Michael Katon

Michael Katon
Born Ypsilanti, Michigan
Genres Blues, rock
Occupation(s) Guitarist
Years active 1980s-2000s
Labels Provogue Records
Website www.katon.com

Michael Katon is an American blues-rock guitarist and vocalist. He grew up in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA, in a musical family where he was early inspired to take up the guitar.

Katon began playing with local bands in clubs and roadhouse bars around Detroit from the age of 15, and spent 20 years paying his dues in classic blues fashion, working with a succession of blues and jazz bands. Subsequently based in Hell, Michigan, he released his solo debut, Boogie All Over Your Head, on his own Wild Ass label, with Swedish label Garageland picking up Katon in Europe. The straight forward R&B boogie style, gravelly vocals and stylish blues guitar of Proud To Be Loud endeared Katon to both the blues and heavy metal crowds, and live shows with Ed Phelps (guitar, harmonica), Jon Eppinga (drums) and Gary Rasmussen (bass) proved to be wild affairs, particularly due to the guitarist's penchant for four- and five-hour sets.

Netherlands-based blues label Provogue Records were suitably impressed, offering Katon a European contract and he quit drinking to concentrate on his guitar playing, resulting in the harder, more focused Get On The Boogie Train, and while his lyrics retained their customary humor, he also produced a fine slice of urban blues in 'Cadillac Assembly Line'. Rip It Hard continued in the traditional blues-boogie vein, and while, like many blues men, major commercial success evades Katon, he remains a respected guitarist in the field.[1] He released a live album in 1997.[2]

Valerie Potter of Metal Hammer said " Michael Katon plays some of the loudest, toughest, meanest rock & blues on the planet!".[3] Living Blues also said of Katon: "Katon is a virtuoso guitar player with his roots in the right place...[his] sound is a blazing blend of electric blues and roadhouse boogie".[4] Allmusic critic Cub Coda wrote that Michael Katon

"plays true American roadhouse rock ’n’ roll and blues with a raw, mean and spirited sound, combining lowdown blues and boogie with the amped-up approach . Katon’s guitar playing is informed with the nastiest and tastiest tones imaginable with torrential slide work and astonishing string bending capabilities. His relentless energy and dedication to pouring every ounce of soul into the music is perhaps best described by an astounded fellow guitarist who said, ”Katon won’t stop beating on a guitar until he’s squeezed every last thing he can possibly get out of it. That guitar is glad to go back in the case at the end of the night, believe me.”

The first time I saw Michael Katon playing, he was blowing the roof off of some unnamed dump in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio, shaking the walls down with a wild-ass sound. Armed with a wall of Super Reverbs with a Strat plugged into ‘em that was soaked in sweat and beer with the bridge rusted into place, he was playing with the kind of fervor that only a musician, a true road dog, can put into it. When music is your passion, it becomes part of your fiber and being, you realize that you’re married to it, and you put everything real that’s inside of you inside of it and you’ll play no matter where, no matter what.

Maybe that’s why Michael Katon impressed me so much that first night. Here was a guy, playin’ to a handful of nobody specials in a place the size of a phone booth and he was goin’ at it like he was killin’ rattlesnakes. He was up there on that postage stamp sized stage, the personification of hillbilly detachment cool, channeling equal parts Lightnin’Hopkins, Albert King,and Paul Burlison, while laying it down like he was knockin’ it out with big stage presence for the festival crowd. Soon after that night his debut album ‘Boogie All Over Your Head’ was released to international raves, and Katon has hardly had time to look back. European tours to ecstatic audiences have regularly been the norm since that album’s foreign release in 1984. A quick look through his gig itinerary finds Katon’s no holds barred style equally at home in a variety of settings; sharing international music festival stages with the likes of ZZ TOP and Iggy Pop to blues fests with Junior Wells and Son Seals, or an intimate late night jam with Buddy Guy. No matter what the setting, Katon finds his true audience. As the 80s moved into the next decade and then the 21st century, one Michael Katon album flowed after another, all of them preaching his roadhouse manifest; ‘Proud To Be Loud’, ‘Get On The Boogie Train’, ‘Rip It Hard’, ‘Rub’, ‘Bustin’ Up The Joint’, ‘The Rage Called Rock ’n’ Roll’ and ‘Bad Machine’ are all part and parcel of a musician whose raw, wild and inflammatory style is all of one piece."

In June 2014, he was voted into the Michigan Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[5]

Discography

  1. BOOGIE ALL OVER YOUR HEAD (1984)
  2. PROUD TO BE LOUD (1988)
  3. GET ON THE BOOGIE TRAIN (1992)
  4. RIP IT HARD (1994)
  5. RUB (1996)
  6. BUSTIN' UP THE JOINT - LIVE (1996)
  7. THE RAGE CALLED ROCK 'N' ROLL (2000)
  8. BAD MACHINE (2002)
  9. MICHAEL KATON, M.K. (2006)
  10. DIABLO BOOGIE, BLUES BREWED IN HELL (2006)
  11. LIVE & ON THE PROWL! (2007)
  12. BOOTLEG BOOGIE LIVE! (2008) (Download only)

References

  1. ↑ Slaven, Neil; The Guinness Who's Who of Blues(2nd.ed.), Guinness Publishing LTD 1995, London
  2. ↑ Detroit Blues Magazine, Volume 3, Issues 1-3, Detroit Blues Society, 1997
  3. ↑ CD Review Volume 11, Issues 7-12, 1995, page 67, WGE Publishers
  4. ↑ Living Blues, Issues 78-83, 1988, page 102
  5. ↑ "Michael Katon". michiganrockandrolllegends.com. Retrieved August 30, 2015.

External links

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