Michael Dahlquist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (October 2007) |
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
| Michael Dahlquist | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Michael Dahlquist |
| Born | December 22, 1965 |
| Died | July 14, 2005 (aged 39) |
| Occupation(s) | Drummer |
| Instrument(s) | Drums |
Michael Dahlquist (December 22, 1965–2005) was a drummer in the Seattle band Silkworm.
Contents |
[edit] The early years
Michael Dahlquist was born at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, Washington. He spent his childhood in Bothell, a nearby town, and many vacations were spent at his grandmother’s ranch in Livingston, Montana. In 1969 and 1970, a nine-month trip to Europe saw the Dahlquist clan live on bread and cheese as they traversed the continent. His childhood was filled with creative endeavors: writing (a lasting passion), juggling, puppetry, and tree-climbing, with a little skateboarding thrown in for good measure.
Michael graduated from Inglemoor High School in Bothell in 1984, and then attended Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. In Olympia, he continued to develop his interests in writing and performance. To the former, he studied literature, mythology and mysticism, including a summer program at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he studied with poets Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen. He engaged in all manner of performance-oriented endeavors, from stage design to participation in and study of Fluxus-style art events of the sort pioneered by John Cage and Joseph Beuys. During this time period Michael had his first experiences as a rock drummer, playing with the bands Flowers for Funerals and Dungpump.
In 1988 Michael moved from Olympia to Seattle. After a few odd jobs, he found himself a home at Yellow and Graytop cab companies, for whom he drove over the next eight years.
[edit] Silkworm
In January of 1990, Michael began a personal and semi-professional relationship that would shape much of his adult life. He met the members of Silkworm, three young men recently transplanted from Montana, who were looking to replace their drum machine. He doubled the size of his kit to four drums immediately. Michael was also a member of the Crust Brothers, playing on their 1998 album Marquee Mark.
The activities of Silkworm dominated Michael’s life for the next six years. He also became an avid mountaineer and scaled Mts. Adams, Hood, Baker, and Shuksan. He snowboarded, learned to be a swing dancer, and also found time to play with a local gamelan ensemble.
In late 1996, Silkworm began curtailing their tour schedule, and Michael talked his way into a job as office grunt at Lizardtech, a local producer of imaging software. Six months later, he bought his first house, a tiny one-bedroom on Seattle’s Beacon Hill. By the time he left Lizardtech as a product manager in the summer of 2001, he had taught himself Perl, HTML, and XML, and had written the Silkworm website from scratch.
In October 2001, Michael moved from Seattle to Chicago, Illinois. His bandmates had already made this move, individually, but the band had continued to prosper as a long-distance concern.
In Chicago, he was employed at Shure Incorporated as a technical writer, and he continued to spend a great deal of time on Silkworm and related pursuits. However, he also started a web design business and resumed his college studies, as he pursued a degree in visual anthropology from DePaul University.
[edit] Beyond music
In the last few years of Michael’s life, he made landmark trips to Italy (twice) and Japan with Silkworm. He bought a 2500-square-foot condominium on Chicago’s South Side.
Between late 2001 and mid-2005, he took on the job of editing 145 hours of digital video into a 90-minute documentary film titled "Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?," an outsider perspective on the Christian rock music scene. He taught himself film editing from scratch, building a ramshackle Avid system out of home PCs.
[edit] Death
Michael died on Thursday, July 14, 2005. While he was stopped at a traffic signal, another car struck his at high speed. His friends and fellow musicians Douglas Meis and John Glick also died.
