Outside of Ohio, Michael Stanley is a rock 'n' roll obscurity. The singer-guitarist has been churning out solid, blue collar, heartland rock for 30 years, but once you cross the state line, the Stanley name takes a big dip in recognizability.
But here in the Buckeye State, Stanley -- who is also the afternoon DJ on Cleveland's WNCX and has held a few local television gigs -- is the beloved leader of a rock 'n' roll cult.
His followers are mainly music fans swiftly approaching, in the midst of, or waving goodbye to middle age and have been faithfully following the Cleveland native for years.
On Saturday night, Stanley and his band The Resonators preached to 450 of the converted at the cramped, sold-out Tangier restaurant cabaret during a two-hour-plus concert that featured music spanning his entire career. The concert was the second of a four-night engagement that concludes next Friday and Saturday.
Stanley, who celebrated his 55th birthday last month, casually took the stage in a green T-shirt, black blazer and black jeans and tore into the up-tempo All I Ever Wanted, a prime slice of his straightforward songwriting style that highlights melody and traditional verse-chorus-verse song structure over rhythmic flash and riffs.
The nine-piece Resonators, including two guitarists, a percussionist, a saxophonist, a backup singer, longtime keyboardist Bob Pelander and a rhythm section, backed him with the ease of a unit that has played the songs and the venues together for quite some time.
From brand-new songs such as the mildly funky Vicodin & Prayer and the Springsteen-inflected My Last Day On Earth to older fan favorites such as In the Heartland and Strike Up the Band, Stanley radiated a relaxed, familiarity with the fans, as if he were in a room with a bunch of old friends who got together to hang out and play some songs.
While Stanley is still living out his rock 'n' roll dreams (and the vicarious dreams of some of his fans, too) he is no arrested adolescent. He has no illusions about himself or his fans, and throughout the evening he made humorous references to his and the audience's age, and reminisced about the old days at the Coliseum and the Cleveland Agora.
"There's a woman up here in front who looks all of 17, who sang all the words to that last song," he said after performing the mandolin-laced folk ballad Louisville A.D. from his 1972 debut.
"Did your grandma sing that song to you in your crib?"
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