Mike Zito: The knight of faith with no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others…
By David McGee
LIFE IS HARD
Mike Zito
Gulf Coast Records
It’s not often that an artist leaves as graphic and intimate a record of his trials, tribulations and tragedies, along with the jubilant moments, as Mike Zito has been doing since February of 2013, when he published the first installment of Mike Zito, A Bluesman in Recovery, a personal online blog. It begins in his tenth year of recovery from debilitating drug and alcohol addiction, chronicles the lifesaving love and commitment of his wife Laura, charts the upward progress of his career in his sobriety, and details the highs and lows of the fight he, Laura and their children fought against cancer’s merciless advance following her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Now having released Life Is Hard, his first new album since Laura’s passing in July 2023, it seems instructive to appraise the new work in light of the entire journey it encompasses, from the triumph of hard-won sobriety (which informed his gritty, unvarnished 2013 confessional masterpiece, Gone to Texas, a Deep Roots Album of the Year) to the onset and progression of Laura’s illness right up to her final breath. For that we turn to the blog. At least in the music world there’s nothing quite like it, and so let us weigh the backstory, as told in Zito’s own words, against what he, working with producers/guitarists Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith, has wrought in his first in-depth musical statement since losing Laura.
Mike Zito, A Bluesman in Recovery….
Excerpts from a personal blog
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
So chances are I will assume you have no idea who I am and why would you? I am just a husband and father of 5 that lives in Texas. I play music for a living, which is a dream come true, and I am in recovery. My sobriety/clean date is October 28, 2003. My home group is in Nederland, Texas.
I am not writing this blog because I think I am a spiritual guru or because I believe I have special insight into the recovery programs that might save your life 🙂 I am writing this blog to save mine.
I have always played music and thought for sure once I entered into the recovery lifestyle, that I would never be able to play music again. Not in bars or clubs, maybe in church. But after working the steps and through the love and support of my home group I was able to once again walk into a club and play music without the fear of drinking or using looming over me or obsessing in my mind.
I became spiritually fit and I had a legitimate reason to be there.
With that all said, I have been playing music again professionally for 9 years and touring the world. My musical career has been more successful than I could ever dream of and it’s all thanks to recovery. …
…
Monday, June 1, 2020
I have been a witness to change first hand.
The type of change that is enduring and lasts a lifetime.
It’s not easy and it hurts along the way, but it is possible and most certainly
necessary when you’re dealing with life or death circumstances.
When I got clean and sober I was told I needed to change one thing……everything.
I thought they were being funny, but it turns out they were not. Changing everything means assuming the possibility that everything you have believed in up until this very moment is a lie, it is not true. Because everything you believed in before this moment has led you to this moment, and this moment is in dire need of change.
All that was necessary for change was the willingness to do so, that in itself was change. I didn’t need to create new words for the color spectrum, the ones in place were fine and thats a worthless cause. But I absolutely could not put alcohol or drugs into my body again and I had to change people, places and things that were related to my drinking and using immediately.
I needed to try and change my mind. When my mind thought of something, I had a reaction. It was the same reaction for 33 years of life. I had never developed an alternate reaction.
The idea was the next time I thought about using drugs or drinking alcohol, instead of reacting and immediately doing so, I should stop and say the serenity prayer. If I said the prayer long enough and enough times in a row the thought to use or drink would most likely go away….for the time being.
The thought to use or drink would come back again and again and each time I would need to try this new practice over and over and over and over. It would be wonderful to think that God was creating a miracle to end my using and drinking by prayer…..but in actuality, I was changing my mind.
Not all things changed so easily, some continue to linger on after 16 plus years of sobriety. What I have found over the years is that some of the behavior I wanted to change was so deep rooted to a thought process I was not able to detect. I have character defects and flaws that are connected almost to birth. I have childhood traumas, sexual abuse, religious nightmares, and mental illness that causes anxiety, obsession and compulsion and sometimes depression.
All of this conditioning was handed down generation by generation. Until it got to me. I was the faded copy of a copy that was hardly recognizable anymore.
All of these experiences that created this way of thinking was not mine, but given to me by my parents who got it from their parents and so on and so on……
I did not personally have any of these experiences at all, I just had the by product information that was passed onto me. … I was so faded, I either had to change and have my own experiences or fade away. …
…
Thursday, February 21, 2013
… it’s a lifelong process.
Even today I am still pretty much crazy, though I have my sanity checked on a daily basis.
When I do not admit to my mental illness, my ego is in control.
I also have tools now and I know what to do when I start to get a little squirrely.
I pray. I make a physical effort at making a spiritual connection with my higher power and almost immediately I am relieved. I may be fortunate today to not use drugs or drink when I am getting crazy, but it still can cause problems in my life. My ego, self-centeredness, selfish, know-it-all mental illness can get in the way of progress. It can take over and I don’t even know it, until I take step back and look at the situation from the observer’s point of view. I realize today that my mental illness is real and will never go away, but it is in check and will be if I continue to work the programs of recovery that saved my life and make a concerted effort at maintaining a spiritual life here on Earth.
So, here’s to a life long process of being restored to sanity….. God knows I need it! …
…
Monday, July 10, 2023
Everyone sends me messages these days, a lot more than before Laura and cancer. They offer empathy and sympathy and for some reason milk. I am told more often than any other statement “If there is anything we can do, just let us know. If you need milk. let me know.” Apparently, during this process, milk is very necessary. I am unsure why, as we have plenty of milk. We have whole milk, 2%, and Oat milk. I have yet to see any of the girls laying on the floor with bowls of dry cereal howling for milk. Everyone wants to run to the store for me, which is very nice. But I let them know right away if we need anything from the store I AM GOING. That is my one trip out of the house for the day and you’re not taking that away from me. …
I believe in a God of my understanding and I have a relationship with God. I have a deep understanding of life and death from being in recovery for 20 years. My sponsor and the program have been training me for a situation just like this for years. I am spiritually prepared. It does not make it easier, it just makes it doable. I know this is not the end for Laura. I believe in an afterlife. I am also still hopeful and pray for a miracle. I won’t stop praying for a miracle until she is no longer here. I have gratitude for the 20 years I have gotten to spend with this wonderful human being. Yes, I am sad I don’t get 20 more, but I am not going to ruin the little bit I have left by being resentful and mad, I am grateful. Most people will have never lived and loved as much as Laura and myself did in an entire lifetime, let alone 20 years. What a blessing that I get to be here with her now. She saved my life in 2003. She saved me from being a dead junkie. I could never repay her for her love and support. To be here now for her and make her comfortable will be the most important thing I do in my life.
I have cried 1000 times over the past year. I cry alone when it’s too much. I cry with Laura when we are alone. I don’t have to cry to make you feel better. I have grieved for the past year and cried for the past year….it’s your turn to cry and grieve now. I will grieve for years to come, but right now I have a duty to my best friend and to my family. I can cry as much as needed when I am on the other side of this journey.
…
I will continue to share stories of Laura with you and old photos, it’s really fun. Laura loves to be reminded of these fun times we had. She never had a great memory, but I do. I will play my guitar on Instagram and share all of the Blood Brothers shows as they continue to tour. I hope you will support Albert and the band and go see them with Gary Hoey. They sound amazing! Yes, I do have a new album I have been working on for the better part of this year. It is a Blues album. Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith are helping me put the song list together. Everyone seems to think I am going to write lots of new songs about this journey with Laura….but I don’t think that is possible. Not right now and maybe never. I have certainly written a few, but that’s all I can muster. I wouldn’t even know how to write songs about what we are going through now. I have no words. I am lucky I can walk through it let alone sing about it. ….
The blog continues through the years, with at least one posting a month for each year up to 2019, when the postings dipped into the single digits but were no less vivid, no less intimate in their disclosures. His highs come in experiencing his music career in full resurgence in sobriety and embracing the love and support of his wife, children and family members. But every so often something occurs to remind him of how far he fell, how close he came to losing everything in the throes of addiction. Few of these tales are as wrenching as his recollection of Christmas 2018 in a post headlined “Christmas is for givers…and takers.”
Noting that this was “the season of sharing,” he adds: “When I was in full on addiction, no one ever shared anything with me. I also returned the favor, I NEVER shared what I had with anyone.”
He continued:
It was dog eat dog. If I thought you had something left and you weren’t gonna share with me, I would probably steal it from you or beat you into submission. I spent a few Christmas’ that were less than average while in my drug use…..and they will always be in the front of my mind this time of year, an that’s a good thing.
The worst Christmas I can remember is right out of a movie. I was kicked out of the house, my parents wouldn’t pick me up for fear of stealing from them and I was out of dope, no food and nowhere to go.
It was freezing cold in Cape Girardeau, Mo. that December 25th, 2001, and I had $5 to my name.
My kids were spending Christmas with their mothers and families and I was not allowed to see them or come around. I couldn’t “come around” anyway, I had no car or transportation. I had no gifts to give anyone and nothing to offer but a sad story. I was living in a 2 room apartment downtown, the heat was turned off and I slept on the floor with a blanket and pillow.
I got so hungry, I got up and dressed and started walking down Broadway hoping something was open for food. I walked about a mile in the snow and freezing cold and saw the sign to a Chinese Buffet that was lit up. I walked in the place and it was completely empty, open, but empty. It was $10 for the buffet and all I had was $5. I just stood there and stared at the food, I had not eaten in days and I was completely hung over and sick from the drugs. I think I almost started to cry……the man at the counter asked if I was going to eat and I showed him I only had $5. He took the money, smiled at me and said “Merry Christmas, enjoy your meal.” I spent the next 2 hours eating there alone. The man would fill up my drink and I would promise to come back and pay him more money the next day. He just smiled.
He knew that anyone so pathetic as I looked, alone on Christmas with only $5 to his name, was not coming back to pay more money. I walked back in the snow to my apartment and fell asleep on the floor. It was probably the worst Christmas ever. I thought about killing myself that day, but I was too much of a coward to even try. It was all my fault, my own doing. No one had done this to me, I was a product of my own decisions
I will never forget how bad it was…
After Laura was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and began her fight to live, Mike’s postings, fewer in number, provided regular updates on her condition and the path she was taking in hopes of recovery, which in turn spurred reflections on his own life and values. The titles of some of these blogs tell a story–“GRATITUDE” (April 2019),”Commitment” (June 2019), “Thanks Giving” (November 2019), “I Believe” (July 2020), “Everyday I have the blues” (November 2020), “VERY THANKFUL” (JUNE 2021) “Too much is never enough” (August 2021), “Give it what you got” (December 2021), “Life with Cancer” (September 2022)–leading up to the lone 2024 entry thus far.
Friday, March 29, 2024
It has been a long time since I have sat down to write this blog, for obvious reasons.
This Easter Sunday will be 8 months since Laura passed.
After she left this world, I just did not have anything to say or much reason to do so.
I knew I had to make the album we planned before her death and I knew I needed to try and be useful for my family, but I didn’t have much else in me, I was numb. I was tired. I had just spent a year and a half grieving while watching my best friend die in front of me. It was exhausting. Next month will be two years since Laura began getting sick. It was a nightmare that seemed would never end. Once it did, it was just quiet and weird.
But sometime in August I began to get the desire to pick myself up and brush myself off. I began doing shows again and playing my guitar. That was a big deal. It felt good to play loud. It was weird at first to get out in front of people again, but I started just making myself do it.
I would walk into the crowds and let people get close to me again. Most people greeted me with hugs and love. Some had no idea what to say. Many cried without words. I would spend my time consoling them more than anyone consoled me. It was very therapeutic. I would tell them thank you and “it’s gonna be ok” and they would ask me “you’re not crying?” Or they would give me this concerned look and I would sweetly answer “I have cried for over a year, it’s your turn to cry now.” I could not cry anymore. I did not want to isolate and get stuck in depression, I wanted to walk into life again and move forward for myself and my family. We lived in a shadow for a very long time, it was time to walk out of the shadow.
…
In September I went to Sunset Studios in Hollywood with Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith and their band of exceptional musicians and recorded the album “Life is Hard.” A tribute to the loss of Laura and to living through some tough shit but persevering. I believe this to be the BEST album of my career. I put everything I had into each note I sang and played. Joe and Josh and the band put their hearts into this with me and I believe we made a gem. Laura would be so proud.
Not that you, dear reader, need to know all this background in order to appreciate what Mike Zito delivers on Life Is Hard, blessed as he is with the empathetic support from Bonamassa, Smith and the gifted musicians accompanying him on 11 tracks (12 if you count the radio edit of “Forever My Love,” two minutes shorter than the unabridged version featured earlier). But it would be fair to say the unadorned confessions he’s shared publicly for the past 11 years give the attentive listener a, oh, panoramic appreciation of the depth of feeling Zito conveys in 54 minutes, five seconds of nothing less than the truth of his interior life. For your faithful friend and narrator, only two albums compare to Life Is Hard in all respects: the late, great Joe South’s 1975 masterpiece, Midnight Rainbows, which I reviewed for Rolling Stone upon its release and which haunts me still, given how South’s unsettling songs were penned in the wake of his brother Tommy’s suicide and I was appraising it at a moment when the memory of my own brother’s death a few years earlier, in the prime of his life, was still fresh in my memory; and Dale Watson’s Every Song I Write is For You, from 2001, a touching, string-drenched but often jubilant outpouring of love and loss following his fiancée Terri Smith perishing in a car crash. The tragic accident sent Watson spiraling into an abyss of drug and drink, only to regain his footing–and his soul–through his music. That the songs often have an upbeat quality (Watson has said the original numbers are his love letters to Terri) only deepens the tragedy shadowing them.
My life was a song
The music and the words arranged all wrong
Out of style
But every time I think of you I smile
You were mine for a little while…
Those words, lyrics penned by Joe South on his original tune “To Have, To Hold and Let Go” on Midnight Rainbows, rather hung in the air for me as I listened again and again to Life Is Hard. Joe’s response to Tommy’s suicide (the brothers were close, and Tommy was also the drummer in Joe’s band) was extreme but perhaps unsurprising. As he’s quoted in the Midnight Rainbows liner notes: “I flipped out. I just went completely into the ether in the wake of my brother’s death. I just had to get away, so I went to the Islands, caught Polynesian paralysis and just lived in the jungles of Maui for a couple of years.” After regrouping in Maui, he returned to Georgia with his wife and newborn son and began assembling and recording the songs comprising Midnight Rainbows. He toiled at it for nigh on to a year “to get it all right,” he said. Further, he said the point of it all was to “lay it out there in such a way as to have multiple levels of unfoldment. I hope whoever’s listening will derive his own short story from each track; each person should just fill in his own blanks. I also try to keep what I’m saying on a positive level. … Bumming people out is one level of unfoldment I just don’t want to vibrate.”
‘Forever My Love,’ a Mike Zito original from Life Is Hard
The Joe South lyrics quoted above strike me as summarizing the dramatic change of life Mike Zito experienced when Laura came into his life. That “bumming people out” is not on his agenda any more than it was on South’s is evident from the opening cut’s (Little Milton’s “Lonely Man”) machine-gun drum volley, sizzling guitar flight, drummer Lemar Carter’s powerhouse drive and Mike’s rough-hewn assertion, “Oh, baby, don’t you know/don’t you know that I love you/Come on, baby/never, ever leave now.” It’s standard jet-fueled blues-rock direct from the Zito wheelhouse bolstered by an additional lift from Reese Wynans’s rousing theme-and-variation workout on the keyboard and some muscular sax work from Paulie Cerra bookending a positively sizzling upper neck Zito guitar solo. It’s a great set opener; you can see the fannies getting out of the seats and onto the dance floor as the band kicks it into gear. But that lyric, “…never, ever leave now,” leaves a bit of a chill, even in the midst of a celebratory moment. As the words persist in memory, Zito and company ease into the grinding groove of Fred James’s “Life is Hard,” the album’s title track, with Zito’s arrangement mirroring the song’s first recorded version by Johnny Winter in 1991 (a tough live version can be heard on Zito’s 2022 album Blues for the Southside, a double-CD gem recorded in St. Louis). Zito unburdens himself of a growling, aching vocal and complements it with a searing guitar solo, all this animating a moment when the album really comes to grips with its overarching theme of pondering loss, love beyond the grave and the valley of the shadow of death. The nine ensuing tracks include the only two Zito originals he contributes to Life Is Hard—he wasn’t kidding when he blogged “I wouldn’t even know how to write songs about what we are going through now. I have no words.”
From 2022, a live version of Fred James’s ‘Life Is Hard,’ first recorded by Johnny Winter in 1991, also featured on Mike Zito’s 2022 live album, Blues for the Southside, before returning as the title track of his new album.
Well, he does have words. His “Forever My Love” comes right out of his blog postings in its frank expression of devotion and in the surging music’s ever-ascendant intensity, with Zito’s howling guitar fueling its fire. His words–This pain I feel inside/You’ll always be my guide/You’ll never leave my heart (breaking “heart” into two syllables for added effect)/Oh, you’ll never leave my side—written and sung from a place of abject pain, coupled to the guitar’s epic wail and the background female voices rising to gospel fervor, make of this a transcendent brew in which grief, anger and loneliness combust majestically and memorably. Later he offers “Without Loving You,” an swaggering blues stomp keyed by Wynans’s steady humming keyboard, piercing twin guitar punctuations and Zito pleading, “Something’s got to give/tell me how I’m gonna live/without loving you.” There are no easy answers to any of the existential questions Zito poses throughout Life Is Hard, but he tries, if not here, then in other songs he chooses to cover.
‘Have a Talk With God,’ written by Calvin Hardaway and Stevie Wonder, a Grammy nominated song from Stevie’s Songs in the Key of Life, covered by Mike Zito on Life Is Hard
In one instance he turns to Stevie Wonder’s 1976 Grammy-nominated tune from Songs In the Key of Life, namely the funk-gospel of “Have a Talk With God,” in which Stevie posits, Every problem has an answer and if yours you cannot find/ You should talk it over to Him, He’ll give you peace of mind/When you feel your life’s too hard /Just go have a talk with God. “Life is hard” is more than an album title and a song here. Zito has the exuberant gospel chorus intact, Wynans is robust on the keys, and Zito replaces Stevie’s chromatic harp with his own stinging guitar commentary. From Tinsley Ellis (himself on a hot roll with his new acoustic blues album, Naked Truth) Zito borrows “Dying to Do Wrong,” here a swirling miasma of guitar, kick-ass drums, keys, soaring background vocals and Zito deeply invested in Ellis’s lyrical warning about personal dangers looming, not the least being cocaine. Tab Benoit’s harrowing “Darkness” (Let’s let our hearts shine/shine our way through the darkness/between you and I) is as remarkable for the ferocity of Zito’s guitar solo as it is for its anguished message of love gone awry; and Walter Trout’s “Nobody Moves Me Like You Do,” with its Zeppelin-like thunder and Page-like heavy blues guitar, posits a notion that could have been torn from Zito’s own soul, to wit, Our souls are joined forever/you’re my soulmate, my lover and my best friend/Oh! Nobody moves me like you do/I said nobody moves me like you do, yeah…” Listen to this one loud, very loud—the pummeling you’ll take feels so good. None of this quite prepares one for the most surprising cover getting under your skin—“These Eyes,” the Guess Who’s 1969 pop hit expanded into slightly more five minutes of roiling emotions suggested by halting rhythmic passages dotting a silky backdrop of female background singers and orchestral flourishes provided by Jennifer Kumma and Anna Spina on French horns as Zito, transforming it into a blues ballad, deliberately works his way through the lyrics lamenting the emotional fallout from a failed relationship; in the way he stays at slow boil, never revealing even a smidgen of complicity in the matter at hand, suggesting so much subtext in his forceful phrasing as to make one wonder if he’s really interpreting the Randy Bachman-Burton Cummings lyrics as describing a direct confrontation with a God he feels abandoned him. If he had a hammer, he’d hammer out a warning…
‘Without Loving You,’ a Mike Zito original from Life Is Hard
‘Nobody Moves Me Like You Do,’ written by Walter Trout, from Mike Zito’s Life Is Hard
Blues artists have confronted, philosophized, and mused about death in various ways since time immemorial, from Son House’s anguished “Death Letter Blues” to Lead Belly’s and Ida Cox’s like-titled tunes to Blind Willie McTell’s “Cooling Board” to Muddy Waters’s “Burying Ground,” to name but a few of the more chilling entries. As arguably the foremost exponent of the “holy blues” subgenre, the Rev. Gary Davis, aka Blind Gary Davis, gave it a monument titled “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” a chronicle of exactly what the title suggests—death as an inevitable and inexorable force, undeniable, unassailable, invincible. Mike Zito is only the latest to cover the Rev. Davis’s dire discourse, his version rising from an a cappella intro to a maelstrom of otherworldly banshee guitar wails and screams, cannon-shot drums, a background chorus in full flower and Zito himself declaiming the lyrics as if he’s foretelling the end of civilization as we know it—or as death as he knows it, with no greater fervor or assurance than when he asserts unequivocally, “Death will come to your house and he won’t stay long/look in the bed and somebody’s gone/death will leave you standing and crying in this land.” His voice fades away, and all that’s left on the soundscape is a thunderstorm of drums, disembodied voices and ghostly guitar sonics until, with 12 seconds left, the track plays out in the complete, merciless silence death has brought. The effect is to nail your head to the wall and leave it hanging there like an empty paper bag.
‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy,’ written by the Rev. Gary Davis, from Mike Zito’s Life Is Hard
In The Denial of Death, his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning treatise examining the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of the concept of death in ancient and modern cultures, Ernest Becker (his Pulitzer was awarded two days after his own death) mused about Kierkegaard’s notion of the “knight of faith.” Re-reading that passage, I couldn’t help but equate it to what Mike Zito revealed of himself in his blogs through the years and especially on this new album. Consider Becker’s position: Kierkegaard had his own formula for what it means to be a man. He put it forth in those superb pages wherein he describes what he calls “the knight of faith.” This figure is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; no task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant’s parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it always allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch others’ lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them to shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread.
‘These Eyes,’ the Guess Who hit from 1969 transformed into a blues ballad on Mike Zito’s Life Is Hard
‘Dying to Do Wrong,’ written by Tinsley Ellis, from Mike Zito’s Life Is Hard
Mike Zito may not check all the boxes of the Kierkegaardian knight of faith standard, but in the most important respects he does. Life Is Hard is the culmination of an arduous, tragic journey over two decades-plus, from which he’s come out whole at present. His latest blog reveals him to be returning to his home town of St. Louis to become Executive Director of a nonprofit music center “to build a professional recording studio for young artists to have a chance to get their music out there.” And what’s more, there’s a new relationship blooming with a woman he knew in high school. All roads are leading back to the source.
“St. Louis is my home,” Zito writes. “This is where I was born and raised and learned to be a musician. I left the city on a very low note over 20 years ago. I have never been able to truly enjoy my city as a sober, productive member of society. I am thrilled to come back to the music scene in a big way. I hope that the nonprofit will bring many of my old friends back together again. I look forward to being involved in more shows and events.”
Behold Mike Zito redux, Knight of Faith.
