"We just want to leave people feeling good," he said. "We don't do a lot of things that are really well known across the spectrum of R & B music," he said.īesides Finnigan, Phantom Blues Band members include guitarist Johnny Lee Schell, drummer Tony Braunagel, bassist Larry Fulcher, saxophonist Joe Sublett and trumpeter Les Lovitt.įinnigan said that while all the members of the Phantom Blues Band are successful session players, producers, arrangers, composers and songwriters in their own right, whenever they get together and hit the road, they just want to have a good time and play with the kind of joy that attracted them to music in the first place. "It's what drew me to music in the first place," he said.īlues originals and classics generally are what the Phantom Blues Band perform in concert, Finnigan said. Since then, he's spent more than 50 years performing in practically every music genre but said his first love will always be rhythm and blues. Luckily, Finnigan befriended a Hammond organ dealer in Wichita who decided to help him finance his first organ. I couldn't get a loan because I was just 19 and no one in their right mind would give me money." "But even then it cost about $17,000, and I was lucky to have $7 in my pocket. "When I got to KU, I started playing with guys there, and I became obsessed with getting a Hammond organ," he said. A favorite of Finnigan's was jazz organist Jimmy Smith, and Finnigan became fascinated with the sound of the Hammond organ. Kansas is where I became a professional."įinnigan, who grew up in Troy, Ohio, listened to jazz and blues music from a radio station whose powerful signal reached Troy from Chicago. I met my wife there, and we've been married 49 years. "In Kansas, I always run into a lot of people I haven't seen for a while," said Finnigan, who now lives in Los Angeles.
The Phantom Blues Band will be in concert June 16 at the Stiefel Theatre for the Performing Arts, 151 S.
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King, Jimmy Reed, Albert Collins, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush, band members like to get together whenever their schedules can converge and hit the road with their own material, plus a few classic rhythm and blues favorites. "All the live and studio work we've done together has given us a bond, a trust between all of us."Īlthough the Phantom Blues Band has backed up a plethora of blues greats that include Taj Mahal, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Freddie King, B.B. "I've known most of these guys for a good long time, close to 40 years now," he said.
In 2000 Finnigan, a session musician who had recorded and performed with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Etta James, Joe Cocker and Crosby, Stills and Nash, joined up with the Phantom Blues Band, an ensemble of master musicians that formed in 1993 to back up famed blues singer and guitarist Taj Mahal on his album "Dancin' the Blues."įinnigan figured between himself and the other members of the Phantom Blues Band, they had about 200 years of musical experience.
"I was young enough that I didn't care," he said.
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So he taught himself how to play the Hammond and decided to take his chances in the music business.
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Mike Finnigan knew he wasn't going to make it as a professional basketball player, so he decided to focus on a more "stable" job as a professional musician.įinnigan, who now is considered one of the world's masters on the Hammond Organ, had a basketball scholarship to the University of Kansas in the 1960s but knew he wasn't talented enough to make the NBA.