Bio

Biography

Darren Michaels, Solo Bassist

Driving through Mississippi on the way home from a gig in January of 2004, Darren’s wife asked him to tell his biography as a bass player so that she could record it for prosperity. What follows is Darren’s description, including occasional quotes (with only minimal interjections by Cindy).

Darren was born on May 1, 1976, in Jacksonville, Florida, and moved all over the southeast, but he grew up mostly in central Mississippi. “For seventeen years,” he says, “nothing happened.” Then, during the last term of his senior year he was relocated to Arkansas, stuck in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by cows. (He grew to really dislike cows.) He had wanted a bass for a long time, and during the relocation to Arkansas, he finally got one. (Well, much earlier he got a guitar, because that’s what his parents thought bass players had to start with. Prior to that, he had played the tuba in the school marching band - “it’s probably what gave me my love for the low end,” he says - and even before that his first instrument had been a harmonica.) When he was little he was influenced by the song “Disco Duck” and the rhythms of the air conditioning unit in his home, but much of his musical influence also comes from cartoons, TV and movies. Since he didn’t have his own tapes, he didn’t know the “cool” songs to listen to. Luckily, though, as a going away present his friends gave him a CD player and some CDs. One CD was Blood Sugar Sex Magic by Red Hot Chili Peppers. He bought a transcription book for that album and spent most of his free time learning those songs. (He can still play most of them by heart.)

As he finished his senior year at Bryant High School in Arkansas, he tried to keep a low profile, but this one guy just would not leave him alone. That guy is Brandon Welch. Eventually Brandon coaxed conversation out of Darren, which later led to jam sessions at Darren’s house. “I could not hang with Brandon musically,” Darren says. So he did basic root stuff while Brandon did whatever he wanted with the guitar. Luckily, the two taped everything they were doing, and Darren was also taping all of his practices alone. Thus, Darren had a vantage point for improving.

With Brandon came not just jam sessions, but a whole world of new music, as well. Darren’s taste in music had been limited – he knew either old funk bands he’d heard off of TV shows or songs off of his brothers’ tapes. Brandon, however, introduced him to old prog stuff and rekindled his love for 80s music. Brandon, along with his friend Larry Fox, also meshed Darren with their group of friends in the Benton area, including Kenneth Williams, who was in a band with Brandon called Continuum. On the side, Darren, Brandon, and Kenneth jammed together in Brandon’s father’s printshop. They called their little project Tangent (as it was an offshoot of Continuum), and once again Darren felt he couldn’t hang. To Darren, Brandon and Kenneth were “musical geniuses.”

Eventually Darren began to develop a style to mesh with Brandon’s guitar and Ken’s drums. This left Darren a lot of room to be melodic as a bass player. “My melodic style I owe to those guys,” he says. “They had the rhythm thing so tight, it allowed me to explore other aspects of my instrument.” Otherwise, he feels he’d be a typical root-5 bassist. Unfortunately, Tangent didn’t last long because Ken was also in a band called Peanut Gallery. Around the time of their high school graduation, Peanut Gallery got really serious and Ken began performing, leaving no time for jamming with Darren and Brandon.

During the summer after graduation Darren met another of Brandon’s friends, Derek Dague. Brandon and Derek both went to Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Says Darren, “everyone else went to college and I went to work full time… as a security guard.” (So, he says, he had to cut his mullet.) In their free time, Brandon, Dague and Darren started getting together in Dague’s barn (which Darren says they shared with an opossum named Opus). There in the barn the trio started pumping out song after song (“not that all of ‘em were any good,” says Darren). They were very productive, but since a few members didn’t feel ready and since they had no drummer, the Wyrd never performed anywhere. (The Wyrd, by the way, is the first band Darren will really claim; there were stints with others before the Wyrd and even before Tangent, but the Wyrd is the one where most of his influence comes from.)

The highlight for the Wyrd was recording at a guy named Chris Moore’s house. They called the recording “the Wyrd does Harrison, but not well.” (This recording is how Darren got to know Chris Moore, who hated his guts at first. David Moore, Chris’s brother, hated Darren because Darren woke him up at 7:30 in the morning by playing “Imagine” on the piano over and over.) The Wyrd recorded eight songs and were psyched… until they listened to them. Darren remembers, “on the ride home, all the cheer and anticipation were gone, and that’s when I knew the band was dying. I think the death blow came when we listened to Peanut Gallery.” After comparing their recording to Peanut Gallery’s, all the productivity ended and the guys went their separate ways. Darren used his time wisely: he started writing solo pieces. This is when the song “green” started to form, when Darren was nearly nineteen.

Darren had quit working and had entered Arkansas Tech to get a fine arts degree, and Cindy (who Darren had known in high school in Mississippi) started going to Hendrix. Darren hung out with Cindy and her roommate Eva and was looking for a new band. He found an ad in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette for a band looking for a bass player. Darren was feeling more confident since he had first begun with Tangent, so he decided to call the number on the ad. Grant Vaughn answered, and Darren thought he sounded “old.” When Darren went to meet the band, this guy in his mid-forties answered the door and Darren found that he was the youngest person in the room by at least ten years. The music had strong vocals and really strong rock elements, and Darren was worried that his melodic playing wouldn’t fit in. The band jammed and put chord charts up. Since Darren had been studying on his own, he could read them, so he just sort of played along. The band really liked what he was doing, so he became a member of the band after only a few songs. A few months later Darren was in a real studio for the first time: Dog House Studios in Little Rock.

The band never got a set name; it was always changing. Rod Pruitt, the singer, wasn’t too motivated to perform live, so they kept recording songs but never seemed to play anywhere. Their first real gig was in front of T-Shirt Trivia, a t-shirt shop in Greenbrier, Arkansas, where Darren worked. Then they played other gigs, – in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and in a steakhouse that was intended for country music (“imagine The Blues Brothers without the chicken wire,” says Darren). After several lineup changes, the band finally split (“too many age differences and different musical stylings,” according to Darren). Grant then formed a blues band and Darren became the bass player – thus he had a crash course in the blues (he’d been more into Toad the Wet Sprocket at the time). Grant’s band, N2 Blues, started gigging immediately at places such as Juanita’s, Guido’s, and Trees (in Maumelle), so for Darren this was really a learn-on-the-job situation. Rod struck out as a solo songwriter and kept Darren as his bass player when recording. For some time Darren even played with a third band on the side with a former Rod Pruitt drummer, Trey, and a guitarist named Tracy. Darren was playing all sorts of different styles and learning to play with all sorts of different players. He became proud of some of what he was doing.

On the personal side, Cindy and Darren began dating, which was Darren’s first serious relationship in years. Then Cindy left for Spain one summer. Darren returned to Jacksonville while she was away and tried his hand at the music scene there to see if he could make a name for himself as a bass player. Instead, he spent the summer working in a warehouse that sold nuts and bolts for hydraulic systems. At work he met a guy that introduced him to Wing Chun (a type of martial art), which has influenced a lot of his thinking since then. He tried to get into bands, but all the people he met never seemed to follow through with anything. So instead he began to focus on solo songs and how to make the bass play the music that was in his head; Darren was turning the bass into a compositional instrument. The coolest thing about Jacksonville, besides the beach, was that it exposed Darren to a lot of new live music. In Little Rock there was rock, lots of country, and lots of blues. In Jacksonville there were all sorts of styles coming through. Every weekend, then, Darren had a new perspective on what it means to play bass. “So in that 3 months, musically, even though I wasn’t playing out anywhere, it was like a huge growth spurt,” he says.

When Cindy returned to Hendrix, Darren returned to Conway, Arkansas, and after such a huge summer of doing and listening and going to the beach, he was “forced to compress all that back down, to repress it.” It put a lot of dissatisfaction in him, having to go back to Arkansas. What’s worse, he was yet again at another warehouse, this time pulling orders for a dog collar company. The oils in the leather collars made his hands break out, so when he played his fingers would split open. Something cool did happen at work, though: the guy that got Cindy’s job at the company, Neil Dillard, was like, “hey, man, I’m trying to put a band together. I hear you’re a bass player. What kind of music do you play?” Darren thinks his answer was “something witty like, ‘whatever the music wants me to.’” Apparently that was a good answer, because Darren joined the band and they practiced in the back of a vintage clothing store (“vintage meaning one step up from thrift store, except the shirts are $40,” explains Darren). In that room Darren met drummer Josh Hines and guitarist Mark Chiaro. Along with Neil, these four guys became the core of Brokin Hed. That was the first band in which Darren got to write with his new knowledge and skills. He was delighted to be with musicians who were ambitious - they wanted to write, they wanted to play out. All of the band’s gigs had something to do with Hendrix, though (Coffeehouses, Bands on the Bricks). It was in this band that Darren really learned what it means to really rock with a drummer while setting up a solid foundation for the rest of the band. Darren furthered his recording experience with Brokin Hed, as they did a live recording of their Bands on the Bricks performance. In between Brockin Hed practices and gigs, Darren reunited with Brandon again for a short stint in Phil ‘n the Blanks.

Since Darren was back in Arkansas for what seemed to him like forever, he concentrated on art again. Bass playing was not yet a serious goal; he had no designs to be a serious musician. Then his apartment caught on fire. Darren describes it: “I got a call from my girlfriend’s ex boyfriend and the conversation went, and I quote, ‘Hey dude, your apartment’s on fire.’ ‘Uhm, okay. Thanks, dude.’” When Darren got to his apartment it was already gutted and anything above waist level was pretty much destroyed by either the heat or the soot – his artwork, his TV, his CD player. Luckily, his basses had fallen onto the floor, and his brand new thumb bolt-on Warwick six string was in its case. The case turned to melted plastic around the headstock, but the bass itself was fine. The iguana (the firestarter!) was ok, too; he was found hiding under the tub, scared but ok. Rather than getting really depressed about it, Darren tried to take it as a spotlight on where to go. With his artwork ruined but his basses intact, Darren felt there was “something pointing the way.” “This is the path,” he realized. “Whatever other path I traveled would lead back to this one.”

So, with money he’d been stashing away plus money from the fire, plus money from Cindy’s parked car getting hit at a Wal-Mart, the two moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and stayed in an extended stay hotel for two or three weeks. During this time, Darren and Cindy searched for jobs and Darren auditioned for AIM, the Atlanta Institute of Music. To his surprise, he was accepted. So after five years of being self-taught, Darren started on the path of academic learning in music. At AIM Darren was able to study with bassists such as Adam Nitti, Alan Barnes, and Gary Wilkins. During that year he also played with countless drummers and countless guitarists, all with different backgrounds, styles, and levels of ability. He was also introduced to jazz. During his stay at AIM, he was never really affiliated with one band, so that got him into composing just for bass more and more. “I’ve always got music going,” he says, “and I’ve got to get it out.” More importantly, says Darren, during his last term at AIM he got into looping. He wrote his first looping piece, “Cellophane Wings,” and performed it solo at his graduation recital. This was his very first performance as a solo bassist.

After graduating from AIM with honors in the fall of 2000, Darren was once again bandless, and he went to work literally the day after graduation at yet another warehouse. Darren progressed rapidly at this job and started getting paid real money… which made him realize that he was suddenly an adult. One day he was out delivering some supplies to another branch while his truck died on a busy overpass (spaghetti junction, for you Atlantans), and he nearly got plowed by an eighteen-wheeler. This shook him up and made him realize that working a job he disliked to make lots of money was not going to make him happy. So Darren left that job and by the end of that week was playing jazz in a pizza parlor. (“This,” says Darren, “reminded me of my on-the-job learning of blues; I was learning jazz on-the-job, too, which seemed infinitely harder. Thankfully everybody else was on-the-job learning, too.”)

Besides playing jazz, Darren joined the band Morning Glory and began making real money at gigs (but never got any of it because it all went to the band’s recording fund. Darren’s bass recordings for the album, by the way, were never released). However, the leader of the band had his own vision of what the music should sound like, and he didn’t want others writing the songs. Darren did get to play with Jessie Astin, though, who was a master guitar player at just seventeen. With Morning Glory, Darren got to perform live many times, from a July 4th performance in East Point to multiple Starbucks locations to well-known Atlanta venues such as CJ’s Landing and Echo Lounge, where he again got to perform solo (sort of – the song was turned into a duet with Jessie). On the side, Darren continued to freelance in rock and jazz.

On his own time, however, Darren was increasingly experimenting with looping, and he started writing lots of solo compositions. It dawned on him that he had too many ideas to be in a band; either he would have to dominate (“which then makes it not a band,” he says) or strike out on his own. He realized, too, that he needed to document his new solo compositions in the best way possible. Luckily, Chris Moore again popped into the picture. In February of 2001, Darren recorded a demo of “green” along with four other songs. This CD became a five-song demo for what would eventually become the album green. Unfortunately, however, once again tragedy struck and Darren dislocated his foot saving orphans from a burning building…. Actually, he hurt it breaking into room he was supposed to be teaching in at AIM. Without medical insurance, Darren was forced to return to work to pay the bill. “But the lemonade that I made out of that,” he says, “was that I used the money from the job to get back and forth to Arkansas to record for green.”

In October of 2001 Darren married Cindy, and his demo was played at their reception. The two went on their week-long honeymoon in Puerto Rico, and Darren fell in love with the beach and the rainforest. When they returned home Darren wrote the song “El Yunque,” inspired by the rainforest he had visited. Moore convinced Darren that he needed to finish his album soon, so Darren worked for another year to complete it, driving back and forth from Atlanta to Arkansas whenever he got the chance. Once his album was finished, Darren decided that with the looping capability at his feet he would strike out solo. In the summer of 2002, Darren played his first entirely solo gig at the Raging Burrito/Azul in Decatur, Georgia.

Darren, who never seems to be working on just one project, also recorded an album with Johnny Lawrence (with Brandon and Kenneth, from back in the day) at Crystal Studios in Little Rock. Since he had recorded his solo album at Moore’s studio, East Hall Records, and was on the East Hall label, he was also invited back to Arkansas to play at the first annual East Hall “guerrilla recording” session, one weekend in which an entire album was written, performed, and recorded. This experience led to Darren’s eventual recording with the Jack Acids, who are also on the East Hall label. The Boys Choir sessions, as they came to be called, also reunited Darren with Derek Dague.

Back in Atlanta and with plans already in the works for a second album, Darren was happy to get a “humbling and mind-altering lesson with Michael Manring.” He says, “from those three hours I’ve based half my new album. There’re lots of concepts flowing out of that guy.” Darren was also happy to attend Victor Wooten’s Bass/Nature camp in May of 2003.

In 2002, Darren also began teaching bass at two music stores in Gwinnett County, and he had several private lessons with Adam Nitti. His solo gigs grew in number from subsequent gigs at the first place to give him a chance as a solo bassist, Raging Burrito/Azul, to multiple gigs at Caribou Coffee in Norcross and then at Sweet Java Brown, Atlanta Artist’s Center, and Ashton’s. Eventually Darren’s solo gigs grew to include out of town venues, as well. He has had successful gigs in Colorado, North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi, California, Tennessee, and Arkansas (back where it all started!).

Darren lives with his wife, a yappy Chihuahua, one remaining (and finger-biting) ferret, and a house-burning iguana in the Atlanta area. As part of his interest in graphic design, Darren designed the CD booklet for his first album, green, his logo, his differing promotional flyers for gigs, and his website. His original study in art has also influenced music; music just happened through twist of circumstance. In memory of that twist of circumstance, Darren says, “I’m doing my best to keep on the path that all my paths will always lead back to.”