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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I just found out that my old bass playing electronic wizard buddy Mike Kesti passed away at his home in Oroville, CA on April 1, 2026.\u00a0 My condolences to his family – I attached the included photo of us from 1975 that I attached to my memorial note sent to for his obit.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mike and I first met during our sophomore year in high school.\u00a0 We (Gene Betts, Mike, and I) were involved in our high school musical production <\/span>Bye Bye Birdie.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Playing drums in the pit orchestra, I had already spent a month rehearsing with the other musicians in the high school music room before we started assembling the full production at Kaufman Auditorium (at our old Jr High school, Graverate).\u00a0 Gene was doing prop and production work on stage and Mike was an acoustic guitar playing member during the big production numbers on stage.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Gene and I had played music together at his house a few times (his brother had a nice Gibson SG but Gene could not take it out of the house (yet) so I would bring over a cymbal and snare drum so we could jam).\u00a0 When the pit orchestra bass player and I started playing snippets of songs waiting for rehearsals to start, Mike began coming over with his acoustic and joined in.\u00a0 After a while, it became like a version of \u2018stump the band\u2019 when cast members would ask, \u201cDo you know <\/span>Inna gadda da vida?\u201d <\/span><\/i>(or something like that) and we would launch into what we knew of it.\u00a0 This went on until the director asked us to stop so she could get things going.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The three of us plus Mike Cleary, the lead singer for The French Church, officially played real music together at the cast party held at the the Chalet Supper Club.\u00a0 We had a blast and before the night was over, the three of us made plans to get together in the summer and play some tunes.\u00a0 This was the beginning of The Twig – but our first working name was \u2018The Bight\u2019 (which we got tired of spelling and explaining it was a joke from the saying, \u2018that bites\u2019).\u00a0 We were a true garage band (okay, basement band) with Gene finally getting to use his brother\u2019s guitar and amp, Mike playing his bass (not sure he had his Fender Bassman yet) though a homemade speaker bottom he built in the housing of an old and very heavy wooden TV enclosure.\u00a0 I had my trusty silver sparkle Ludwig kit (the \u2018Ringo\u2019 kit) and a couple of old mics Mr Electronics scrounged up.\u00a0 A classmate (and old friend of both Gene and Mike – June Swanson, nee:\u00a0 DeRoche) was at many of our practices and early gigs – she was working at Brookridge Heights when my mom first moved there.\u00a0 June and and I had a blast recalling the days of the band.\u00a0 She liked to hear my mother tell the story of how she had to move her knicknacks away from the edge of her dresser because Mike\u2019s bass notes would rattle the whole house.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We spent the next twelve months learning songs, playing the occasional party (a Red Owl grocery store workers party and some teen things at Messiah Lutheran Church).\u00a0 When we knew we were serious about becoming a gigging band, we worked a regular rehearsal schedule around Mike\u2019s job at the hospital kitchen and Gene\u2019s job at the Erickson gas station.\u00a0 Both were in need of cash to upgrade their equipment which we did in bits and pieces as we went.\u00a0 I did not have any regular employment and the drums were paid for by countless hours of helping my dad cut and sell firewood on the weekends.\u00a0 We also played many youth services at Messiah Lutheran church – it had great acoustics and we enjoyed helping out.\u00a0 This means we can say we played in the same venue as the Rolling Stones who did an acoustic version of <\/span>Amazing Grace<\/span><\/i> there years later when their long time road manager Chuch McGee was laid to rest<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The first true paying job we got after we joined the local Musician\u2019s Union was an outdoor event for Northern Michigan University\u2019s Band Camp.\u00a0 We were hired to play for an hour which was good because we only had an hour worth of songs.\u00a0 When we were done, the campers\u00a0 pleaded with their counselors to let us play longer so we repeated our whole set list (minus the drum solo in <\/span>Toad\/Born to be Wild<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0 We knew we had work to do so we began looking into a real PA and buckled down to learn enough songs to do longer gigs.\u00a0 We played at a church youth gathering in Gladstone, a fundraising affair\u00a0 (in a tent) for the church at the U.P. State Fair in Escanaba and set our sights on playing our first real high school dance in the fall of 1970.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We visited the local electronics store and purchased some good mics while Mike ordered us an affordable set of PA speakers from an electronics catalog.\u00a0 It was powered by the PA amp Mike had built from a kit.\u00a0 One gig later, we found the speakers were not going to cut it so we all pitched in and bought two better speaker cabs from Marquette Music, added treble horns Mike had found, and we were in business.\u00a0 Our final set up had me in the middle with four Fender bottoms (two Bassman and two Showman) on either side.\u00a0 Gene was on my right, Mike on my left and they each had a bottom on either side so they could hear each other.\u00a0 It also gave us a bigger sound when playing large rooms like gymnasiums.\u00a0 Our elaborate stage lighting consisted of two four foot fluorescent bulbs (red and green) placed alongside the drum kit.\u00a0 The last professional touch came courtesy of the printing class Mike was taking – he made up business cards for The Twig to distribute during gigs.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0From August of 1970 to June of 1971, The Twig played enough gigs that I never did have to get a paying job.\u00a0 School dances (high school and junior high), frat parties, and even a couple of bar gigs kept us playing while we expanded our set list to accommodate four hour nights.\u00a0 We used our dad\u2019s (Mike and mine) pickup trucks to haul equipment and were lucky enough to never have had a vehicle or major equipment breakdown during our gigging time.\u00a0 The largest crowds we played in front of were at the annual High School Talent Show (2,000) and a dance when Marquette hosted the annual Community School Olympics (4,000).\u00a0 The last job we played was for a dance to open the new youth center in Munising after which life went on without us getting to play together again.\u00a0 I ended up going to work in the kitchen at the Huron Mountain Club later in June.\u00a0 I lost touch with both Gene (before he eventually moved to California) and Mike (who was Michigan Tech bound).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During the spring semester of my freshman year at NMU, I hooked up with a band composed of three airmen from KI Sawyer AFB.\u00a0 When I joined, they were called Cloudy and Cool.\u00a0 None of them could join the local AF of M but as I was a card carrying member, I became the Union\u2019s \u2018leader of record\u2019 and band booker.\u00a0 This allowed the newly renamed \u2018Knockdown\u2019 to charge union wages and play in joints that would not hire non-union bands.\u00a0 Knockdown went on until May of 1974 when our guitar player (Ray Bennett, the human juke box) mustered out of the Air Force.\u00a0 The end of the band worked well for me – after spending two years with them (including two summers commuting back and forth from the Huron Mountain Club for gigs), I was going to\u00a0 work at the NMU Field Station near Munising and would not have been able to play during the summer of 1974.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As fate would have it, I returned to town in August and happened to catch the last gig for Sustone (Marquette\u2019s answer to the horn band Chicago) at the Backdoor bar located at the Marquette Mountain ski chalet.\u00a0 Talking to their guitarist Barry Seymour led to us jamming to see if we could get a new band together.\u00a0 We added my old Knockdown bass player to the mix.\u00a0 We added another guitar player and when it became obvious that the bass player was not working out, we wondered where we could find a new one.\u00a0 Barry and I ran into Mike at the same Backdoor ski chalet bar when we were checking out another band.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Barry was a few years younger than Mike and I.\u00a0 He remembers jamming with The Twig along with another guitarist.\u00a0 Soon after The Twig disbanded, Mike picked me up to go over for a fun little jam with future Sunstone drummer Tom Lyons and Barry, so we had a little history with him before we all\u00a0 met up again five years later.\u00a0 Mike had just returned from an aborted attempt to play in a band in Toledo, Ohio and was just starting work at NMU\u2019s Public TV station.\u00a0 He was excited to join Sledgehammer and made an immediate impact by designing our new PA (the speakers we built in my dad\u2019s workshop while Mike (again) built the PA amp).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My job commitment at the NMU Field Station took me out of town on fall weekends into mid-October.\u00a0 We couldn\u2019t book gigs yet so we filled that time with regular band practices in my folk\u2019s basement.\u00a0 Once my weekends were free, we began booking jobs at the usual places:\u00a0 dances, frat parties, bars, a couple of weekend road trips out of town, and even one wedding reception (even though our band business cards said \u2018We Don\u2019t Do Polkas\u2019).\u00a0 Barry brought in his love of The Doobie Brothers, BTO, Eagles, and Steely Dan.\u00a0 I contributed some of the older stuff that Mike and I had done back in The Twig with second guitarist Lindsay adding Joe Walsh, Hendrix, and Jethro Tull tunes to the mix.\u00a0 Mike was big into ZZ Top and the Grateful Dead but for some reason, the Dead never did crack our playlist (Barry guesses it was because we weren\u2019t exactly a jam band).\u00a0 Mike added floor monitors to our PA and this allowed us to do justice to the harmony parts Barry arranged, especially for the Eagles and Doobie Brothers songs.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sledgehammer recorded our live set at the Four Seasons Lanes and Lounge in April of 1975.\u00a0 Mike put a friend of his on the mixing board for the night and then took the master tape and made copies for each of us.\u00a0 I eventually converted mine to CD before the tape began to show its age.\u00a0 It is one of my favorite pieces of band memorabilia from my playing days.\u00a0 I later used what I learned from Mike to make a similar recording of Easy Money, my last gigging band (recorded at the Ontonagon VFW at the second to the last job I played as a regular member back in the fall of 1978).\u00a0 I sometimes wish we had been able to make a recording of The Twig back in the day, but <\/span>Sledgehammer Live from the Four Seasons Lanes and Lounge<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Easy Money Live – Taking it to the VFW<\/span><\/i> (yes, kind of a Doobie Brothers ripoff) contain many elements of what Gene, Mike, and I did together to remind me of those days.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0RIP to both Mike and Gene – we had a lot of good times together and I am happy to say the lessons we learned together in The Twig carried on as we all continued in the music biz.\u00a0 Even though we were not in contact with each other, we made some great memories together.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Mike loved ZZ Top and he and I traded vocals on this burner – the frat boys loved this tune!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I just found out that my old bass playing electronic wizard buddy Mike Kesti passed away at his home in Oroville, CA on April 1, 2026.\u00a0 My condolences to his family – I attached the included photo of us from 1975 that I attached to my memorial note sent to for his obit. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-from-the-vaults","category-local-music-news","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3810"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3813,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810\/revisions\/3813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}