on the weekends and my young brother and I would listen to those. Heartbreak Hotel and we’d play it over and over and over again.
You listened to the radio all the time in those days? Yes, the city that I was in was down south. My parents moved to Florida when we were very young and there was only one station it was a retirement town and it was like a farm channel. News and reports and that kind of weather.
When rock and roll hit, then they started playing rock and roll. It was like one weekend, one day a weekend then we moved to Detroit. My brother passed away when I heard the beginnings of Motown.
So Motown was just happening with Smokey Robinson and Chop Around, that song. And then she said, just because you’ve become a young man there’s still some things that you don’t understand before you ask some girl for a hand in mind keep your freedom for as long as you can my mama told me you better shop around oh yeah you better shop around shop around So when did you start playing drums? I banged on the drums when I was little and I had no musical instruments I banged on pans and about 13 or 14 I joined the Boy Scouts because they had a marching band and I wanted a snare drum so you could take it home so I brought it home and I would bang on the snare drum and then I got a guitar Is it true that it was the Rolling Stones song Satisfaction that first got you into the drums? Yeah, I was banging on the drum It taught me rhythm and coordination for drums. I could actually do the beat.
Once you discovered the guitar there was no going back At the time it was just something it looked really really fun and you saw the Animals and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Kings. The Kings were the main thing when they came out and Ed Sullivan and all those shows. So I was just learning guitar at the time and just learning how to tune it and play it I sat it down for a little while a year or 8 months or so and we moved to another house and I actually found friends that played so I ended up learning songs from them and you’d go to a different neighborhood and they knew different songs and you’d go to another neighborhood and they knew different songs so you’d be passing these songs along None of us really took lessons.
It was too expensive. It wasn’t a thing at the time. Unless you really wanted to learn flamenco or classical or kind of songs in books you know.
There were no Beatles books or Rolling Stones books yet It was a very cool time to be playing musical instruments wasn’t it? If you wanted to be one of the inn kids you had to play an instrument and then of course you had to join a band Yeah well then I picked it back up and my mom got me a new guitar. From there it was the Birds and Dylan and Rolling Stones and Kinks and Porgy and the Raiders and we moved forward and just having fun carting our amplifiers and guitars in a wagon from one guy’s basement to the other basement and playing and making noise and getting kicked out of the house On this reservation Took away our ways of life The tongue of Hawk and Blue Knight Away our native tongue And taught their English to our young Weaves were made by hands But days made in France We’re out of high school and we get a little storefront in Detroit put all the egg cartons on the walls and we went there every day and learned to write songs. It was in between the whole British invasion that happened, then the ballrooms like the electric ballroom in Philly I think was one and then New York was the Fillmore East and Fillmore West and that all happened and after that bands were getting bigger so they were playing bigger auditoriums and we were thinking in terms of getting on those stages as opposed to getting in bars.
Bars were just starting to let younger bands, rock and roll bands play in the bars because the drinking dropped and so bars you had to play four sets of other people’s music and we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to write our own music and so we were in these storefronts banging away every day. We were there all the time.
All the time. And you were already writing your own tunes then? Yeah, we were banging out our own songs our own sound. It was around the time of Hummel Pi and early Led Zeppelin and early electric blues, heavy electric blues, Savoy Brown, early Fleetwood Mac.
That was a big one. I got a black magic woman I got a black magic woman Yes, I got a black Got me so blind I can’t see But she’s a black magic woman and she’s trying to make a devil out of me Don’t turn your back on me, baby Don’t turn your back on me, baby Yes, don’t turn your back on me, baby You’re messing around with your tricks Don’t turn your back on me, baby Because you might just break up my life, you see Were those bands your inspiration for the songs that came from you? Oh yeah, sure. It was probably in the vein of Led Zeppelin’s Rhythm and Blues, heavier Jeff Beck group or that kind of stuff Yardbirdsy, kind of Yardbirdsy and then with the Detroit MC5 and Stooges stuff, kind of a mix of that which sounds strange, but it’s the energy of it more than the sound the attitude.
Detroit was a noisy, dirty, grimy kind of car industry place 24 hours, building cars, gritty, and so the sound was that way, it was noisy, you know so drummers banged straight solid beats but in a different way and they banged your guitar in a different way and we grew up very proud of the attitude, the energy, the attitude you know, and having Motown and all that in there Motown was that great beat, pounding all the time with good melodies on it The best things in life are free but you can give them to the birds and bees Your love give me such a thrill But your love don’t pay my bills I can’t come That was the specific Detroit sound Yeah, it’s kind of an attitude I think people from Detroit, I know they understand what I’m talking about It’s kind of aggressive, it’s a little bit in your face. When we were kids, you were always very direct when you were saying things. You don’t, there’s no holds barred.
It’s kind of New York to East Coast, but not as fanciful language. It’s kind of direct. More straight forward.
Yours is more colorful than ours. The funny thing is, Louie Louie was a big thing. When I was 14, it was like, wow, what is that? And the original Kingsman version, that really set it off.
Then I found out later that the manager of the Kinks suggested that the Kinks write a song like Louie Louie. So the Kinks wrote, You Really Got Me. It was kind of their take on a raw Louie Louie.
Your musical vibe was evolving very quickly through that era, wasn’t it? Yeah, I was probably 17 or 18. It’s a bunch of pages, you know. It’s like a chapter, there’s a lot of chapters there.
So you’re banging your hearts out. You’ve got this old storefront. You’re aiming to play in the ballrooms of the day.
You were obviously gaining a following as you went. Tell me about that time. Yeah, it was tough because you couldn’t go from your basement to the right side stage because you can’t get to the ballroom unless you play something before that.
And so we’re still kind of like stuck in that thing until later on, when the new wave movement hit. You sit in my car, I have no seat best of all. I can lock all my doors, it’s the only way to live.
You sit in my car, I can only move. You talk about the new wave movement. It started out of New York, didn’t it? It was the whole center for punk and these new forms of rock music.
How did that affect you? A lot, that was really important because out of New York was Hip Parade magazine. And Lenny K was part of one of those magazines. Lenny K would feature in the back of the magazine, new original bands.
So we sent in a photo, we were just getting our first 45 together and we sent a photo in and he put the Romantics photo in there. And then on the West Coast was Greg Shaw from Bop magazine. He had started out when I was before Romantics.
I was getting these mimeograph like in high school. He sent it to you in the mail and it was about all these pop bands, all the cool new pop bands and new bands. And it was about magazine, was just before Bop magazine.
He started signing a couple of groups and we were hearing bands from San Francisco, there’s bands from LA coming on and there’s the Blondie and the Ramones from New York. So all this thing was brewing up and so it was influencing Chicago and Detroit. And so we started really zeroing on our sound.
I have to explain how the sound came about because all those years we were fighting to get into an original thing. We were searching for a lead singer, someone up front. The mindset was that you had to have a lead singer.
And then when the new wave happened, that was throwing out the window. It was like Lou Reed and Velvet Underground and all these bands were just banging out songs and everyone was singing. It wasn’t like any pressure to have a guy, a front man anymore.
And that’s when all four of us Romantics, we all sang lead. It was one of us that was, we got rid of. Tell It To Carrie was the Romantics’ first single released a year after they had officially formed in 1977.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. The Romantics grew out of a band called the Motor City Rockers and according to Mike, it was sheer tenacity that saw them get their first break playing at a club in New York City.
I formed a group with the original drummer, Romance Drummer, and we sat in the basement, we wrote a bunch of original songs and CBGB’s had just opened up maybe a year before and we wrote a bunch of original songs. Someone called Billy Crystal, he used to run CBGB’s, and told him that we wanted to come to town to do a show. He got back to us and he said, yeah, come in on a certain day, Wednesday I think it was or something in the middle of the week.
We packed our stuff up, our original songs, and we went there. And we had a singer, he couldn’t sing in key, but he had the look. He had the look and he played harmonica really good.
We went there, we played the show, and we broke up after that, we went back home. It was a huge accomplishment to put everything together, the songs, call them up, get together, drive, rent a vehicle, rent a van, drive to New York. It was a big step in the career to take that upon ourselves to do that, to drive that 660-something miles to New York and then play, and then come back.
It was a big deal. The band broke up. Why did the band break up? Well, we played, the show went well.
It wasn’t packed. Sylvain Sylvain was there for the Ramones, Dee Dee Ramone was there. A singer in Detroit, like I was saying before, he used to get tipsy.
But backstage, before the show or after the show, he was in there with Dee Dee Ramone because of the punk thing. Detroit attitude was kind of making fun of, now I want to sniff some goo, and you’re a punk, and you spit, and all that stuff. And he was kind of mimicking all that.
And he pulls out a switchblade and goes, now I want to sniff some goo, and he’s right in front of Dee Dee Ramone. And it scared the crap out of Dee Dee Ramone, and he left, and we found out about it, and we totally kicked him out of the band, and we just went home, we went home. He crossed the bounds.
He ruined a vibe that we thought, you know, you go there to meet people to move ahead in the right way, but he thought he was funny. We didn’t think it was funny at all. If he did that to one of us or something like that, we would have been nothing.
But to do it to someone that you’re trying to make an impression when you go to a city, and you’re trying to build a foundation for yourself and move in quarters around people that, hey, what are you doing? You got an open show? Could do a show with you, or who knows? Yeah, of course. Yeah, and so we went back home and broke up, and we took some time off, because for 10 years we’ve been doing this, you know? It was like from high school to that time. I get off when you get on me Always have to top me I love the lips That I want to kiss When you start to talk Oh boy That you’re so attractive Until you get your muscles active Changing roles is your, your obsession When you gonna learn Learn to listen What was so special about CBGB? CBGB was a new place that Lenny came from the magazine in New York.
He and Patti Smith were writing songs, and she was doing poetry, and he was backing her up on guitar. So they went to one, I think it was one of the churches, and they were doing shows. They were doing, like, poetry shows, and it kind of, things started happening, original music.
So they found this place, CBGB’s, Country Bluegrass and Blues. And this guy was an old, ragged, old hippie that was Hilly Crystal. And he hired, he let them come in there and do their poetry, and they were doing that.
And then the next thing you know, you have television with Richard Hell, and then you had Johnny Thunders, and they formed a group, Heartbreakers. Next thing you know, you have the Ramones, and then you have Blondie, then you have the Tufts Arts, and then you have, you know, all these other bands coming together, playing CBGB. Got it, so it was the place to be.
Yep, and then Copperfields was another one, because there was a lot happening. Young people were coming up with new music. We were like the kids of the British Blues music, or the 60s kinks music, or the Elvis music of before that.
We were bringing that whole thing forward in our own way. And Stooges and Velvet Underground too. ♪ Standing on the corner ♪ Suitcase in my hand ♪ Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest ♪ And me, I’m in a rock and roll band ♪ Huh ♪ Riding the studs back at gym ♪ You know, those were different times ♪ All the poets, they studied Lucifer ♪ And those ladies, they rolled their eyes ♪ CJ, whoa We went home, and we licked our wounds or whatever, and I was reading New Musical Express, and the jam came out.
And they were just, I love The Who, and the kinks of The Who. And there was a New Musical Express, there was a big page of Paul Weller on it. It was a big photo.
And it was him with his black coat, a white shirt, black tie, and his feet were sort of shoes with a black and white shoes. And it was the coolest look, and I go, man, that’s a great look. And then the Flamin’ Groovies had a record coming out.
It was Shake Some Action. And I got their record, and it was like a revitalized Kings or Beatles or Stones. That clicked to me.
I go, man, this is great. I went to the drummer, and I go, Jimmy, check this out. I go, I think we could do this.
Let’s see what we can find. I started calling a few numbers, and I called a couple guys, and I came over, and it ended up becoming The Romanics. And I started writing these songs.
I was still playing bass guitar. I had these cassettes full of songs of my ideas. And I brought that along, and we’re going, well, who’s going to play guitar? I mean, we’re calling all my friends from earlier bands, and they didn’t want to do it.
They were still doing the kind of Jeff Beck and Led Zeppelin, and they were kind of still doing the long solos and long songs. So what came about is Bass Player came over with Wally, and he played bass, and I ended up playing guitar. There was the beginning of The Romantics in 1977.
Why did you call the band The Romantics? Well, we had a couple of other names, something like The Backbeats or something, I don’t know, whatever it was. But before The Romantics, and before all this happened, going to New York, Jimmy and I, the drummer, we were real close. We played at your school for 11 years or something.
We were always playing together. I was on bass, he was on drums. We really liked Roxy Music, because they looked good, and a lot of girls would go, they had a good female audience because they looked good.
And Bowie was out too at the same time. And we liked the look of a band having a look and everything. And Roxy Music was, we were just almost forming a group with a lead singer, and it was going to be kind of a Roxy Music, rock and roll kind of thing.
Jimmy, I think, was reading an interview. In the middle of Cream Magazine, there was an interview with Brian Ferry. And in the interview, he was talking about rock and roll music, and he’s talking about the art Romantics, the Romantic movement, how it was about liberation of the arts, the liberation of the free thinking, free experimentation and everything.
And I think he saw that, put it in his head and wrote it down, and then went through a number of names, and when we exposed those names, he goes, well, what about Romantics? And so we go, yeah, okay. It certainly worked for you, didn’t it? Yeah. You released your first album under the name of the Romantics, and one of your most notable songs, What I Like About You, was on that album, and just jumped up to the top of the charts, didn’t it? Well, we didn’t know it was going to do that.
It was just another song. We were on the road with the Romantics in 76. First show was 77 in February.
The original MC5 had broken up, so they reformed with two of the original members. They were doing a publicity thing for MC5 reforming as a new band. My friend who played guitar with us when we were in high school, he came over and he said, Mike, we need an opening band.
Would you like to play? He came over and listened to us. He goes, yeah, I’ll get Rob Tyner, the singer from MC5. He’ll come over and check you guys out.
And he came over, and they both liked what we did. They said, sure. I’m sure they figured it was just lightweight pop rock band, cute songs, short songs, and nice chords.
But when we’re on stage, that was our meat and potatoes, moving in on stage, really attacking the stage. And they didn’t know that yet, and we didn’t know it in a way. But we know we were looking at all the punk bands from London, so we had that attitude back.
We did the show, and at the end of the show, a lot of the media, the TV, radio, and record people, we were talking to them, and they gravitated over to us. And then we were asked to play the next two weeks later. It was with Mink DeVille.
You ask me to give up the hand of a girl I love You tell me I’m not the man she’s worthy of But who are you to tell her who to love That’s up to her Yes, and the Lord above Thinks she’s happy with me Without those things Still you beg me To set her free Third show, managers had talked to the promoter in Detroit, and we were hired to do a show with Steve Miller, Peter Frampton, and Jay Giles’ band. You’re talking about Keith. So we were opening for those three bands.
We had our songs, our look and everything, and we went on at about probably 7.30 at night, and it was still daylight. And it’s a dome stadium with a plastic dome, and the light still comes through, so it was still light in there. And the crowd, probably about 5,000 people, and people streaming in.
By the time the bands came on, the whole place was packed, 78,000 people. We played, and no one threw anything at us or no tomatoes. So we succeeded in three shows to make a big jump to hitting the road, and it was a long trajectory because we still weren’t going back to doing clubs.
Success doesn’t come easy, does it? You’ve got to really work hard at it. Yeah, well, yep, from my bedroom every night until about 2 in the morning when I was in high school until that point, yeah. Did you have to build yourself? I can imagine you would have had to think, my God, look where we are now.
Look at, you know, all this hard work has come to this. How amazing. It’s kind of a thing where you always expect it.
You think that’s what you want to do, so it’s not like it’s a surprise because it’s in your head the whole time. You envision yourself there. So that’s the motivation.
You’re doing it, but you’re still working at it. I look back now and I’m going, God, I wish I kept better track. We didn’t do as many photos back then, so I wish I did more photos.
My brother used to do photos of us. He was a photographer. The moral of the story is hard work and persistence and self-belief.
Yeah, well, I mean, playing downstairs in my mom’s basement and they’re trying to watch All in the Family with Archie Bunker and yelling, and we’re downstairs playing True Love. Mike, you had some huge hits. Not only the one that we’ve talked about, What I Like About You, I think the next one was Talking In Your Sleep.
Who are you writing about? Was it the same person? The you in What I Like About You and Talking In Your Sleep? Is she the same person? Well, you know, it doesn’t necessarily work like that. It can work like that. Yes, I guess, but that’s more of when Jimmy came up with lyrics, he was talking about the girls, the cool girls in the audience and the girls in the miniskirts in the audience or the punk girls.
We were playing the New Wave Punk Clubs and he was saying different words every night. He asked me, he goes, we were on the road. He was like, I need a song like a Ringo song.
I need a song, you know, Ringo always had a song he could sing and all four of us, he sang I Want To Be Your Man. It was either I Want To Be Your Man or Boys, the Ringo song. I’ve been told when a boy gets a girl, I think he sang that and he wanted an original.
So all four of us could have a song. So I came up with something. I was at home and I was at my dad’s house.
I had been outside on the picnic table banging out chords and I came up with these chords. I go, Jimmy, I got some really good chords for you. And so he came and got me.
I showed it to him at the house. I go, I’m not sure if I remember it. He goes, get in the car and get your guitar and ride in the back of the car and I’ll drive you and you can keep playing it.
I go, if I have to, I’ll do that. Anyway, but I remembered it by the time I got to our little studio. So I come over there and me and him go in and then we set up throw our coats down and then when I got up there to play it, he goes, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it, that’s what I like.
He goes, that’s it. He’s going, that’s what I like. And that’s how I came, that’s what I like about you.
And he said, that’s the groove. That’s the groove. It feels right.
You got it. Anyway, so the other guy showed up after we had the song was like done and then I told Wally to play a harp part on it. I go, a harp harmonic would work great on this.
And so he came up with a harp part.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. The leather-clad Detroit band, The Romantics, got its start landing a record deal and releasing a self-titled debut album in 1980.
On the heels of that album, their second LP bore the hopeful title National Breakout, but it wasn’t until 1983 and the release of the album In Heat that The Romantics truly broke through. The reason why there’s a difference in sound and the attack of the band from the first album and In Heat to Talking in Your Sleep album is because the new wave punk scene happened and everybody went in the studio and it was about being raw, straight ahead, no extra production, really basic production, simple recording, no overdubs. Really, the punk movie was about the attack, the energy, the fun, and kind of in your face.
So that was the first of two albums. Then I was fired from it. I was too much of an upstart, punk upstart pushing my agenda, I guess.
But it was your band. How can you be fired from your own band? Well, yeah, exactly. Well, actually, in reality, I wasn’t because I was never formally out of the band, really formally.
When you’re part of a corporation, you have to be excommunicated. But that was never done. Anyway, so I came back in the band.
I was fired for a year and a half. They called up the record label and said you either get Skilled back in the band or we’ll get someone to write songs for the band. So I got the call and I went back in the band and I came back on bass and guitar and wrote, of course, writing.
They needed the writing. The production of things had changed from the raw punk thing. Now it’s spando ballet, Duran Duran.
Roxy music was maybe way up in there. And then all these kind of dance bands, more like a Bowie groove music. We’re talking about the 80s now and the era of MTV, right? Yeah.
From 76 to about 80 was really raw punk. And then it started, production got bigger, the production of songs. Nick Lowe, Squeeze with Black Coffee in Bed.
And so Talkin’ In Your Sleep was more of a produced thing. And so that’s why that album sounds more glossy here. Double guitars, guitar overdubs, vocal overdubs, keyboards, that kind of thing.
We would never have done that in the first two albums. I went back to bass. I came up with a bass line for Talkin’ In Your Sleep.
So me and Jimmy were jamming, just jamming. And I came up, it was just a jam. It was just something we grooved on.
And we had it at a rehearsal space. And we were on the road for pre-production, writing songs for the new album, which became In Heat. In 1981, I came back in the band.
We’re getting out there and coming up with new material. I’m coming up with stuff and giving it to the band. We got into pre-production, which is what you used to do.
You don’t do it now. Bands don’t do it so much now. They just go right on the computer.
It helps when you do pre-production, because you get to figure things out, and you take things that you don’t need away on a song. You might be doing stuff that you don’t need to do. Changing keys, melodic parts, bass lines, kick drums, fills, sweating drums, that’s got to go.
Anyway, we came up with the whole album. And we were jamming. The producer came over, Pete Solly, from Australia.
He was living in Australia at the time. He was producing the sports. He even played keyboards in late versions of Procol Harem.
He had been jamming with that Talking Receipt bass line. And he remembered it when we got in the studio. We did the whole record in the studio.
We did all the songs. We laid them down. The ones that we had come up with.
At the end, he comes on and says, you’ve got 11 songs, and you’re all done, but you need one more song. And we thought, oh, God, we’ve got to do another song. And he goes, what do you got? And we started doing a couple of things.
We came up with a couple of things. And we recorded a couple of tracks that were OK. And then he goes, Mike, what about that thing you were doing on bass? He goes, that bass line thing you and Jimmy were doing.
So I go, OK. And I got on the bass. And I did it again.
He goes, OK. And we got a groove going on it. And he goes, that might work.
And so he goes, let’s work on this. So we go into this control room. And we bring the piano or electric keyboard up there.
And the other two guys were there. And we’re going along with it. And Pete is coming up with a turnaround.
Like, you’ve got the verse. And we needed a turnaround to get us into the chorus, like the progression, the next part. And so he came up with a turnaround.
He goes, how’s this? And we would go, well, how about this chord? And I would go, maybe this or this or that. And then while he’s doing it, he’s coming up with the melody for that turnaround. Then he gets to the chorus.
And he’s got, I hear the secret you have to keep. I don’t know how he came up with that. I think Jimmy had the title.
I think he got it from the cars. I think he got it. I think he heard the cars singing.
And you’re talking in your sleep. I don’t mind wasting all my time. Because when you’re standing all so near, Ben’s in your head.
He may have jogged it down. He might not have, though. I think he might have.
But that could have become the idea that became when you’re talking in your sleep. As we’re singing there, someone goes, I hear the secrets that you keep when you’re talking in your sleep. So it was the era of MTV that must have really helped get your stuff out all over the globe, really, not just through the U.S. And is it true that you were actually the first white band to appear on the television show Soul Train? That’s right.
Well, not the first, but rock band, yeah, I think. Elton John was on there, Elton John and a couple of other groups. But I think we were the first rock band.
People were wondering why would they come up with a dance song like that or something like that. But we were thinking in terms of, well, the Rolling Stones would do something like that. They might do a groove.
So that’s the way we were thinking. Yeah. And you were really at the top of your game then.
I mean, maybe before Jimmy Maranos left the band to get on to solo stuff. He came back. He was in the band.
I came back to the band. He was in the band for the whole tour. We toured for, we were on the road for 11 months on that tour.
I think we came over Christmas. Then we went back out. But he walked off the bus and I never saw him after that.
And I’m not sure if management had something to do with it or how unhappy he was. I never found out. It was just that he quit and we got another drummer and had to move forward.
Of course, that drummer was Clem Burke, wasn’t it? Who was playing with Blondie. Well, there was two drummers before Clem. And then Jimmy came back once for a minute.
Then he quit again. Then Clem came in. And then I think Jimmy came back.
And then he quit again. He quit three times. It was just crazy.
So that’s that. You’ve got to be pretty good with going with the flow, don’t you, with people coming and going all the time in the band? I guess, yeah, because doing it from high school up until the first record, people are in and out and you’re kind of juggling things, you know, and whatever feels good you move with. That whole story was like from high school till 84.
So. It’s been a really good ride. And, of course, then things quietened off a little bit.
But as we started off by saying you’re experiencing a whole new resurgence of popularity, you’re out on the road again, and you’re doing a whole lot of your own solo stuff, Mike Skill, aren’t you? Yeah, yeah. Prior to the pandemic I had been writing some songs. I had a little studio at my son’s school.
It had a music room and an art room, and in that art room I asked if I could come in there and play some music, and I ended up building a little control room, and I ended up recording a bunch of songs. And I ran into this guy a couple of years later, a producer. He remixed a lot of songs.
Madonna, Chris Cornell, Ted Nugent, a bunch of groups. And he says, Mike, I hear you have a bunch of songs on tape. And he said, send it to me.
And I sent it to him, and he remixed them. They came out really good. And around the first year of the pandemic or second year, I started releasing them.
Terry got married, and not my business. One day you’re going to fall down on your face. Your friends will all be gone without a trace.
And Daddy won’t be there to touch your fall. Square one won’t look back after all. And now you’re looking out for compromise.
Expecting me to stand and share your lies. Well, it’s not my business. No, it’s not my business.
It’s all about you. Don’t mean a thing to me. And now you’re on your own.
You seem to lose your way. Well, dark and chaos rule your drama play. And the time is dead.
Made from one wrong ride. And I know I can’t rearrange your mind. Knocking down another compromise.
Up all night with your hopeless alibi. It’s not my business. I used to song 67 Riot about the Detroit Riots in 1967 with Wayne Kramer on guitar.
And that’s where I stand. And I’m writing again. And I’m in the studio again coming up.
So it moves on. I just keep moving forward and keep writing and doing some shows. I just played Detroit myself with Brad Elvis from the Romantics and two friends of ours and did a really great show with a band called Rhythm Corps.
It’s been an extraordinary career that you’ve enjoyed and still going strong. Is there anything that you haven’t done yet that you still hanker for? You know, because Jimmy and I were in art class together. We were going to art school, and music came along, and I just got set aside.
So I do a lot of drawing and some painting and that. So that’s one thing I’d like to do a little bit, push a little more. And they keep telling me to write something, a book or something, and I don’t know if I want.
I guess I could start doing that. Maybe a raw basement version of Darryl’s House Live at Darryl’s House I’ll do live in the basement or something. Sounds good to me.
Yeah. Just really more of what I’m doing and a lot more writing. It’s still going to be rock and roll music, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, garage, funky garage, blues music, you know.
Congratulations on an awesome career and really leading the way for a whole new generation of people to kind of follow and a whole lot of new music. Thank you for sharing your time and your stories with us and telling us all about the Romantics’ rise to fame and fortune. Thank you, Sandy.
Thanks for being supportive of what I’m doing and getting back to me. And we’ll talk more. I’m sure we’ll talk more.
Thank you. The Romantics albums all featured quite a few should-have-been hits, but as you’ve heard, founder and guitarist Mike Skill isn’t one to dwell on what could have or should have been. He’s always moving forward and I guess that’s what we all should be doing, shouldn’t we? Thanks for your company today.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the Romantics as told by Mike Skill. I’ll be back with another fabulous guest same time next week. I hope to have your company then.
Bye now. It’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Beautiful day Oh, baby, any day that you’re gone away It’s a beautiful day