Goodbye Big Mike

In the June 7 edition of his music column, Backbeat editor Dave Herrera writes about Michael "Big Mike" Colin, a performer and entrepreneur who took his own life a few weeks back. This was far from Colin's first mention in Westword, however. His name turned up in bold print frequently during the '90s and early '00s, and it would have appeared again recently under far happier circumstances had events evolved differently. Earlier this year, Colin sent Westword a three-volume set of recordings called Eclecticore credited to Mike Colin + The Family of Noise, and I felt this sprawling collection of tracks (some terrific, some half-baked, all wonderfully personal) was definitely worthy of review. Unfortunately, Colin didn't include some key pieces of information -- specifically, whether the CDs were commercial available, and if so, where music lovers could find them. So I sent e-mails to every address I could find for Colin, in the hope that he could fill in the gaps, but I never received a reply. The next time I heard about him was in an e-mail from former Denver musician Chuck Fishman informing me of a MySpace note about Colin's passing.

This last episode was typical of the Colin about whom I wrote on numerous occasions. For him, expressing himself through music was always more important than making money from the fruit of his labors. He was a pure artist, and if he never received the attention he deserved, his boundless energy, creative diversity and deep well of passion inspired musicians throughout the city.

Westword's online archives capture many aspects of Big Mike's personality. A February 1994 profile focused on Cactus Marco, a group Colin formed following the dissolution of Phatasmorgasm, which I described as "a remarkable band, capable of blending rap, rock, metal and practically anything else that wasn't nailed down into an utterly original whole." Cactus Marco featured some of these ingredients, too, thanks to the efforts of Colin and former Phantasmorgasm drummer Kenny Ortiz -- but it also ventured into new realms thanks to guitarist Bob Tiernan, a member of a bold jazz-fusion outfit known as Windowpane. At the time, Colin was also running N.O.A., a record label behind The Denver Collection, Volume One, a compilation that championed an even wider variety of sounds. Still, Colin remained focused on music, not commerce, as the article's last two paragraphs make clear:

Big Mike is under no illusions that his project's suddenly going to turn the Colorado music community on its ear--as he says, "If there's one thing Denver teaches you, it's not to give a fuck." From his experiences with Phantasmorgasm, he knows that success is fine, but what's more important is expressing one's creativity as honestly as possible, without regard to how many others clasp the results to their bosoms.

"I feel sorry for bands that are going to die here unhappy, and for people who, if they don't get signed, are going to have an unfulfilling life," he adds. "We're just happy doing what we're doing, and if you don't like it, fine. We're going to keep doing it anyway."

An April 1997 column touches upon similar themes. As noted in the piece, Colin had decided to combine music he'd made as part of Cactus Marco, Acoustifuxx and other outfits under the Phantasmorgasm name -- an act of juxtaposition symbolic of his belief that boundaries, musical and otherwise, were to be ignored, not heeded. He conveyed his ambition in the following quote:

"It's going to be hard for people to get a handle on this much eclecticism," Big Mike concedes, "but that's the point of the project. This might sound rather lofty, but we're trying to document that at the end of the twentieth century, there were still people who cared about music as art. There are very few innovations going on now; it's a very bleak period. So we're trying to show people in the future that some musicians wanted to do more. We're trying to create a new aesthetic."

This last goal was enormous, and Colin's efforts to accomplish it took a toll. Around the time of Westword contributor Thomas Peake's fine November 1998 Phantasmorgasm article, a frustrated Big Mike left the scene for a couple of years. However, he had an incredible amount of music in him that demanded to be heard, and at the time of this September 2000 column by former Backbeat editor Laura Bond, he'd come up with a plan to push it into the marketplace by burning individual recordings for customers on demand, rather than pressing a bunch of discs in advance. The idea was inspired in large part by economic realities, but it also returned music to its essentials -- one person singing and playing his heart out in an attempt to communicate directly with a member of his audience.

Colin's fans never numbered in the millions or even the tens of thousands -- but that doesn't diminish his efforts in the slightest. While he was here, he fought the good fight, and that's all any of us can ask. -- Michael Roberts