The life path of Mike Nile—musician, producer, songwriter turned director and filmmaker—has over the past 60 years been filled with inspiration, tragedy, and joy. He says he’s been blessed to have worked with many great musicians and bands, including Spirit, Fleetwood Mac, Bonnie Raitt, Firefall, Little Feat, Dolly Parton—and even Orson Welles. He’s experienced great satisfaction, as well as great personal loss, but says he’s now in “a good place.”
Nile recently produced “Vessel: a Rock Opera” with Peter Barton Fletcher, who developed the story and composed the music. Nile co-wrote the screenplay and filmed and edited the production.
Nile’s roots in the entertainment industry go back to when his mother wanted him and his sister, at five and three, respectively, to become dancers. “My mom saw the show “The Little Rascals” on TV and wanted her kids to be like that,” Nile said. “So, my sister and I entered a talent show, and we won first place in the tap dancing contest. I got used to being on stage.”
When the Beatles became the big thing in pop music, Nile wanted a guitar. “Man, I was big on the Beatles. I wanted a guitar band,” Nile said. “So I bought this acoustic guitar from Rockley’s on Colfax—my dad and my mom wouldn’t let me get an electric guitar because they said, ‘Hey, you can’t sit around a campfire with an electric guitar and play songs.’ In 1964, I got a top of the line Fender Precision Bass. My parents lent me the money, and I paid them back every cent off of gigs that I played.”
Nile’s first band, The Blue Blazes, performed the first song he wrote (he was 12) at a Battle of the Bands contest and won a prize of studio recording time. The band played at junior and high schools and churches throughout Denver and at Roller City in Lakewood.
He graduated from Lakewood High School in 1971 with a music scholarship to Colorado State University. After a year at CSU, he enrolled at UCD to study electronic music. “For my senior thesis, I wrote a suite—’The Moonlight’—which was performed by the Denver Symphony and the Electronic Music Ensemble.”
Producers Mike and Bob Lee (Radio personalities in the L.A. area) got wind of Nile’s expertise with electronic music and asked him to go to their studio and do some synthesizer work. Eventually, Nile ran his own 5000-square-foot recording studio in Malibu, where he worked in the ‘70s and ‘80s with many nationally known musicians and bands.
Throughout his impressive history, Nile estimates he’s written between 2000 and 3000 songs.
Nile was a member of the rock band Spirit in the late 1980s, until his father fell ill with leukemia in 1993, and he returned to Lakewood to help take care of him.
Now back in in Jefferson County, Nile formed a Celtic rock band—The Indulgers—with violinist Renee Fine, who would become his wife (she was also a violinist with the Boulder Philharmonic). After 18 years, The Indulgers disbanded and Nile and Fine formed Wild Mountain, an Americana folk rock band with Sarah Jones and Neale Heywood.
Sadly, Renee was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 2019 and died in April of 2023. “The biggest challenge of my life was losing my partner of 25 years—a fellow musician and someone I shared everything with,” Nile said. “For the next three and a half years, I became the caregiver.
“When Renee couldn’t play, and she got to the point she couldn’t even hold a violin anymore, I didn’t have the heart to continue to play without her. That’s when I went into filmmaking, to overcome the vacuum that I had when I wasn’t playing anymore.
“I had always done videos with my band. So it was really easy for me to kind of fall into doing filmmaking and get into different projects.” Some of his film work can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/@sideoftheroadshow.
“Vessel: a Rock Opera” follows the life of Vessel, a character created in the mind of “Pete”, after his mother, brother and best friend all die within a short amount of time. Vessel experiences a mental breakdown. While under hypnosis by his psychiatrist, he goes into the world of a young aspiring musician who becomes a rock star and is tricked by a jealous friend and bandmate into taking a ride on a train to hell. Through iconic rock songs, the opera’s surreal narrative navigates through Vessel’s dream-like world…. or is it a dream?
The opera will premiere at Clancy’s Irish Pub on December 19 at 7 p.m.—for the cast and crew but, space permitting, Nile says, “the more the merrier!”
Life often returns things full circle. As it turns out, Nile’s next project is to edit raw documentary footage another company had begun about the band Spirit, in which he had once been a member.
Nile has been an avid businessman, a manager, producer, arranger, performer, songwriter and filmmaker. He says that considering all the people he’s worked with and everything he’s done, he’s at a place of peace and fulfillment in his life, with new projects and all the challenges they might bring forth. He says he is in “a good place.”
His new motto is ‘I want to do nice things for nice people.’ “As soon as I started doing that, I started getting friends,” Nile said. “I’m talking about real friends that call me up and say, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ So now, what I do, I do for love. I do nice things for nice people.”
