On August 13th of this year, my friend and musical compatriot Mickey McGee died suddenly at age 67. He was a drummer, guitarist, luthier and computer geek.

I played is several bands with Mickey as a the drummer from the early 90’s on until the Covid shutdown. He had a pretty good day gig at Dell, working on RAID software, or maybe hardware? I forget. In the early 200’s he had a massive brain aneurysm that would have killed just about anyone else, but he happened to collapse while talking to his girlfriend, and she was quick to call for help. He pulled through after several months in the hospital, & when he got out, he was legally blind in one eye, and was eventually put on supplemental oxygen.
But he joyouslty trooped forward, and got back on the horse. He’s show up to rehearsal with his oxygen machine & hoses, get himself situated behind the kit, and proceed to drum away like nothing had happened.
We recorded most of our rehearsals just for educational purposes, and once in a while we got lucky and got something worth keeping. This is The Yes Men playing South Side of the Sky, with Mickey drumming & singing backup vocals.

The Yes Men eventually branched out from just Yes songs to cover some other prog rock favorites and mix it up a bit. This is a medley of 4(5?) Pink Floyd songs. John Viehweg originally had the idea & put the pieces together. It didn’t need much editing by the band. At first, it didn’t include Great Gig in the Sky, but we decided to hell with it, that since we had no singer like Clare Torry at hand so we did the manly thing and did it Guitar Hero style. I think it works pretty well, considering.

The poignant part here is at the beginning of GGITS, Mickey does the voice-over starting with “I’m not afraid of dying…” which, by his little chuckles here and there, and his addition of “You’re next!” show his humor and indomitable spirit that we all loved so much about him. He’s foretelling his own fate & inspiring the rest of us to also be not afraid.

In November we held a celebration of life, and quite a few of his musician friends gathered together & played in his honor. He will be greatly missed.