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autograph?’ We’re clipping along at 70 miles per hour on I-271 North and Michael wanted to do it! So the limo driver just kept pace with that car. I remember it was on my side, we put the window down. It was very dangerous and almost stupid, but Michael was trying to do it.

“The window went down and he was reaching to try and get the paper from the guy. The limo driver was just trying to keep parallel with the guy and it didn’t work out, because we were going so fast. The guy in the car mistook it as Michael was ignoring it, so he started to yell a lot of profanity at Michael. It was this weird little cool moment that turned dark. Michael just dropped back in the seat, we put the windows up and he got really upset because he cared about every fan. He really got upset that he couldn’t give that guy an autograph and that he’d probably never come to another show. He just felt really, really bad. And then everything got quiet in the limo for the rest of the trip up to Chagrin Boulevard. It was something only four of us witnessed and it said a lot about the attitude he had towards interacting with his fans.”

That connection endured even through critiques by his longtime supporters. In its Aug. 26 - Sept. 1, 1982 issue, Scene ran a letter from Stacey Sharp, a local fan who felt “betrayed” by the band after the publication’s “MSB Opening Act” contest (co-hosted by WMMS) promised Eddie Money would strike up his band before Stanley’s at the August 25 show, which didn’t happen. “I am sure that Wednesday night will nevertheless, be a good time and a good show,” Sharp wrote. “But as I sit here listening to Eddie Money I can’t help but feel deceived, as well as $10 poorer.” (In the same issue, Money was interviewed by Scene’s Keith Rathbun and proclaimed: “[Michael Stanley’s] a nice cat and he’s got a real great band. But when I come through Cleveland I’m going to do the ‘Eddie Money Show.’ I want to headline there.”)

The following week, Stanley empathetically responded to Sharp with a letter of his own, providing a backstory to Money’s cancellation with the hope of making things right. “It was Eddie’s choice to turn down the dates, and I am truly sorry Stacey that you feel ‘betrayed’ and ‘taken,’” he wrote. “I hope this letter clears up some of your assumptions. We try to make each MSB show one that you will remember. I hope this year’s Blossom shows made up for Mr. Money’s absence.”

Dobeck said that after one of the shows, his ride left him at Blossom and he didn’t have a way back to downtown, before jokingly suggesting that, if it had been up to Belkin Productions, there would have been six shows in total. And though Pelander called it a “nightmare,” the drummer joyously recounted the night a rainstorm nearly flooded the lawn area. “They had a mudslide on the side of Blossom,” Dobeck said. “I was sitting up [on my riser] watching the kids slide down this hill and a cop tried to grab the kid at the top of the hill. The cop didn’t want the kids to ruin the grass, but he ended up going down the hill with them.” Dobeck’s favorite memory, however, came later that night, by way of Stanley falling on his ass when he ran across the stage. “It was the funniest thing I ever saw,” he said “Michael was far more animated in those days, and he slipped and, literally, did this roll [across stage]. He got up right after. We were all surprised he could even stand after that. We thought he broke something. We kept playing and were like, ‘Oh my God, he’s still alive. Is he going to do that tomorrow night, too?’”

The shows endured even after the stage lights went out in Cuyahoga Falls, as The Plain Dealer and Scene reported extensively on the milestone.

In the August 27 edition of The Plain Dealer, longtime rock critic Jane Scott likened the excitement of the band’s August 25 performance to when the Beatles played Public Hall in September 1964. Scott noted that the sea of 19,000 fans was almost four times the size of Stanley’s hometown of Chagrin Falls and that the crowd’s screams began around 8:45 p.m., when the band walked out on-stage. She praised the first chapter of the Blossom run, highlighting the mammoth, 29-song setlist and how wonderfully the Michael Stanley Band had evolved as a group. Scott even gave a nod to the uptick in production value.

“This concert also had the band’s first use of lasers, done sparingly and tastefully,” she wrote. “The shows continue tonight, Monday and Tuesday. I can’t think of a better way to spend those nights.”

ON FACEBOOK, A NUMBER OF

Michael Stanley Band groups and fanbases share memories from throughout the years. Koslen and Gismondi are no strangers to those pages, as they often join in on the reminiscing. Though the local support remains strong, which is emphasized through tribute shows selling out the MGM at Northfield Park, a question still lingers 40 years after the fact: How did the Michael Stanley Band manage to pack over 70,000 people onto Blossom’s grounds in one week?

Koslen said it’s a mix of Stanley’s artistry and the Belkins’ firepower in the industry.

“Mike Belkin, in particular, he was the real force in Cleveland,” he said. “They had a lot of clout and they put their muscle behind Michael. When I left the band, Michael had that momentum. He was a terrific musician and songwriter. He was. When he stopped working with David Spiro and went on to work with the Belkins, that was what he needed to push him over, at least locally. And it worked really, really well and really fast.” The Belkins were the missing piece for Stanley and they built off of the essential foundation Spiro had started. Their influence in the music business got the band on stages all around the country, but it was the band’s chemistry that sold the tickets. “It wasn’t that hard to get people in there to see Michael and to see the band, because it was really good,” Koslen said. “It was a really good band all around.”

Mike Belkin Jr. noted that Cleveland was the peak marketplace for Stanley’s career. “To this day, nobody’s done four shows [in a row] there,” he said. “The fact that he was able to play here until he passed away shows the loyalty of those fans and the quality of his material.”

The Belkins believed in the Blossom shows and knew it could change the history of rock and roll in the city. “I used to sit in that room while the Belkins and Blossom were negotiating,” Abood said. “I was a newbie there, but Mike Belkin looked at me and said, ‘You better advertise the hell out of this show. I want to sell every single seat,’ and, thankfully, we did.”

Afterward, each band member got a glass trophy commemorating the feat, but it took awhile for the impact of the shows to really sink in.

“We went about our business and started working on the next batch of songs,” Pelander said. “It didn’t sink in until years and years later. It was like a dream. Obviously the people on the business end had an idea of past ticket sales and all the metrics, but I don’t think we ever expected to do 74,000 people.”

The band had approached the shows like they would any and brought with them the same mantra: give the people their money’s worth and ride the excitement until the wheels fall off.

“It’s something that, when you’re in the moment, you don’t realize how special it is,” Pelander said, echoing what Stanley said before the shows. “Even something that special.”

THE MICHAEL STANLEY BAND

would put out two more studio albums together, You Can’t Fight Fashion (1983) and Inside Moves (1986), before dissolving. On the former, Stanley wrote his grandest ode to the city that loved him beyond words: “My Town.”

“The lyrics were so Cleveland,” Dobeck said. “If you were from Cleveland, you got it real quick.”

It remains a perfect epilogue to the Blossom shows, when a city showed out en masse for their favorite son. Though the band was getting radio play in every major market, 50% of their records were sold within 100 miles of Cleveland. “He was happy to be here and [Cleveland] was happy to have him. I think that’ll last a long time,” Dobeck said. “It was his charisma onstage and his songwriting. He was able to write a lyric that people could identify with a part of their life or a story they were going through. I hate to say it was all him, but it was all him. I was lucky to be on the ride.”

On May 29th, 2022, at the Robins Theatre in Warren, Ohio, a few hundred longtime fans of Stanley packed into the seats to watch the Resonators and Koslen pay tribute to their late friend, one of a slate of tribute concerts organized after Stanley’s death. Parents, who used to have Michael Stanley Band records in their tape decks in high school, brought their kids along, passing the musical communion down to them. The songs still endure and you could see so brightly that Stanley is as deeply missed as he is eternally loved. But no matter how loud the music plays, there’s still a hole in the stage where he used to stand.

“There’s nobody that can take Michael’s place. He was with the people in Cleveland every single day,” Koslen said. “The audience still wants to come out and be around the experience again, even after Michael’s gone. He’s created this community of people that gather around him. Yes, they gathered for the music, but they also gathered in a very personal way. They felt this connection between each other, too, and with Michael. And that still remains today.”

scene@clevescene.com @clevelandscene