Biography
During two distinct decades, Mike Wilhelm held a significant place in separate San Francisco Bay Area ensembles. Serving as guitarist and songwriter with the Charlatans throughout the 1960s, he participated in a unit frequently ranked among the earliest psychedelic outfits to emerge from San Francisco, even though the group’s approach more precisely merged blues, folk, jug band traditions, and 19th century saloon music. In the late 1970s he added guitar to the Flamin' Groovies for a period, contributing to the albums Flamin' Groovies Now (1978) and Jumpin' in the Night (1979). Earlier in the decade he had also performed with the Bay Area hard rock outfit Loose Gravel, whose recordings surfaced on his 1976 solo debut Wilhelm. A succession of further small-label solo albums followed in the 1990s and 2000s, among them Wood & Wire (1993) and Live at the Cactus (2007), while he continued to appear regularly across Northern California well into the 2010s. On May 14, 2019, Wilhelm died in San Francisco after a battle with cancer.
Albums