Junto Profile: Mike Nolan

This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? Mike Nolan

Where are you located? I’ve been a New York City resident for the last 40 some years. 

I was born in Joliet, Illinois, the home of the Blues. I spent my first 18 years in and around Chicago. I had a friend in high school whose brothers were a lot older than he was… probably a mistake kid… One of his brothers was a music writer for a Chicago newspaper at the time covering mostly jazz and blues. He would take my friend and me out to blues clubs with him when we were still underage. All the managers and owners knew him so they kind of looked the other way when some 15 year olds walked in. So through that connection I saw pretty much every major blues act from the era (1966 or so) in small clubs. Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Hound Dog Taylor, John Lee Hooker, a very young Buddy Guy, etc. Of course all that was just before the British Blues invasion, so I did know where all of that music came from. 

I was in a band by the time I was 13 years old or so. One of the band members was a rare only child from that era. His mom used to drive us around to see rock shows all over Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. I got to see the Who on one of their first tours in a tiny club in Monticello, Indiana … at a little boardwalk resort on Lake Shafer. Indoor venue that held about 300 people, the stage was about a foot high, and we were standing right in front of it dodging swinging microphones and shrapnel from busting guitars. In Chicago I saw a lot of shows … memorable ones include 2-7-1969 Vanilla Fudge with Jethro Tull as the bottom bill and Led Zeppelin in the middle slot. Hendrix in early ‘68. Traffic, Blind Faith, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane (with It’s a Beautiful Day as the opener), lots more.

On one particularly interesting day in August of 1968 I had gone with a friend to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at one of the large pre-cinemax-type theaters that was in Chicago at the time. After the movie let out, we were just walking around and passed a gallery that had a Red Grooms exhibition, so we went in to have a look. There was some pretty outside music playing and I asked the gallery attendant what it was…. Silver Apples of the Moon!…. Which certainly influenced me to go down the electronic music rabbit hole. After leaving the gallery, we saw a bunch of long-haired kids running up the street, so we decided to follow and ended up in the middle of the Democratic National Convention riot. Got tear gassed and chased by the cops!

I went to college the first time at Indiana University in Bloomington. It was a pretty good music town and I was studying music and English literature. I played in a couple of bands and met a lot of people. The whole scene was revolving around John Mellencamp at the time, Just before he hit it. 

I got bored with it for some reason in 1973 and moved to Paris, France…. Not Illinois or Texas… Played some acoustic guitar in Communist restaurants for food, wine, and tips. It was great! I was living a minimally comfortable bohemian life with a girlfriend and a cat! I got bored with that and on New Years Day 1974, I moved back to my parents’ house in Indiana. That really didn’t work out (a much longer story). On January 12th I went out for a ride around the ‘hood and on impulse pulled into a US Navy recruiting station and signed up. I was on a plane to San Diego on the 15th. Living in Paris on New Year’s Eve and in boot camp in San Diego two weeks later…. If you figure it out, let me know. 

First day they asked if I could sing or play a musical instrument. Having not yet learned to never volunteer, I raised my hand. They asked about the instrument, and I said guitar. They were only interested in marching band instruments, so my guitar skills were not wanted. I said that I could sing, so they led a bunch of us off to a rehearsal room and made each of us sight sing something from random sheet music. I had been in choirs for all four years of high school so I had experience in that, thus becoming a member of the Blue Jacket Choir. I sang for three masses of various denominations each Sunday, and did some off-base things like singing the national anthem at a couple of tennis tournaments and the like. Back on base it was boot camp as usual except for the fact that the DIs tortured us with extra fun because they regarded us as shirkers. Things like the simulated boiler room fire, where you were locked in a room with deck grating over a bilge that was filled with fuel oil and set alight to train you in fire fighting. Everyone did it, but they made us sing “Anchors Aweigh” before letting us put out the fire. 

I spent the next couple of years on various cruises and was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. Some of us on the ship formed a vaguely country rock band and played around town. The usual Skynyrd, Allmans, Willie and Waylon, and the like plus some actual country like Ray Price, Johnny Paycheck, Hank, Buck, etc. In my last year, 1977, we were deployed on a show, the flag/diplomatic goodwill tour in Africa. We played a couple of pickup shows, sitting in for local African bands in the first couple of ports on the cruise. The captain got wind of that and checked us out. He managed to get us detached from the ship and attached to Special Services. I spent my last year in the Navy playing gigs all over Africa on bills with local acts. I learned a lot from the local cats who were in the Juju, Highlife, Afrobeat scene. 

I got out in January of 1978… left on the dock in Mombasa with cab fare to the airport and a plane ticket to Philadelphia, where I was processed out. 

I had made a couple of Nashville friends while in the service, so that’s where I moved from Philly. I played around a bit with folks in the David Allen Coe orbit and did a bit of session work. Along the way I picked up the pedal steel habit and wound up playing a bit as there was work for anyone who could make the “country sound” and few practitioners of that dark art. I did that for a while but realized that it wasn’t going to be a career. I went back to school in Bloomington and finished up my undergraduate degree. Met an artist, we got along, she got accepted to Yale Graduate School, so I tagged along to New Haven.

Mike Nolan with his wife, the harp player Erin Hill

I met a bunch of folks at the Yale Drama School, and ended up doing outside ambient music for several productions there. I started making large metallic “Sound Sculptures” that we used in a couple of Kabuki plays that I worked on. I got a lot of good feedback and direction from Mladen Kiselov, who was the director of the Bulgarian State Theater at the time.

I wanted some more control so I went to the local used music store and bought a used Korg MS-10 and an old echoplex, which was the gateway drug to the whole synthesis rabbit hole. My partner at the time (Debbie Huff) was in the painting school. We were flat broke and living the life. I managed to sell one guitar and buy a Moog Sonic VI, which I still have. That helped fill in the MS-10 sound. I was still looking for something and found out that ARP was going out of business and that a local music store was blowing out the three 2601s they had for $1,000. We scraped every penny we could and ate potatoes for a month so I could buy it. Still have it too. 

After Yale we moved to NYC via a several month stay in Greenwich, Connecticut, back when it was still a sleepy almost farm town. Debbie developed a rare cancer and died in 1995. I’ve been in NYC since New Haven. 

What is your musical activity? February 9th 1964. I was upstairs in my room reading a book. My mom came up and told me there was something on television that I should see. I went downstairs and it was the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan. About a week later I pestered them into buying me a guitar. About two years later I was in a junior high school rock band playing the hits at bowling alley dances. I played in rock bands all through high school and college. I have made a couple records with a couple of bands that didn’t do too much. I have done music for film, theater, and dance productions, as well as playing on sessions and producing. Tonight I’m learning a couple of songs for a gig Friday night at some Country Club. In short, I’m still at it.

I think that you get a bit of what I’m up to through my bio above. 

I have done music for about a hundred shows in NYC and regional theater. Almost never for musicals but rather for cinematic effect. I don’t really do that anymore but I did have shows on Broadway and off Broadway during the thick of it and got to work with a lot of interesting people. Notable was the broadway run of “Nixon’s Nixon” and Christopher Walken’s “HIM” at the Public Theater. I was a founding member of a still active NYC theater, but I no longer participate in the organization. There is a lot more from this period, if you want to know more.

I have played dive bars, stadiums, Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center, regional art venues, museums, festivals, nursing homes, more dive bars, etc.

I’m playing fewer gigs nowadays as the NYC gig scene is still in a bit of disarray post-Covid, and I’m getting tired of the parking hassles in the city, but I always go out with my wife, Erin Hill, usually a couple of times a month.

I’m still building the Serge that I moved on to after my stint with Eurorack… it is at 10.5 panels and will top out at 12, when I get time to solder. It is a great solitary pursuit that lets me just listen and see what happens… maybe interact.

I really look forward to doing the Disquiet Junto projects each week because they give me an outlet for the kind of electronic music that I don’t or can’t perform live.

What is one good musical habit? Listen to something, music or the world, and play the essence of it on some instrument… or sing it.

What are your online locations? Lines, The Steel Guitar Forum, The Internet Archive, Arch Daily. On social media: SoundCloud and Instagram.

What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project? Disquiet 0515 Talking Cure: I have a day job… 36 years (so far) as a professor of architecture. I liked this prompt as I am always thinking about the type of sound or music that fits with a space, especially when that space fits a very defined function.

You mention being a professor of architecture. Could you talk about how you came to that, and also how your knowledge of and experience in architecture correlates with your work in music? The architecture professorship wasn’t something that I had planned on doing. Debbie Huff, who I mentioned earlier, was hired at New York Institute of Technology to teach drawing and visualization plus some color theory courses. A few years into her time there, the architecture department decided to start a program in design computation. I wasn’t working in an office at the time and had no real desire to do that. So I was mostly working on design-build projects in the city. The design-build world is a volatile gig economy with no real security. So I decided to go ahead and apply for the job. Back then in 1987, there were almost no architecture offices using computers and almost no programs in any school for design computation in architecture, other than the really theoretical, high-end work at the MIT Media Lab started by Nick Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner in 1985. I was the only candidate that applied for the job, and despite that fierce competition, I was hired. I had been involved with programming on and off since 1971 so I had some experience with the couple of mainframes (DEC-PDP 11s) that were hanging around. At that time there was a quasi-independent department (read as for-profit) at NYIT (the Computer Graphics Lab) for development of computer graphics, and animation, that had some more advanced Silicon Graphics machines, so I hung out there a bit. The CGL eventually broke off from NYIT and became part of Industrial Light and Magic. Formed in 1974, CGL’s roster included future Pixar president Ed Catmull and co-founder Alvy Ray Smith, Walt Disney feature animation chief scientist Lance Joseph Williams, Dreamworks animator Hank Grebe, and Netscape and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark. I guess I came to NYIT as more of a computer jockey than as an Architect.

Playing in rock bands was kind of the opposite of space, as we were usually trying to fill everything up with the maximum possible amount of noise. The other part of my musical life started after hearing Silver Apples of the Moon. I searched out all of the electronic and experimental work I could find… a lot of work in the pre-internet days. That’s where I ran into Cage and started to understand the importance of silence, which is one musical equivalent for space. Varèse was really influential for the orchestral works, but more importantly for “The Poem Electronique.” The “Poem” led to my discovery of the Philips Pavilion… which led to Le Corbusier on the architecture front, and Iannis Xenakis on the architecture/music front. All of that has been linked for me since the late 1960s and has been a lifelong influence on musical thought…. in many genres…

Every couple of years, I run an elective class on intersections in technology, architecture, and music, where I can develop and expand on these ideas and pass some thoughts on to young architects.

Mike at age one with his family: “My sister, plus my dad playing jug, my grandfather, my uncle Bob. On the front porch of my grandfather’s farm. Probably 1954.”

I think for a lot of casual listeners, and even for many musicians, abstract electronic music can feel quite separate from more traditional forms of music, especially the stuff you talked about early on, like the blues. Could you help connect the dots between playing guitar in a country rock band, and developing a Serge system to make electronic music? Yes, it all does seem completely separate and might have stayed that way except for another random event. During the Nashville period, I went to visit another musician from the scene. He had a plant stand in the front window that was made from a 1X12 shelf on the top of a pedal steel guitar. I asked him about that, and he said that he had tried to learn to play it, but had given it up as a lost cause. I asked about borrowing it for a bit, but he said that he didn’t really want it back and that I could have it…. If I built him another plant stand. So that started the pedal steel guitar journey. If you listen to the really good steel guitar players you can hear the space, the when to play and when to lay out. There are a number of modern pickers that can and do play a million notes a minute, but I don’t really appreciate that. As Jimmy Day (one of my favorite steel players) once said, “I wish I could play that fast, and then I wouldn’t.” I play steel in mostly pop and rock settings, but always try to leave space. There are a number of videos of live sets with my wife, Erin Hill, where you can hear my non-country playing (“Rocket Man,” “Gypsy”). The steel is a very good instrument for ambient drone music as well and is great for processing by or accompaniment to the Serge, or wherever modular. We aren’t that oddball… Check out Chas Smith, who has worked with Hans Zimmer and others on soundtracks, built his own instruments, is a steel guitar player, and owns a rather large Serge system. 

It’s a continuing journey and who knows what’s next.

I want to thank you for creating and maintaining the Junto, it is a great hang and an opportunity to get things out quickly that can be heard by a lot of people outside in the bigger music community.