Lockren
Michael

Hello, everyone.
As you can see from my photo, I DO NOT wear a hat! I instead prefer to secure my sloshing grey matter with a snuggly tied bandana in some odd “80’s Hair Metal/Gang Banger/Construction Worker/Biker/Richard Simmons” conglomerate mess of a fashion statement. In short, it keeps the sweat out of my eyes! With that aside, let’s move on to a bit of an odd tale of my beginnings.

As close as can be determined, I must’ve been born around 1965…at least that’s what the doctors were able to conclude. They put my age at about three years old when they first discovered me in a thickly wooded area along the banks of Indian Creek in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

A city bus driver had taken his bus on an off-the-beaten-path detour to embark on a lunchtime romp with an overtly friendly passenger. As they clamored through the tangled brush that opened up onto the banks of the creek, they came upon me sitting naked at the waters edge stuffing my cheeks full of fallen tree nuts. Having been abandoned by my biological parents, I had apparently been taken in and was being raised by a family of escaped hamsters from the nearby nature center.

I was too young to remember these events myself and I can only speculate as to the accuracy of this account. I do know however, that on occasion I have sudden profound cravings for fallen tree nuts and I find myself fascinated with running in place!

By the time I was eight years old I had fully reintegrated with society and had developed an interest in percussion. All was fair game… couches, chairs, books, my own stomach…you name it, I’d beat on it.

My mother decided, when I was 10, that I needed to replace my original drum kit. It consisted of a large cardboard box that my mother’s cookware had come in, an old tin lunch box with a red and green plaid print pattern on it, an empty Quaker Oats oatmeal canister, and a couple of old metal lids from a frying pan and a stock pot (probably why she needed new cookware). My mother was poor but she tried hard to provide and for Christmas, “Santa” bestowed upon me my first “Junior Drum Kit” from Sears Roebuck. Its shells were made of…yep…cardboard! No matter though because THAT day became the best part of the rest of my life!

That drum set never made it past the first year before being annihilated by my incessant thrashing and I never was able to afford a new drum kit until I was 20 years old. For ten years I simply taught myself to play entirely in my head. No real instrument, just an intense desire. When I finally did get a REAL set of drums, I was in my first band within six months. It was a three piece band called LOS COZ…and it was!!!

In 1989, after a couple of years bashin’ around with some different local garage bands, I received a call to join a country road band looking for a rock drummer. I left Cedar Rapids and spent the next four years tootling around the Midwest and Canada until I returned to CR in ’94 where I joined up with local country band, Santa Fe.
I left them in late ’99 and in 2000 hooked up with the superbly energetic classic rock, country, blues, and variety band, Me and Rosie B. We spent three awesome years together but the longing for more focused top-40 country was gnawing at me and when Mike Flack called me with the idea of 8 Seconds, I stepped down from my post to follow my heart.

I traversed 8 Seconds through it’s eventual mutation into Unknown Highway and ultimately ended up here with the folks you’ve come to know collectively as……LOCKREN. That’s my story and I’m s-s-stickin’ to it!