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Michael, Michael, Michael.

You know the type, the life of the party, the guy who orders a shot, holds it up in the air and challenges everyone in the bar to chug-a-lug, to bottoms-up, to down their drinks all at once.

That was Michael Purington. As a musician with the popular 1970s group Lost Highway Band, Purington would start with a beer in the afternoon, during rehearsals, and progress to liquor at night, during gigs.

For a dozen years he traveled and played and drank - having fun, he says: "It was working. It was a great life."

The Phenomenal Comedic Talent of Michael Purington

Amazing Song Writer, Tender Heart, Serious Recovery

When the band quit, in the mid-80s, Purington didn't. "When there's no gig, you have a lot of time to fill," he says.

He'd work from 8 to 5, then go home at night and get drunk. He quit writing songs; he stopped making music.

Then for the umpteenth time, he quit drinking. He was sober for about four years. "Quitting is easy," Purington says, paraphrasing W.C. Fields. "I quit a million times."

He returned to music - as a promoter this time, bringing blues acts to Missoula. He booked Bonnie Raitt into the Wilma Theater, he says; he brought John Prine and John Lee Hooker to the Top Hat. The bar scene proved too great a temptation, though; in 1989, he took to the bottle again.

"I just wasn't hooked up with other people who were sober," he says. "It just about makes you crazy if you don't have help."

Then he found himself playing in a band at Harry David's nightclub: "It was horrible," he says – not the band, necessarily, but the experience. After all, he'd toured all over the place with the Lost Highway Band, had recorded albums during an era when doing so was a big deal, had nurtured big dreams of making the New York scene - and now, the best he could do was a Missoula South Side bar?

"So I started," he says, lifting an imaginary drink to his lips. To escape? "Oh, yeah - to escape life. Just let me die ... slowly." He drove home shakily that night. The woman he was living with was so fed up with his drinking, she wouldn't talk to him. That was bad enough. "But mostly, I had reached a point where - it was very undramatic - I started asking for help."

Michael Purington

played saxophone in a dance band at age 13, quickly promoting himself to guitar shortly thereafter. At 19 he began playing professionally and started the Lost Highway Band in 1974, touring the western United States and Canada, releasing two albums and three singles, and performing with Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, B.B. King and George Thorogood, among others.

Michael's music is now featured regularly on Take12Radio.com

Michael's Song "Outside Issue" is The Interview Friday Theme Song here at Take12Radio.com and KHLT Recovery Broadcasting

Visit Michael's Web Site

Michael Purington

The Monty'man Welcomes