Who the Fuck Was Mike McGuirk?

He was an SF legend and amateur baseball commissioner who survived his own Bangkok death wish, helped invent music streaming, and was the best writer you've never heard of.

In its more aspirational moments, I suppose you could say this newsletter is about how to think and feel about our tremendously short time on this earth, how to live and come to terms with the fact that we are all going to die. And if that’s the case—and I hope it’s the case; I think maybe it’s the case slightly more than 50% of the time—then this is the right time and place to tell you about my friend Mike McGuirk, who passed away on a Thursday in July, after a two-decade battle with spinocerebellar ataxia type-1, a rare, progressive, and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disease that Mike spent the better part of his life either dreading the onset of or directly dealing with as it slowly robbed him of his physical faculties. Despite that, he was one of the funniest, friendliest, most joyful people I’ve ever met, and also, hands down, one of my favorite writers. 

And so I’m going to do my best—and will fail, because this task is impossible—to write something befitting of McGuirk’s legend, and/or try to convince you that he was, in fact, just that: a legend, one of those souls that vibrates at its own unique frequency, a natural wonder of the world, if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors, which I think Mike would, because who the hell cares? Who’s making the rules and why are any of us playing by them? Shouldn’t we be getting drunk in a Bangkok pool hall right now? I know Mike is. I know it as surely as I know anything.

That’s partly because it was my great pleasure of getting multiple chances to answer this post’s titular question back when McGuirk and I were colleagues at a music startup close to twenty years ago, when a new boss or department lead would ask, So who’s this guy based in Thailand that we keep mailing laptops to? Or, Who’s that scratchy voice on the other end of the conference line who’s somehow able to write about both Pig Destroyer and Pink? You should have seen their faces when I explained that the voice belonged to McGuirk, that he was our ace in the hole, that he was based in Bangkok and would never hit a deadline, but that it was imperative we keep him on the payroll no matter how many times he fucked up. And the thing is, we did. Through various mergers and layoffs, we kept sending Mike checks, financing what he himself described as “failing at suicide” in Thailand. But we’ll get to that.

For now, let’s start small and move outward. Mike was from Boston and loved to smoke Marlboro Reds, so he had this raspy New Englander’s drawl and when he said my name it was punchy and compressed, like a fuzzed-out Keith Richards guitar lick: Gahhrat. Even at his healthiest, he was skinny and disheveled, but handsome in a nerdy-greaser way. He was nearly always wearing thick glasses, crusty jeans, some kind of “Virginia Is for Lovers” T-shirt but funnier, and ratty Chuck Taylors, the kind of perfectly unkempt vibe certain kinds of cool people spend hundreds of dollars trying to cultivate, but which Mike, truly, woke up looking like (although I’m sure that’s because he slept in his clothes). Gahhrat… 

Gahhrat…

The first I ever heard of him was as a music writer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a storied alt-weekly that lived in the shadow of the Village Voice but which was only slightly less of a cultural institution, at least if you lived in the Bay Area. I’d moved to Oakland shortly after college, in the early '00s, with aspirations of becoming a music writer myself, and so my first encounters with Mike were through his prose. He had no formal training and had spent most of his professional life prior to writing as a line cook. But he was a natural, in possession of a deceptively simple, just-shootin’-the-shit style that lovingly wrapped its arms around whatever he chose to write about, whether that thing was glass-gargling death metal or Christina Aguilera. No matter the topic, you wanted to read what Mike had to say about it, and the fact that he mostly wrote about and celebrated the weirdest, gnarliest, most intriguing bands in the SF music scene at the time meant that scene became synonymous with Mike, and vice versa.

From my vantage as someone living in an illegal warehouse squat in Oakland, playing in half-serious noise bands and freelancing for the local papers, Mike was the guru at the top of the mountain, the scuzzball kingpin. He was embraced by all the coolest bands, and when he wasn’t writing about them, he’d be going on about some old blues legend, or publishing a screed about Grand Theft Auto, or contemplating the existence of Beck. Being a free-floating genre omnivore, someone who could write as capably about Christian rock as he could about Black Sabbath, was not commonplace like it is today, and it certainly wasn’t something most folks could pull off. But Mike made it look easy. If that’s because, by his own admission, he had a “total disregard for factual accuracy,” well, who cared—Mike knew how to get to the essence of a thing in as few moves as possible, and once he did, you wanted to see it through his eyes, even and sometimes especially when that thing was the complete discography of Cher. 

Most of this work is collected in Strike Four, the essential and sadly out-of-print (tho you can download a free PDF of outtakes here) compendium that includes a bunch of his Bay Guardian clips, several thousand words from his old blog, Dispatches, some stuff from his Rhapsody days (which we’ll get to momentarily), and about sixty pages of scorekeeping, administrative emails, and game recaps from the short-lived, homegrown, co-ed baseball “league” Mike dreamed up, The North-Atlantic Mission Baseball League & Association (note the acronym). In a more perfect world, Strike Four would sit next to the works of Lester Bangs and Ellen Willis on any decent Rock Crit 101 syllabus, providing insight not just to the music itself, but what it looks like to live and breathe and puke it, plus occasionally bean it with a baseball.

***

The baseball league is one of the very best things I was ever a part of. It is mine and I made it happen, but really I just set it in motion—none of us knew what was happening and all of a sudden we were ALL part of something pretty damn cool. It was some kind of weird magic. I am not the only one who feels this way.  — Mike McGuirk, Strike Four

***

And so flash forward a few years. After a bit of freelance toiling, I managed to snag a gig at the Guardian’s rival paper, the SF Weekly. I did my best to follow Mike’s example, celebrating the bands I loved, trashing the ones I hated, spraying beer on the ones that fell somewhere in between. I must’ve done a serviceable job as a professional scuzzball myself, because after a few years of that I was poached by the aforementioned music startup and given a job at scuzzball HQ, where Mike and others like him were literally building the future of music consumption. It is there that I had the good fortune of becoming McGuirk’s boss. Please allow me to set the scene.

Around this time (the early '00s), San Francisco was recovering from its first tech boom (Netscape, Pets.com) and gearing up for the much bigger sequel. Google and Facebook were these new companies no one knew what to make of, the iPhone was still a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye, and Napster had recently blown up the music business. Building on this latter development, a few people (none of them with the last name “Ek”) had the bright idea to take all the music ever recorded, digitize it, and make it so you could stream all of it, whenever you wanted, for a fixed monthly price. What is now commonplace was extremely hard to explain at the time—So you don’t own the music, you rent it? was the question everyone asked—but what it led to was a situation where a large percentage of the otherwise unemployable top shelf music nerds in the Bay Area all ended up with extremely well-paying jobs that included health plans, stock options, and all the tap beer you could drink (trust me we appreciated the last thing much more than the first two). And this group essentially built what would become the dominant model for music consumption for the next twenty years. And most of that took place in a redbrick building on the corner of 16^th Street and Potrero Ave., otherwise known as the San Francisco headquarters of a company called Rhapsody. (Funny story: Mike got the job at the startup that became Rhapsody because they needed a Christian music expert, so Mike pretended to be one and talked his way into the gig, then capably faked his way along until he was made rock/pop editor. The guy had skills.)

Like a lot of things in my life, I showed up late to the party. By the time I arrived at Rhapsody in 2006, McGuirk and his colleagues—which included assorted DJs, ravers, band vocalists, and assorted former journalists, many of whom used the office as their personal party space on nights and weekends—had mostly laid the groundwork of music streaming. The things we now all take for granted—playlists, algorithmic radio, accurate and browsable artist discographies, etc.—were things this team puzzled through and refined, work that Mike likens in his book to “raking water,” because in those early days it was all just such a mess. I showed up just as things were starting to click, which is to say: just before the debut of the iPhone and its app store, which is what allowed streaming to go from a novelty you could enjoy on your laptop to the “celestial jukebox” we all talked about in our big team meetings. When that happened, every major tech company rushed to build their own service, but even they had a hard time competing with a certain Swedish upstart that would become the Kleenex of music streaming. All of this doomed Rhapsody to being a mere footnote. Despite the company’s multi-year headstart, the free beer turned out to be worth more than the stock options. 

But back to Mike, because the other thing that happened shortly before I joined Rhapsody is that in 2004, McGuirk was diagnosed with SCA-1. This was a devastating but sadly not unexpected turn of events. Because while it’s exceedingly rare, SCA-1 is also very hereditary; Mike’s mom and sister both had it. For a minute it seemed like Mike might escape their fate, because he’d made it through his twenties unscathed, but he was finally diagnosed in his thirties. And because the disease ran in his family, he knew what awaited him: “slurred speech and a gradual loss of all physical coordination,” as he writes in Strike Four. “At some point, I will be wheelchair bound. It’s kind of like a battery running out of juice. … There’s a lot of flailing anytime I extend my arms and it takes me a half hour to do anything.”

Mike’s novel answer to his situation was to “move to Thailand to die,” and this he did. (FWIW, this was at least a decade before it occurred to anyone to use the phrase “digital nomad”; Mike was an innovator there as well.) During our first years working together, Mike would spend his days and nights in Bangkok pool halls with Thai “bargirls.” The updates we’d get from him would include tales of trying to score drugs, losing his ATM card for the umpteenth time, getting robbed by women he brought back to his room, and other assorted misadventures. I say above that I was his boss, but all that really meant was it was my job to invent increasingly elaborate excuses why we needed to FedEx Mike a laptop every time he spilled beer on it or dropped it from a balcony.

Despite whatever he was up to—and you can read all about what he was up to in Strike Four, including his frank assessment of the bargirl culture and his role in perpetuating it—Mike still dialed in to our weekly team calls to talk about which new records were coming out and who’d be responsible for writing about them and adding their songs to various playlists and radio stations. And despite all of this—his physical deterioration, the fact that he was “going down the tubes in a tornado of self destruction”—the writing he did at that time, or really the blurbing, a new-ish form no one besides Mike really thought to make an art of (alright maybe one guy)—that work was so good it was anthologized in De Capo’s Best Music Writing series in 2006. I mean, who gets anthologized for writing blurbs about Nickelback? That’d be Mike McGuirk, whose name and work is sitting right there alongside that of heavyweights like Greil Marcus, Ann Powers, and Jon Caramanica.  

***

Accept, Balls to the Wall
By Mike McGuirk
OK, the frontman is an Aryan dwarf who sings like a lurid cross between Bon Scott and Ronnie James Dio, and the song they are most famous for is called “Balls To The Wall,” which is about, of all things, having your balls pressed against a wall. And the cover features a guy wearing nothing but a leather jacket and a Speedo. You do the math.

***

Eventually, after persistently not dying, defying both the medical odds from his doctors and whatever chances you’d give an expat with a literal death wish who liked to hang around sex workers and firearms, Mike came back from Thailand. That’s when I really got to know him. His condition was deteriorating, and as he predicted he found himself using a cane, then a walker, and eventually a wheelchair. But whenever we had some kind of work outing, we’d send a cab to pick him up, then we’d all get drunk and talk about the small miracle that was Rhapsody in its heyday (its heydey having passed by then). As Mike put it in a blog post I asked him to write as part of Rhapsody’s 10-year anniversary: “Some crappy mall-metal band called Autopilot Fail would put out a record in the US, and somehow money from it trickled down to me, 10,000 miles away, buying drinks for girls at candlelit illegal street bars.” And: “It’s a good thing Rhapsody came along because, first of all, God only knows what I’d be doing for work these days, but also the whole group there has created something truly unique and fantastic. At least that’s what everybody says in their goodbye email when they quit and go work for Google.”

We’d meet up and go to shows, or grab dinner with our mutual friend Nick, himself an o.g. Rhapsody person, and someone who became, along with a handful of other devoted friends, Mike’s de facto caretaker. Mike was a diehard Red Sox fan, and I loved the Oakland A’s, so we caught a few games together, and would reminisce about the 2003 ALDS or Mike’s undying affection for Manny Ramirez. Mike met Danielle at some point, and every time we saw each other after that he’d ask about her, then pull me aside in a confiding way and whisper to me how beautiful she was, how lucky I’d gotten. When I was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2012, he sent me the following note:

“I just saw these emails about your situation. First off, I'm sorry to hear anything at all is up with you health-wise but it sounds like the surgery was a success so thank christ. I know this sounds goofy but I consider you a friend way more than a boss or whatever you are and the idea of you going through heavy shit is really upsetting. you rule Garrett so please get better. also you have to use this as much as you can with Danielle. backrubs, being fed grapes, permanent front seat status,  etc. a perpetual ace up your sleeve. you must use it when the time is right. No, I just want you to know this is very serious stuff and you (both) are on my mind a lot. don't worry about replying. enjoy being hopped up on goofballs if you can and I hope I see you sooner rather than later. Love, Mike.”

In 2020, I saw Mike at the Tonga Room in SF for his 50^th birthday. He was confined to a wheelchair by then and his speech was hard to decipher, but the guy was still an amazing hugger, and I swear there was never a moment when there weren’t at least half a dozen women within arm’s reach. Needless to say, everyone loved him, and went out of their way to take care of him. I was part of the former group, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the latter group, everyone who made sure Mike was sheltered and fed, driven to doctor’s appointments, to social events. That list is long, and it’s full of saints. In fact, the reason Mike’s blog has entries going up to 2022, our friend Nick explained when I asked, is because even after he’d lost most of his motor function, Nick and Mike’s friend Wyatt would sit and listen to him recount these stories, these totally random and hilarious stories, then type them up, then review every word with Mike, so the posts sounded exactly like him, which they do. And that’s why today you can do yourself a favor and read the penultimate entry, about attempting to put on “Five Pounds of Muscle” at 24 Hour Fitness after a bad breakup. Do that, and then tell me you’re not dying to hang out with this dude. 

The last time I saw Mike was in April of 2023. I’d received word from Nick that he’d been transferred to a bed at Chinese Hospital in SF’s Chinatown, so I flew up from LA to see him. Nick and I met on a corner, then stopped to grab some Lay’s potato chips to bring to Mike, because apparently they basically melt on your tongue, and Mike was having trouble swallowing. Mike was staring silently out a window when we arrived, but when he saw me he lit up and we had a big hug, and then the conversation just took off. Together with Nick, we followed Mike’s train of thought through the most random and wonderful assortment of pop culture ephemera—who was the actor that wasn’t Tom Waits or Roberto Benigni in Down By Law? (John Lurie); did we know Justin Trudeau’s mother was rumored to have had an affair with Mick Jagger? (I didn’t); did we remember that movie with Billie Dee Williams where he was a pitcher in the Negro Leagues (it’s The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Leagues, but I had to google it)? On and on it went like this, for hours—the Grateful Dead, Hogan’s Heroes, Patton Oswalt, Blade Runner. Mike’s body had failed him, but his brain was alive with every piece of trivia he’d ever absorbed, and he wanted to talk about all of it. Taped near his bed was this photo, taken by SF photographer Mark Murrmann, who wrote on his Instagram tribute: “Absolute fucking legend, and I’m not talkin’ about the dudes on the sign.”

I had hoped to see Mike again after this visit, but two weeks later I was diagnosed with cancer, and then a year flew by, and I never got to tell Mike about any of it—not about how it was actually that day that me and Nick visited him that I first felt the pain in my stomach that ended up being tumors, or how close it felt like I’d come to dying, or what it was like to listen to some of my favorite music under those circumstances. I never got to tell him that we’d welcomed a baby girl. I think he would have really liked that last part. I just want you to know this is very serious stuff and you (both) are on my mind a lot. don't worry about replying. enjoy being hopped up on goofballs if you can.

When I heard of his passing, I froze, then cried, then spent a long time texting with friends, exchanging memories, of which there are so many. I texted Nick, asking if he remembered when we all went to the Red Sox game in Oakland, and Mike took his shirt off right there in the bleachers, so he could bask in the afternoon sun. It was a perfect image—skinny Mike, clutching a Budweiser, asking how I felt about Pedro Martinez. Gahhrat…

Nick wrote back: “We used to get the free daytime game tickets from work and walk over and go to the Giants. One game on a beautiful day, Mike again takes off his shirt to bask in the sun. I look over and Jonathan Richman is near us, and he is taking off his shoes and socks and rolling up the bottom of his pants. It’s like Bostonians need to grab every ray of sunshine.”

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This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading. Healings is free for all, but you can show your appreciation for the work we do with a paid subscription. A portion of all proceeds goes to the Patient Advocate Foundation.

Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.