Biography

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Mike Wheeler – Self Made Man
Delmark DE 824 (2012)

Mike Wheeler has been playing the blues for almost 30 years and has played with Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Shemekia Copeland, Jimmy Johnson, Son Seals, Willie Kent and a Who’s Who of today’s Chicago Blues! Mike is an extraordinary blues singer, songwriter and guitarist; he wrote most of the material on Self Made Man including the title track where he sings, “I’m a self made man and I made myself have the blues.” Mike is accompanied by his regular group including Brian James, keyboards; Larry Williams, bass; Cleo Cole, drums and special guest Omar Coleman, harmonica on three songs. Others songs include “Get Your Mind Right”, “Movin’ Forward”, “I Don’t Like It Like That”, “Here I Am”, “Join Hands”…


Mike Wheeler
Self Made Man
Delmark DE 824


Even when he’s relating a story of romantic betrayal Mike couches his tale in rhythmic grooves and melodic frameworks that almost compel you to get up and dance away whatever sorrows he might be invoking; his spiky, P-Funk influenced fretwork on “Movin’ Forward” and his “Superfly”-tinged wah-wah on “Join Hands” likewise bring redemptive good feeling to storylines drawn from the hardscrabble side of human experience. Complete notes by David Whiteis enclosed.


1. Here I Am 6:18
2. Big Mistake 3:53
3. Self Made Man 6:12
4. I'm Missing You 3:09
5. Join Hands 4:09
6. Let Me Love You Baby 4:38
7. You Done Me Wrong 7:22
8. Walkin' Out The Door 6:03
9. Get Your Mind Right 5:19
10. I Don't Like It Like That 4:16
11. Moving Forward 5:42
12. Chicago Blues 4:57
13. I'm Working 4:06


All songs by Wheeler/Williams/Cole/Vollriede, MLCB Music, ASCAP except "I'm Missing You" by Mike Wheeler, Mwheel1 Music, ASCAP and Let Me Love You Baby by Willie Dixon, Hoochie Coochie Music, BMI.

Mike Wheeler, vocals, guitar
Brian James, keyboards
Larry Williams, bass
Cleo Cole, drums
Omar Coleman, harmonica (3,9,12)

Recorded at Riverside Studio, Chicago on May 6 & 7, 2012 by Steve Wagner


Produced by Mike Wheeler and Steve Wagner
Album Production and Supervision: Robert G. Koester
Mixed by Steve Wagner & Dave Katzman
Photography: Chris Monaghan, MoPho
Design: Dave Forte

Other Delmark Albums of Interest:
Linsey Alexander, Been There Done That (822) with Mike Wheeler
Toronzo Cannon, Leaving Mood (817)
Quintus McCormick, Still Called The Blues (821)
Put It On Me! (815), Hey Jodie! (801)
Sharon Lewis & Texas Fire, The Real Deal (816) with Billy Branch
Demetria Taylor, Bad Girl (814) with Big Time Sarah
Jimmy Johnson, Pepper's Hangout (745)
North/South (647), Johnson's Whacks (644)
Junior Wells, Hoodoo Man Blues (612) with Buddy Guy
Magic Sam, West Side Soul (615)

CP 2012 Delmark Records
4121 N. Rockwell,
Chicago, IL 60618 www.delmark.com

“I would say that the blues is about everyday life, the dealings that people go through in relationships and work – you know, just everyday living.”
Mike Wheeler’s blues, like his conversation, invoke images of a serious-minded man who nonetheless lives in a celebratory way – a hard worker willing to take some lumps on his journey toward victory, but who refuses to sacrifice either his pride or his happiness to attain it. “I’m a joyful person,” he attests, expanding on his theme of what his music means to him and what he wants it to convey. “I’m not really into a bunch of negative stuff and being mad all day and stuff like that, so I guess that reflects in the music. I figure that songs should tell a story instead of just going everywhere with it – a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Mike’s attitude may be a far cry from the old “tortured blues poet” stereotype, but it’s appropriate for a man whose earliest blues memories are inseparable from his recollections of the loving household he grew up in. Born in Chicago in 1961, he found himself surrounded my music almost as soon as he was old enough to know what it was. “When I was young,” he remembers, “my mother played all of it; she played R&B and soul and blues and everything, so we listened to everything in my house. She used to play the old Muddy Waters stuff, and man, that just attracted me. Something about that sound; I loved that. B.B., Albert King, Freddie King – I liked blues at a young age.”
It didn’t take long for his enthusiasm to bear fruit. By the time he was in his teens, he’d already begun sowing the seeds of his eventual musical career. Bassist Larry Williams, a close friend and bandmate to this day, was one of his earliest influences. “I met him when I was a teenager,” Mike recalls. “He had a professional band that was already gigging. Those were the kind of guys I hung out with. I hung out with musicians, and they knew the blues stuff, they new the R&B cats, they knew the rock cats.”
Nonetheless, it was the rootsier 12-bar Chicago style that proved to be his calling card, at least at the beginning. His first straight blues gig, he remembers, was a mid-‘80s stint in the band of pianist Lovie Lee, a former Muddy Waters sideman and stepfather of fabled harp maestro Carey Bell (they held forth at a North Side bistro called Lilly’s). A few years after that, he hooked up with guitarist Charles “Chuck-a-Luck” Crain in an aggregation called the Park Avenue Players; he also worked with bassist Joan Baby and vocalist Nellie “Tiger” Travis (who has since gone on to make a name for herself on the southern soul-blues circuit). When he joined harpist Cadillac Dave’s hard-driving aggregation in about 1995, he found his territory expanding into the Chicago suburbs; a subsequent gig with bassist/vocalist Sam Cockrell returned him to the South Side circuit he’d traversed with Chuck, Joan, and Nellie.
Finally, in 1998, he joined trombonist/funkmeister Big James Montgomery and his Chicago Playboys, a gig that brought him greater exposure on Chicago’s North Side and also resulted in his first excursion overseas. Like a lot of other American bluesmen, he was astounded by the adulation he received there. “Switzerland,” he remembers with still-palpable awe. “People treated us like we were famous. I was like, ‘Wow!’ It was kinda hard coming back home and being normal!”
Mike stayed with the Playboys until 2011, but during this time he also began to forge a name for himself as a front man. “I started leading my own band in about 2001,” he recounts.. “It was Sam Greene on the bass, Cleo Cole on the drums, Lawrence Fields on the saxophone, Brian James on the keyboards, and myself. I first started writing songs around the time of my first CD [a self-released disk titled The Mike Wheeler Band], I guess around 2003. We were mostly just selling it at shows; it wasn’t in the stores.”
One evening at the club B.L.U.E.S. on North Halsted, Delmark’s Steve Wagner came in to tape Mike and his band for a live recording to be streamed online. Impressed with the band’s stylistic versatility as well as Mike’s own vocal prowess and improvisational eloquence, he suggested that Mike might want to come to Delmark and record. The result was this CD -- a set that exemplifies the Mike Wheeler approach to blues expression. His band consists of three longtime compatriots (bassist Larry Williams, keyboardist Brian James, and drummer Cleo Cole) along with young harmonica phenom Omar Coleman sitting in on three cuts.
True to his dictum that “songs should tell a story,” Mike crafts vivid vignettes with both his lyrics and his solos – unlike too many younger instrumentalists, he never forgets that a musician tells his stories (“a beginning, a middle, and an end”) with notes as well as words. “I really try to make it mean something,” he maintains, “so you can understand what I’m doing. It’s really about trying to flow and land right where you want to land. I’ve been around a lot of guys who were faster, but I really never tried to get off into that style. Sometimes that [might] not mean anything – just being fast, but you can’t get anything out of it. I just tried to stick with making the notes mean something.”
His affirmative attitude toward life is reflected here just as strongly. Even when he’s relating a story of romantic betrayal (“I Don’t Like It Like That,” “Walkin' Out the Door”) he couches his tale in rhythmic grooves and melodic frameworks that almost compel you to get up and dance away whatever sorrows he might be invoking; his spiky, P-Funk influenced fretwork on “Movin’ Forward” (“That’s my Eddie Hazel-type stuff”) and his “Superfly”-tinged wah-wah on “Join Hands” likewise bring redemptive good feeling to storylines drawn from the hardscrabble side of human experience. At the same time, he honors his Chicago blues heritage with “Let Me Love You Baby,” a Willie Dixon song based on the structure of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” that Koko Taylor first released on Chess in the early ‘70s.
It’s all blues, of course, if it comes from the heart, as Mike’s Delmark stablemate Sharon Lewis likes to put it. “I want to stick with this style,” he affirms, “kinda help more younger people, show them what’s going on in Chicago blues. This is 2012; you’ve got to update it or make it more relevant to young people, so they’ll want to check it out more. When I started listening to rock, I found out that all the rock guys, that’s how they started – listening to blues, the influence of Buddy and Otis Rush and B.B. and Freddie King and all of those guys, and Muddy Waters. So this is kind of like full circle.”


-David Whiteis, August, 2012