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Michael Purington
I Think I’ll Quit Drinkin’ Today
Genres: 12 Step / Recovery Best Selling CDs
Price: $14.99
Songs and Samples
Heard on 12StepRadio.com
Personal Bottom
I Think I’ll Quit Drinkin’ Today
Newcomer
I Am The Booze
Sayings On The Wall
Gloom, Doom, 7-Up & Jesus
Step 13
The Seven Deadlies
I Got A Choice
There Is A God (And I Ain't It)
Last House On The Block
Two Dancers
About Michael Purington
Meet The Band:
Michael Purington – guitar, vocals
Phil Hamilton - harp
Paul Kelley - bass, vocals
Jeff Kirschenmann – drums
Tim Ishler - banjo, dobro, vocals
Michael Purington played saxophone in a dance band at age 13, quickly promoting himself to guitar shortly thereafter. At 19, he began playing professionally and started the Lost Highway Band in 1974, touring the western United States and Canada. They released two albums and three singles, and performed with Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, B.B. King and George Thorogood, among others. Michael has played music part-time for the past ten years.
Phil Hamilton was a founding member of the Lost Highway Band with Michael, plays harmonica, sax and percussion. Phil is morale director and a pretty funny guy.
Paul Kelley came up from Austin, Texas to join the Lost Highway Band in 1976. He plays bass, sings like a bird and knows every song Louden Wainwright III ever wrote.
Tim Ishler hired Paul to play in his band in the late 80's, then hired Michael in the early '90's. Tim won first place on the Gong Show in 1976 playing "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" on banjo and dobro.
Jeff Kirschenmann has built a reputation since the mid-80's as the ultimate hometown Montana drummer. His tasty adherence to keeping a groove made him indispensible to the Messengers.
About I Think I'll Quit Drinkin' Today
I've always thought of the character in these songs as The Guy, as in, The Guy finally decides maybe he's got a drinking problem, or, The Guy decides to take action about his situation.
Anyway, The Guy started popping up in all these songs almost accidentally, as if the tunes were already written, and my job was just to physically document them. Irreverence was comfortably coupled with cold hard truth, humor married stark horror, and fear and faith walked happily together hand in hand.
The Guy's still partyin' hardy in Personal Bottom, the alcohol is doing the job, but he knows there's a day of reckoning coming. The title tune, I Think I'll Quit Drinkin' Today, finds our hero all done...well, sort of.
Newcomer is in second person from the viewpoint of helpful souls who've found sobriety and relish The Guy's presence as new blood, fresh meat and a necessary reminder that "there but for the grace of God go we." They've been there too.
I Am The Booze is the demon in first person. The alcohol announces its intentions in no uncertain terms.
In Sayings On The Wall The Guy encounters two primary recovery tools: redundance and cliches. And it's all "...startin' to make sense even to a smart guy like myself."
He's sober and grouchy, and his new life is Gloom, Doom, 7-Up & Jesus. He's half in and half out. So The Guy looks for entertainment. The famed 13th Step involves hustling women at meetings. Only trouble is, "Under every skirt there's a slip." Relapse, that is.
So he consults a long-term sobriety pal and is coached on character defects, or The Seven Deadlies. Now The Guy says, I Got A Choice. Life does not just sort of happen to me. I can drink or not drink, laugh or cry, live or die, be honest or lie. It's up to me.
And he finally decides maybe he's not the center of the universe after all (There Is A God And I Ain't It), even though he still acts like it a lot of the time.
Then comes the gratitude of having discovered the Last House On The Block. Consistency. Home. Hope.
Two Dancers is a song that stands for itself. I really can't get literal with it, except to say that it was the obvious choice to wrap up this whole project. Something in it tells the story about the "inside job" we all go through when we wrestle with our demons and the death grip becomes an embrace. I got to learn to live with me.
I Think I'll Quit Drinkin' Today is mostly just for fun. But there's a few things goin' on here that might bear a second listening, or maybe even a third. If nothing else, the pickin'll getcha'."
- Michael Purington
March 28, 2001
News and Reviews
An Even Tenor - Sobriety Rekindles Missoula Musician's Creative Spark
By Sherry Jones of The Missoulan
You know the type, the life of the party, the guy who orders a shot, holds it up in the air and challenges everyone in the bar to chug-a-lug, to bottoms-up, to down their drinks all at once.
That was Michael Purington. As a musician with the popular 1970s group Lost Highway Band, Purington would start with a beer in the afternoon, during rehearsals, and progress to liquor at night, during gigs.
For a dozen years he traveled and played and drank - having fun, he says: "It was working. It was a great life."
When the band quit, in the mid-80s, Purington didn't. "When there's no gig, you have a lot of time to fill," he says.
He'd work from 8 to 5, then go home at night and get drunk. He quit writing songs; he stopped making music. Then for the umpteenth time, he quit drinking. He was sober for about four years. "Quitting is easy," Purington says, paraphrasing W.C. Fields. "I quit a million times."
He returned to music - as a promoter, this time, bringing blues acts to Missoula. He booked Bonnie Raitt into the Wilma Theater, he says; he brought John Prine and John Lee Hooker to the Top Hat. The bar scene proved too great a temptation, though; in 1989, he took to the bottle again.
"I just wasn't hooked up with other people who were sober," he says. "It just about makes you crazy if you don't have help."
Then he found himself playing in a band at Harry David's nightclub: "It was horrible," he says - not the band, necessarily, but the experience. After all, he'd toured all over the place with the Lost Highway Band, had recorded albums during an era when doing so was a big deal, had nurtured big dreams of making the New York scene - and now, the best he could do was a Missoula South Side bar?
"So I started," he says, lifting an imaginary drink to his lips. To escape? "Oh, yeah - to escape life. Just let me die ... slowly." He drove home shakily that night. The woman he was living with was so fed up with his drinking, she wouldn't talk to him. That was bad enough. "But mostly, I had reached a point where - it was very undramatic - I started asking for help."
Ten years later, Purington, 52, is not only as sober as a stone, but he's writing, and playing, music again. Not just any songs, either. While most country musicians write and sing about drinking, Purington sings about NOT drinking. His CDs have caught the attention of the sobriety community and Purington, who sells cars for a living, is touring again.
Last September, for instance, he played a gig for recovering alcoholics in Cherry Hill, N.J., - across the river from Philadelphia. So close to New York, he could almost see the Empire State Building. Now he's entertaining offers from "sobriety cruise" companies inviting him to perform for their audiences.
"I spent all these years of my life trying to make it someplace," he says, shaking his head.
Sobriety is paying off for Purington in all kinds of ways - not the least of which is this one: He's writing songs again, lots of songs. "Not just about drinking," he says. "It's about living a different way.
"We all know people that are just flat-out good people. For the rest of us, there is a way to learn to not only be who we want to be, but to be who we are."
Sober, he says, "You get to be who you really are. Your real self emerges. You attain your potential. Stuff starts happening in life. It becomes an adventure."