Ohio music legend Michael Stanley died Friday, his family said.
The 72-year-old rock musician was diagnosed with lung cancer in the fall.
“Cleveland singer and songwriter Michael Stanley Gee passed away peacefully at home on March 5th with his family by his side,” his family said in a statement Saturday. “Michael battled lung cancer for seven months with the same strength and dignity he carried throughout his life. He will always be remembered as a loving father, brother, husband, a loyal friend, and the leader of one of Cleveland’s most successful rock bands.”
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Stanley got his start in 1965 when he formed a band called the Scepters while he was still in high school. In his sophomore year of college, he joined a band called the Tree Stumps and was discovered by a record producer at a club in Cleveland.
“A producer, an actual record producer just like in the movies, stumbled into this club one night,” Stanley said years later. “He was from New York and happened to be in Cleveland visiting a friend.”
He formed the Michael Stanley Band in 1974. The group was a success in Ohio, regularly selling out large arenas. Its best-known song, “My Town,” reached No. 39 on Billboard’s top 100.
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“It was a joke amongst the band,” Stanley told the Akron Beacon Journal in 2018. “It keeps you humble because you do four sold-out nights at Blossom and you’re pretty much a serious rock star, and then the next night, you’re in a club in Indiana playing for 200 people and you go, ‘OK, there’s this side of it also.'”
Stanley’s funeral service will be private. His family requested that in lieu of flowers, fans should contribute in his memory to the Cleveland Food Bank or the Cleveland Animal Protective League.
