A few fun snippets:
He was always "Mike", until Patrick Simmons kept introducing him to Doobies concert crowds as "Michael" during his first tour with them.
He grew up in Ferguson, and frequently notes "If only my buds in Ferguson could see this/believe this was happening...". He and his high school buddy Chuck Sabatino frequently played the Castaway Club in Ferguson, and George Edick's Club Imperial at Goodfellow/West Florissant. It was at the latter that he and Chuck were blown away by Ike and Tina Turner, and never imagined that 30 years later Mike would be opening for her on tours.
McDonald was extremely fortunate to avoid a serious drug sentencing before he hit it big when his girlfriend's apartment was raided by DEA while Mike was there, and they completely missed his big coke stash.
McDonald packed up his Ford Pinto with his electric piano in the back and headed from St. Louis to Los Angeles to make his mark. Later, he moved his entire family to Nashville, enjoying a 100-acre spread only 15 minutes from downtown Nashville, where he could drop in with touring artists playing the town's numerous iconic concert venues. Then, after the kids matured and moved out...it was back to Santa Barbara.
He was a beneficiary of fantastic timing, as both Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers (thanks to Jeff "Skunk" Baxter) asked him to join them just days before their big tours. Fortunately for McDonald, he'd been playing their hits in his bar and nightclub gigs, so only one day of rehearsal got him hired.
Marijuana and alcohol played major roles in his life until he went cold turkey in his 50s. He'd wake up, toke before his feet even hit the floor, and stay that way all day, adding coke in the evening.
Mike was ubiquitous for several years, guesting on several major pop/rock stars' songs, and so busy that SCTV's Rick Moranis did a hilarious spoof of McDonald racing from one seconds-long voice gig to another. When Mike first saw this on TV, he was returning to his hotel room --- with the TV left on --- after a serious dope session down the hall, and saw what he thought was himself making the rounds of recording studios wondering just how potent that stuff was. Then it hit him...it was a brilliant spoof on SCTV, and he laughed right along.
Why was his longtime cohort Jeff Baxter nicknamed "Skunk"? It was due to, he says, "a youthful undiscretion".
As a favor to a recording exec who had boosted his career, Mike agreed to play at a "coffeeshop" owned by a friend or his. No, not like one of those iconic Greenwich Village or Nashville concert clubs. This was literally a coffee and donut shop....with nothing but two old ladies at a table. He played five songs; saw them ask the clerk to tell him to lower the volume, then got the hell out.
Mike was always perfectly happy to be in the background, just playing his keyboards and adding his voice where needed, rather than be up front and the focus of the band.
Mike was always extremely insecure and feared being exposed as a fraud; a common fear among entertainers who suddenly make it big. Even decades into his career, performing on tour with Steely Dan, he was still reduced to a shaking-knees toodler by a single side-eye onstage by Donald Fagen, whom Mike thought surely going to fire him on the spot.
He made Texas newbie Christopher Cross's "Ride Like the Wind" a major hit just by Cross's dumb luck: Cross was recording his debut album when McDonald, recording in the same studio, was asked by his agent, also repping Cross, to walk down a few steps and spend a half hour recording his "...such a long way to gohhhhhhhh..." audio snippet that helped lead Cross to an armful of Grammys.
A record label guy gave Mike perhaps the best advice for his career: Start writing, recording and selling your OWN songs to other artists. That's how so many mailbox millionaires are made.
All during Mike's rise through the ranks into pop music's A-list, he still held grudges from those whom he felt had done him wrong. He writes of one prominent music figure he'd always steam about and cuss aloud at every traffic stoplight for years. Finally, he was persuaded to contact this long-ago enemy and straighten things out. So, Mike called...and the guy on the other end had no idea what Mike was talking about. He never recalled not only the painful incident, but had no idea of the pain it had caused McDonald for so many years. So they both had a nice chat, as McDonald realized for all those year he had been guzzling poison hoping the OTHER guy would die from it.
Mike's real poison was drugs; he married one of his recording partners, Amy Holland, who enjoyed the occasional snort, toke, and nip with him. But Amy saw the signs and checked herself into a clinic to break what she saw as her budding addiction. When she called Mike to come pick her up, the clinic's staff saw him, and immediately admitted him into a withdrawal program. He was that bad. When he first saw the album cover for "One Step Closer", with the Doobies posing at sunset on an ocean bluff, he first recognized what years of drug and alcohol abuse was doing to his body.
In the '00s he quit cold turkey, and claimed he's not had a single hit or drop of alcohol since.
McDonald has worked with, and written for, so many A-list musicians that you'll find your favorite artists in there somewhere in a Six Degrees of Separation way.
I got my slightly used copy of "What a Fool Believes" from Thriftbooks at a bargain price.