Mike Lucas: Singer-Songwriter

by Charles McGuigan 02.2024

Photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

They sat around the kitchen table as the house settled into slumber, its systems quietly shutting down for the night, until there was just the soft purr of the refrigerator, barely audible. This was Bryan Harvey’s house in Woodland Heights just blocks away from the house Mike Lucas called home. The two sat across the table from Coby Batty, and these three men, linked by a love of music, had been good friends most of their lives. Each one of them began singing a song.  When Mike finished his, Bryan would sing another, and then hand it off to Coby. As the night grew older, they began singing drinking songs, and Mike Lucas sang a song he had written called “Daddy Messed Up.” When he finished it, Bryan looked over at him and said: “Mike, that’s the best song you have ever written.”

Mike Lucas is sitting across from me at another kitchen table. He wears his signature cowboy hat, his acoustic guitar cradled in his lap, his left hand gripping its neck. “I must have been in a sad mood the day I wrote that song,” he says. “Most of my other stuff is pretty upbeat.” 

Bryan Harvey (Requiem aeternam dona eum) was in the very first real band that Mike joined when he was just seventeen. “Our first band was called Honcho, named after Bryan Harvey’s dog,” Mike remembers.  “That would have been the first band I was in that played gigs for money.” They would play at junior high school proms and teen dances at a local pool. Bruce Terrell and Bryan Harvey played lead guitar, with Mike on rhythm and Stephen McCarthy on bass. And their drummer was Eddie Rowe who was somewhat older than his band mates and had played with a number of other Richmond groups. “He was the veteran,”says Mike. “And all of us sang.”

Mike’s love for music began many years before that though. When he was just five years old he would walk up to the piano in his parents’ house and gently tap the keys picking, out tunes like “Yankee Doodle.” His mother saw this and enrolled her young son in piano lessons. But those lessons did not take. Where Mike had a natural ear for music, he could not read a lick of it because, as it turned out, he had dyslexia, which no one at the time recognized even though this learning disorder had been identified in 1877 by a German professor of medicine who called it word blindness.

Something similar would occur when he was in elementary school. He joined the school band to play trumpet and though he could not read the music, he was able to follow a girl trumpeter who stood next to him. He played well, learning by ear. Then, in fifth grade he was tested on his ability to read music.    

“They stood us up in front of everyone with a piece of music that we had never played,” Mike tells me. “Of course I couldn’t read it. And they were like, ‘Oh, you can’t read music, you’re out of the band.’

 If I heard it, I could play it. They didn’t know about dyslexia back then and they just said I was lazy.”

This would not in any way discourage Mike’s pursuit of his love for music. And a Christmas gift to his sister, who was thirteen at the time, changed everything for him. 

“My sister got a Barclay guitar,” says Mike. “Everyone was getting guitars back then with The Beatles and The Stones being so popular.” But his sister didn’t have any interest in the instrument, and it ended up discarded in her closet. 

“I was rooting around in her room and found the guitar and started playing with it and I took to liking it,” Mike says. “I was nine or ten, and I would sit on the curb in front of the house playing it.”

One day, as Mike strummed that guitar from his perch on the curb, Bruce Terrell, a neighbor, happened to be walking by, so he stopped and sat next to his friend, and they would hand the guitar back and forth, but neither of them had any clue how to really play it, let alone tune it.

So what they did was tune three of the strings in the same note, and compose a surf song. “We wrote a song before we could even tune a guitar,” says Mike. “And that’s what started everything; I was hooked.  Bruce Terrell, one of my oldest friends, was instrumental in all my first bands.”

After these preteens wrote that surf song, Bruce went off to get proper guitar lessons, and Mike’s mother handed him two dollars and told him to knock on the door of a neighborhood musician and ask for a lesson. “He was a guy named Tommy Martin who played in a band,” Mike recalls. “He had taught me chords, and how to play ‘Gloria’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun, and a Monkees’ song called  ‘I’m Not Your Stepping Stone.’  You had to take off your shoes to go into his house. And he had his Sears Silvertone guitar and a microphone and a stand. This guy was a total pro to me. He might as well have been one of the Beatles.”

When a teen dance was held at Chestnut Oaks Recreation Pool, Mike, too young to be admitted to the dance, would watch through the hurricane fence that surrounded the pool. His fingers gripped the galvanized steel links and his eyes widened as Tommy Martin and his band performed.  All the band members wore orange slacks and blue alligator shirts, and they had all the right equipment. “It was dazzling,” Mike says. “I was enthralled, and that’s when I decided this is what I want to do.” 

Shortly after Mike came of age, a number of his friends took him down to The Warehouse (a now defunct restaurant/bar) in Shockoe Slip and bought him shot after shot in celebration. Jimmy Morgan, who had played with the Good Humor Band, was playing there, and during a break, an alcohol-fueled Mike Lucas approached the stage area.

“Hey man if I were to bring a little amp and play guitar behind you would you be okay with that?” Mike asked Jimmy. “Because I really like what you do.”

Jimmy nodded. “Sure. Come on down.”

And so Mike, who was employed laying carpet, came to The Warehouse with a small Yamaha amp and his Fender Stratocaster. Jimmy would invite him to do a couple of solos. 

“Well he liked it, and I liked it,” says Mike. “The next thing I knew after sitting in a couple nights with him, he says, ‘You want to join up?’. And I couldn’t say yes fast enough. That was my first full-time music gig.”

The pair continued as duo for a couple of months and then were joined by Bucky Baxter on pedal steel, and not long thereafter, Stephen McCarthy added his bass talent, and Hank Miller played drums, and The Pep Boys weres born. They became a traditional, straight country band, performing covers by Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson. 

“It was the real stuff and I’d never played it before and it was like a light going off over my head,” Mike says. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is where everything came from.’ But I had to play it before I warmed up to it.”

During that period, Mike and his band mates went down to Nashville to record two songs, and none other than Ricky Skaggs sang background vocals for them. “This was a huge thing to us,” says Mike. “That was the greatest thing that could have happened to a bunch of young guys.”

The Pep Boys stayed together for a little over a year, and then Jimmy headed out to California. Right after the announcement, as the band was breaking down their equipment at The Warehouse, Mike wore a hangdog expression as he was loading his equipment into his 1968 Pontiac Tempest. And then he heard a motorcycle that pulled next to him, idling. It was Greg Wetzel.

“Hey Mike, what you doing, man?” he asked.

“I’m kind of bummed,” Mike said.  “I just lost my gig.”

With a wide grin on his face, Greg Wetzel pointed at him and said, “You’re with US now.” And then Greg pulled off.

“I didn’t go twenty-four hours without a gig,” says Mike. “It was insane. That’s how I got in The Good Humor Band.” 

For the first couple months Mike served as sound engineer and roadie, but then began playing and singing, and the band had gigs up and down the East Coast. They recorded well over an album’s worth of material, and two years later the band broke up.

At around that time Mike got a job as a carpenter’s helper and his good friend Clark Robinson taught him how to be a finished carpenter. “I was glad to learn the trade,” says Mike. “It’s come in mighty handy over the years.” 

Mike always continued with his music. For a time he worked lounges six nights a week, fifty-two weeks a year. “Rednecky bars where people come to dance, pair off, and then leave,” he says. “It was a band called CW Rhythm. I learned to play a lot of genres of music. And nothing  gets you better on your instrument than playing it every night.”

Next he was with Ray Pittman’s band called The King Pins. They played from Ocean City, Maryland to Key West. Throughout the course of his life, Mike has played with at least fifteen different bands, including The Honky Tonk Experience and Big Posse.

For six years he worked full-time as a carpenter at the VMFA, and then he started getting a lot of studio work. “I was playing on commercials at In Your Ear and a place called RainMaker,” Mike says. “They would hire me for the sessions. And people like Janet Martin and Susan Greenbaum had me come in and play pedal steel parts on songs here and there. Sometimes I did a couple sessions a day, and so I left my job at the museum.”

Things were going really well. In late 1998 he did a long gig with the Theatre of Virginia for their production of a play based on the life of Patsy Cline. “They hired local musicians because they wanted a real band,” Mike tells me. He would also play with Bruce Hornsby on a soundtrack for the Kevin Costner movie, Tin Cup. “All this great stuff was happening and I was thinking I’ve got it made. This is my life now.”

Then in 2000 with the release of the Coen brothers’ film, ‘Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?’ it seemed everyone wanted acoustic music as sound beds for their commercials. And Mike was busier than ever with studio work. 

But in the wink of an eye that all changed. “That wheel turned and then it went from acoustic instruments to extreme stuff and they could do that on the keyboards,” Mike says. “I went from several sessions a month to one every two months. Now it’s once a year.”

But one Sunday every month Mike Lucas performs at Northside Grille, and the shows are enchanting.

“I do what I like,” Mike says. “Hard country, George Jones, Chuck Berry, Dave Edmunds. I’m kind of all over the map. I’ll do anything I think I can do well. The bottom line is, if I’m gonna sing a song in front of people I have to love it.”

He lists some of his favorite songs: “Handle with Care, Mercury Blues, Last Dance with Mary Jane, Tennessee Whiskey, Midnight Rider, The Way. These songs hit me like a ton of bricks. Songs that affect me like that, they’re the ones I’m gonna play. But it can be from any genre. I love More Than I Can Do, Slip Away, She’s a Woman, Wichita Lineman. If it suits how I play and sing and I feel like I can pull it off, I’ll do it.”

A singer-songwriter himself, Mike Lucas is particularly partial to other singer-songwriters. “It doesn’t get any better than Merle Haggard,” he says. “And guys like Steve Earle and Jim Lauderdale are probably my two favorite singer-songwriters right now.”

“Music for me was the one thing I was pretty good at naturally,” he says of his craft and chosen medium. “Music was a place for me to go where I fit in. It’s a magical thing. Lyrics of a song can touch you in a way that nothing else can. Or there can be a classical piece by Bach with a melody so beautiful that it can make you tear up. I don’t know if anybody understands it.”  

And then singer-songwriter Mike Lucas tells me what his oldest friend, a man he has known since he was four years old, once said.

“Coby Batty said it really well one time. We were talking about music and all the different genres and styles, and his explanation for it was, ‘it’s all beating on a rock with a stick.’”

Mike pauses for a moment, then says. “Music is a magic thing and I don’t understand how it works. I just know that it does.”