Five years ago, we told you about the marvelous documentary, ‘Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be’. At the time, the doc could only be seen on the film festival circuit, but recently it’s been made available on streaming platforms for the first time. As my last viewing had been years ago, I recently watched it anew via Amazon Prime. I was reminded that director J. Elvis Weinstein did an incredible job presenting Michael’s truly amazing life, and the film was a joy to see again.

*****

Musician/actor/satellite radio DJ Michael Des Barres has worn many hats over his decades-long career. As a vocalist, he’s fronted such acts as the Power Station, filling in for Robert Palmer on their lone US tour (with a high-profile appearance at Live Aid), and the highly underrated Somebody up There Likes Me, a neglected LP that deserved better. His biggest success (in the form of royalties) has been as songwriter, having co-penned “Obsession,” a worldwide hit for ‘80s synth-pop act Animotion. In addition, he’s a talented character actor, best known for his recurring role as TV villain Murdoc on MacGyver. His versatility is acknowledged in the title of the fabulous documentary, Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be?. Dangerous Minds got in touch with the director of the film, J. Elvis Weinstein, and asked him some questions via email.

How did you come to know Michael’s work?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: The first time I came to know Michael as a musician was when he joined the Power Station, but I recognized him from TV roles at the time. I was a TV junkie as a kid. He lived in my head as a trivia question for many years. I’d always notice him in TV and movie roles.
 

The many faces of Murdoc.

How and when did you approach Michael about making a documentary about him? Was he open to the idea or did it take some convincing?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: We met several years ago working on a TV series, me a as writer/producer, he as a cast member. We spoke about writing a book and even did some interviews at the time, but it never materialized. Then a few years ago, we ended up guests on the same radio show and I mentioned we should have done a documentary instead of a book. There was instant agreement; we were shooting within three weeks.

What drove you to make the documentary?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: I knew that there was a great story to be told and that there were things I could learn for myself from telling it.

Michael appears open and frank during the interview segments in the film. Were you surprised by anything he told you? One of the things I learned from watching the film is that Silverhead was really Michael’s project and the other members were hired guns—I never knew!:

J. Elvis Weinstein: Michael was very generous in his willingness to examine and re-examine his life as honestly as possible through this process. I think he realized very early on that I wasn’t striving for a sensationalistic telling of the story but rather a very human one. 

As for surprises, I don’t have any specific ones that jump out. While Silverhead were hired musicians, they quickly became a very collaborative and tightly knit band. Michael was very much the leader, but the sound evolved from the players.
 

A fan shows Michael some love during a Silverhead gig, 1974.

I also learned that Michael and his ex-wife Pamela (Miss Pamela of the GTO’s) met on the set of a movie (the still unreleased Arizona Slim). It’s really interesting to see some of their first interactions captured on film. What do you make of their relationship, then and now?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: I think the thing that is the coolest about them is the relationship they’ve cultivated since splitting as a couple. The respect, warmth, and love they maintain for one another as friends and parents of a great son is a lovely example for everyone.
 

 
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Musician/actor Michael Des Barres has worn many hats over his decades-long career. As a vocalist, he’s fronted such acts as the Power Station, filling in for the departed Robert Palmer on their lone US tour (with a high profile appearance at Live Aid), and the highly underrated Silverhead, one of the finest groups of the glam rock era. He’s also released a handful of solo albums, including Somebody Up There Likes Me, a neglected LP that deserved better. His biggest success (in the form of royalties) has been as songwriter, having co-penned “Obsession,” a worldwide hit for ‘80s synth-pop act Animotion. In addition, he’s a talented character actor, most known for his recurring role as TV villain Murdoc on Macgyver. His versatility is acknowledged in the title of the fabulous documentary, Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me To Be?, which is currently making the film festival rounds. Dangerous Minds got in touch with the director of the documentary, J. Elvis Weinstein, and asked him some questions via email.

How did you come to know Michael’s work?:

Weinstein: The first time I came to know Michael as a musician was when he joined the Power Station, but I recognized him from TV roles at the time. I was a TV junkie as a kid. He lived in my head as a trivia question for many years. I’d always notice him in TV and movie roles.
 

The many faces of Murdoc.

How and when did you approach Michael about making a documentary about him? Was he open to the idea or did it take some convincing?:

Weinstein: We met several years ago working on a TV series, me a as writer/producer, he as a cast member. We spoke about writing a book and even did some interviews at the time, but it never materialized. Then a few years ago, we ended up guests on the same radio show and I mentioned we should have done a documentary instead of a book. There was instant agreement; we were shooting within three weeks.

What drove you to make the documentary?:

Weinstein: I knew that there was a great story to be told and that there were things I could learn for myself from telling it.

Michael appears open and frank during the interview segments in the film. Were you surprised by anything he told you? One of the things I learned from watching the film is that Silverhead was really Michael’s project and the other members were hired guns—I never knew!:

Weinstein: Michael was very generous in his willingness to examine and re-examine his life as honestly as possible through this process. I think he realized very early on that I wasn’t striving for a sensationalistic telling of the story but rather a very human one. 

As for surprises, I don’t have any specific ones that jump out. While Silverhead were hired musicians, they quickly became a very collaborative and tightly-knit band. Michael was very much the leader but the sound evolved from the players.
 
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If Rodney Bingenheimer is the Mayor of Sunset Strip, then Michael Des Barres is the Strip’s Lord Chamberlain, Knight of the Garter, and Poet Laureate. He is what would result if you combined the DNA of a young Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, Lord Byron, Percy B. Shelley, Heathcliff, Lothario, and every aristocratic hero (he is a marquis) from every Barbara Cartland romance novel.

Michael Des Barres started out his professional life as a young actor. He attended drama school at sixteen after years at elite British private boarding schools. He appeared on television in the U.K.  (Whack-O!, The Bruce Forsyth Show, Mrs. Thursday), West End theatre (The Dirtiest Show in Town, performing in the nude), and in the film To Sir, With Love. Most Americans recognize him from his acting roles here: Mulholland Drive, Roseanne, NCIS, Ellen, Melrose Place, and MacGyver.

Some of us caught an early glimpse of him in 1978 as a punk rocker on WKRP in Cincinnati. Musically his vampy joie de vivre as Robert Palmer’s replacement as lead singer for The Power Station at Live Aid in 1985 was legendary. A diminuitive friend of mine who saw Des Barres for the first time at Live Aid immediately went about studying and desperately copping his stage moves.

Those stage moves were carefully honed in three short-lived bands: Silverhead, Detective, and Chequered Past (which also featured Steve Jones). The British glam-rock band Silverhead, consisting of Michael, bassist Nigel Harrison (who later joined Blondie), guitarist Rod “The Rook” Davies, drummer Pete “Tommo” Thompson, and guitarist Steve Forest (replaced by Robbie Blunt), formed in 1972. They were young, glamorous, and skinny, so scrawny that Michael once joked  that their collective weight was about 150 pounds. They released two studio albums, Silverhead (1972) and 16 and Savaged (1973), and one live album, Live at the Rainbow (1975), on Purple Records, Deep Purple’s label. They were dirty, raunchy (“More Than Your Mouth Can Hold,” for example), and fun, a hard-partying, kohl-wearing feature of the burgeoning glitter scene, where Michael befriended, among others, Marc Bolan. They toured extensively throughout the U.K., Europe, Japan, and the U.S., opening for Kiss, Nazareth, Osibisa, Fleetwood Mac, Uriah Heep, and Deep Purple. When Michael fell offstage and broke his arm in the U.S, it did not slow him down. His cast was spray-painted silver to match his hair, and they kept the party going.

Silverhead were supposed to be the Next Big Thing, poised to conquer the American music market. Unfortunately it never happened. Their sales were disappointing, and they did not reach the same sphere of popularity as T. Rex, Slade, or Sweet. Then they imploded, abruptly breaking up in the middle of working on their third album (Brutiful) in 1974. Michael relocated to L.A. permanently and eventually married The GTO’s Miss Pamela, whom he had met on the set of the movie Arizonaslim when he was a last-microsecond replacement for Keith Moon.

Pamela wrote about her first impression of Michael in her first memoir I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, calling him “a degenerate drug-taking sex-dog toting two bottles of Southern Comfort, wearing two dozen silver bracelets on each arm” and “...a well-bred lunatic with an abundant vocabulary who drank like a school of fish.”

Silverhead has earned a new generation of young fans, thanks to the internet. They reunited last year for a series of concerts in Tokyo and just settled on another reunion scheduled for next year. I talked to Michael this week about the origin of Silverhead and their brief few years of glory. We ended up talking about a lot of other things, including 12 Step programs, drugs, art, and books. He’s read the recent list of David Bowie’s top 100 books and concurs with it, but would add classics like Hemingway, Tolstoy, Twain, Genet, Henry Miller, Rimbaud, Shakespeare, Sartre, Patti Smith, and Serge Gainsbourg. He doesn’t like Bukowski: “I’d rather read Steinbeck.”

He also told me that he prefers real books to Kindles, as does his long-time friend Jimmy Page. “If someone gave Jimmy a Kindle, he’d give it to a member of his staff to start a fire with.”

Dangerous Minds: When did you first get the idea to form Silverhead?

Michael Des Barres: I was doing a huge musical in London called The Dirtiest Show in Town, and Andrew Lloyd Webber came to see it because it was produced by Robert Stigwood, who of course ended up producing Jesus Christ Superstar. I ended up singing on the demos for that in the role of Judas. We got along great, and he said, “You should be a rock and roll star.” I was playing an androgynous sort of character in this musical. I played this angrogynous rock star, which I then became. He said, “You should be in a band. Write some songs immediately.” So I wrote a song called “Will You Finance My Rock and Roll Band?” and he did. He got me a record deal at Purple Records. We put a ad in the Melody Maker, which was the music paper, the de rigueur music source of information in London at that time in 1971. The ad said, “Wanted: erotic relaxed musicians.” These ne’er-do-wells showed up, skinny with floppy hair and eye makeup, and we formed a band called Silverhead.

Within three months we were in Japan playing these gigs, unbelievable response, because we had white faces, it was glamourous, it was kabuki, it was bluesy, it was decadent. Then we came to the states and played to eleven people in Cleveland. You know how it is, “big in Japan.” But fantastic experience, Silverhead, great band. Authentic, degenerate. We led that life. I met Miss Pamela. I left England. I moved in with Miss Pamela in 1974. The band broke up. It was a short-lived, explosive moment. We’re going back in March, funnily enough. That just happened this week. It should be lovely, because that’s closure. It ended in a cloud of hashish and acrimony.

More Michael Des Barres after the jump…