Musical Career
The moniker "Fat Mike" was given to Mike by friends after he returned from college and it was evident that he had gained a little weight. While attending Beverly Hills High School, Mike began his musical career with the band False Alarm. After the band split up in 1983, he met Eric Melvin and Erik Sandin and formed the original line-up of NOFX.
He has also appeared as a guest-vocalist on a number of other bands' tracks including "Peter Brady" on Screeching Weasel's 1993 album, "Anthem for a New Tomorrow." Other appearances include "Beware" by Randy, "Mr. Coffee" and "Lazy" by Lagwagon, and can be heard heckling and requesting "Free Bird" at the end of the Lunachicks song, "Missed It," off their 1996 album, "Pretty Ugly," which he also produced.
Mike is the owner and founder of Fat Wreck Chords, one of the biggest independent labels in North America. He was also the founder of the Rock Against Bush tour. The purpose was to encourage young Americans to vote George W. Bush out of office in 2004.
Mike recently recorded the "Cokie the Clown" EP with NOFX, playing Cokie on both the cover of the EP and the music video for the title-track, "Cokie the Clown". In the video, Mike dresses as Cokie and puts white powder into his squirting flower, representing cocaine. Cokie then walks around Chicago squirting powder in pedestrians' faces, as chronicled in the song itself. The video was shot during the punk music festival, Riot Fest, in October 2009.
Mike appeared in the 2010 music documentary "Sounds Like A Revolution" and also features as an interviewee in the "The Other F Word," an analysis of punk rock fatherhood. He also appears as a guest vocalist on the Dropkick Murphys single "Going Out In Style".
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Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or career:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)