..."Michael's Town", Cleveland Magazine/July 1994...

YOUR CAR IS THE RECEIVER. HIS STUDIO IS THE SOURCE. THE DIFFERENCE IS REMARKABLE.
Turn the radio up and the kinetics of rock 'n' roll seize the gas pedal, raise dust on the dashboard. Your car is a crucible of sound, a crashing together of audio intensities: singers who fray their vocal cords, guitarists who flay their strings to the breaking point, ad men and promoters who bark in Richter-scale extremes.
But it's very peaceful in Michael Stanley's 98.5 WNCX-FM studio, where he produces this daily shivaree for afternoon drive-timers.
The studio looks and feels more like a laboratory than a rock 'n' roll hot spot. Subdued colors, with a solitary poster pinned neatly to a wall. An orderly array of buttons, knobs and dials. A high-beam lamp and a gleaming overhead brass sprinkler, juxtaposed oddly with an ornate plaster frieze, the room's sole remnant of the old Halle Building's elegance. And Michael Stanley, sitting alone, methodically lining up songs from a precisely charted playlist, calmly guiding the ebb and flow of sound along the board with one finger. His studio window overlooks the Halle Building's main floor, where a man is getting his shoes buffed 20 feet in one direction and a woman deliberates between a cookie and croissant 20 feet in the other. No one looks up.

The irony is that this is the Michael Stanley he feels is most himself--quiet, introverted, a little remote--whereas the Michael Stanley the public knows has lived a life in the spotlight for nearly a quarter of a century. First, he was the founder and leader of The Michael Stanley Band, which from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s was Cleveland's great rock hope. Then he was co-anchor on WJW-TV Channel 8's now-defunct "PM Magazine." Now, he is a weekly featured reporter on TV-8's "Frist Look" with Wilma Smith, and a disc-jockey at WNCX (the afternoon counterpoint to the station's syndicated morning show by Howard Stern) and is the seasonal host of "Cav's Fast Break." And through it all--even his wedding this month to television producer Mary McCrone, which, by an odd twist of fate, will make him brother-in-law to Vegas crooner and perennial whipping boy of late-night tak-show hosts, Wayne Newton--Michael Stanley has remained low-key, a regular guy who would never wear goofy clothes on stage because he just couldn't see wearing them to the grocery store.
At 46, Stanley is pretty content, saying that he has come to terms with the disappointments and the joys of his multifaceted career. "I've really been blessed. All my adult life, I've been paid to do things I love. For 15 years, I was paid to travel around the country and play music. Then I got to be on television, walking around with pretty women, going to exotic places and wearing tennis shoes most of the time. And I enjoy working at the radio station. I guess I have the renaissance shotgun approach to life: I do a lot of things well, non great, and I just see what happens."
However much peace of mind might have developed naturally, Michael Stanley's blossomed through near-tragedy. While on vacation in Las Vegas in December 1991, he woke up in the middle of the night with a crushing pain in his chest, which then spread to his left arm. At the hospital emergency room, doctors told him what he had already guessed--he was having a heart attack--and performed an angioplasty to open his blocked artery. In the midst of all the terrified and frantic voices that night--his own included--he was surprised to hear another voice, also his own.
"I was freaked out and hysterical, but, at times I was also incredibly calm," Stanley says. "I kept thinking, if this is it, I don't have a tremendous number of regrets. I've done some great things, I have great friends and two great kids, and I've been in love with some great women. And I've been able to maintain this perspective."
Since then, he has continued the process which began even before the heart attack: building a life of balance, exploring new interests. Whereas the band was once the only thing, 365 days a year, he added new things. He enjoyed the new doors to television and radio that opened, even as the rock 'n' roll door narrowed. He bought two and a half acres in Chagrin Falls and was, in turn, sold on the curving line of its gardens and the glow of its greenery. He lent support to a number of projects, including HIP--"Hearing Is Priceless"--a campaign that teaches kids to protect their hearing from the kind of high-decibel bashing that cost Stanley most of the hearing in one ear.
And while he has maintained strong ties to his earliest loves--he remains friends with his first wife, Libby, and is very close to his 20-year-old twin daughters, Sarh and Anna--he has a new love.
Stanley and McCrone, who is now a producer of non-news programming and features at Channel 8, developed a good working relationship in his "PM Magazine" days. The strengths of that partnership, Stanley says, are mirrored in this new partnership. "When we started to work together on Channel 8, her strengths were my weaknesses and vice versa. She's the extrovert; she draws me out. I pull her back when she needs it. There's this push and pull toward the middle which is very good."

He is unabashedly happy about their marriage-to-be, although a bit fuzzy on the details of their July 9 (1994) wedding. He guesses that about 300 people are invited, a highly diverse list including old friends and new, TV and radio folks, and music personalities ranging from Wayne Newton to the original Eagles rocker Joe Walsh--if, Stanley says, Walsh can manage to tear himself away from his "multi-billion dollar tour."
And after the wedding hoopla is over, Stanley can concentrate on the other promising union of his post-heart attack days: a new band called The Ghost Poets, which released an album last year with an independent record company and is garnering positive reviews, airplay and respectable sales in about 35 markets nationwide. While Stanley himself is fairly laid-back about the band's prospects, fans have high hopes that, after eight quiet years, this is a new shot at showcasing his talent--and Cleveland's--nationwide.
Still, in those eight years Stanley has become more of a local personality than a celebrity. It will be a hard climb back to the heights of rock 'n' roll, even in Cleveland--especially in Cleveland--where radio stations have instituted an airplay blackout on The Ghost Poets songs and even on paid advertisements for their concerts because they view Stanley as the competitor.
MSB certainly enjoyed a strong measure of success, especially in Northeast Ohio where they sold hundreds of thousands of albums and set still-unmatched concert attendance records at Blossom and The Coliseum. The band has a strong following in other pockets of the country, too, and toured with some of the biggest groups in the business, including Bruce Springsteen, The Eagles, Foreigner and The Doobie Brothers. For years, both fans and music industry savants believed it on the verge of stardom.

But that one great hit--that one chart-topping single that can elevate a local band to a household name--never came. There were Top-30 hits, Top-20 hits, music videos and 11 albums (some of which sold up to 300,000 copies). But there was never a No.1 song like Bob Seger's "Night Moves," which transformed the Detroit rocker from a hometown hero into a national superstar. This was always the wistful analogy, proffered by Stanley, his manager Mike Belkin and by Cleveland itself, which counted on this local boy to make everyone forget about the burning river, the city in default and the proliferation of "mistake-on-the-lake" jokes.