LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Mike Wilhelm, a blues and rock great who was part of founding the 1960s San Francisco music scene before later calling Lake County home, has died.

Wilhelm died Tuesday at a San Francisco hospital after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 77 years old.

“Although in declining health over the last few years, Mike was a great guitarist, loved his music and worked hard at keeping the flame alive. Very sorry to see him go,” said Bernie Butcher, who along with wife Lynne owns the Blue Wing Saloon and Tallman Hotel in Upper Lake, and featured Wilhelm many times at the saloon, one of the county’s top music venues.

Wilhelm emerged as a key talent in the influential 1960s Bay Area music scene.

He was a member of the Charlatans, hailed as San Francisco’s first psychedelic rock band that kicked off a groundbreaking musical era and introduced the “San Francisco Sound.” Charlatans drummer Dan Hicks later went on to form Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks.

In 1967, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia reportedly called Wilhelm his favorite guitarist. Wilhelm displayed a beautiful mastery of the guitar, whether it was finger-picking a western-style ballad, digging into the blues or playing rock. Married perfectly to that practiced effortless ability with a deep, powerful voice.

Wilhelm grew up in Southern California. He told Lake County News music columnist Thurman Watts in 2010 that he grew up watching the Johnny Otis television show every Friday night, with other musical influences including the King of Western Swing, Spade Cooley, who also had a TV show, as well as Lawrence Welk, the radio and his parents’ classical music collection.

Another important influence – Blues legend Brownie McGee “gladly taught Wilhelm licks on the guitar that have continued to further his playing and appreciation of the blues to this day,” Watts wrote.

Butcher, who also grew up in Southern California, recalled mentioning to Wilhelm one night that he was about ready to go to his 50th high school reunion.

“Funny, my 50th is coming up too,” Wilhelm told Butcher.

“Turns out we were classmates in the San Fernando Valley, Canoga Park High Class of ’60,” Butcher said.

“So I look him up in my yearbook and he’s a clean-cut kid like the rest of us – short hair, scrubbed face, thin black tie and all the rest. Then he comes back from a stint in the Navy and ends up in San Francisco in 1964 and falls in with a group of musicians that call themselves the Charlatans and they’re sporting long hair and western dude attire,” said Butcher.

Barry Melton, another 1960s rock star who fronted the band Country Joe and the Fish, also knew Wilhelm from growing up in Southern California.

Melton, who played at Woodstock, later went on to become a public defender, working in Lake County in that capacity for many years. He retired from his law practice in 2017 and now splits his time between Paris and Northern California.

Currently in Paris, Melton recalled that he and Wilhelm were “San Fernando Valley kids” who first met in 1963 when Wilhelm was running a weekly hootenanny – or a "hoot" – at "The Prophet," a small folk music venue in Woodland Hills.

“We actually met while playing music at one of the other folk clubs in the big city, over the hill; but it didn't take long for him to recruit me for a Woodland Hills set,” said Melton.

“This was an exciting time, musically, for young folk singers in Southern California; and Mike Wilhelm was a gifted finger-picking wizard in a neighborhood filled with talented folk performers the likes of David Crosby, David Lindley, Taj Mahal and others,” Melton explained.

Melton said he’s not quite sure when he first heard the clarion call to the Bay Area, but by the time he arrived, Wilhelm was there also.

By late summer 1965, Wilhelm was recording with the Charlatans, who Melton called “THE founding San Francisco rock band.”

Country Joe and The Fish, started around the time, “but we started as a duo and didn't go full-bore electric until early 1966,” Melton said.




Wilhelm, Melton recalled, was the first person – but not the last – to call him a “hippie.”

“I was with my old friend, Bruce Barthol, in my 1954 Plymouth Belvedere and he labeled us both with the same accusation. Funny how things like that stick in one's mind …” Melton said.

In 1965, the Charlatans began a stint at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, creating for their appearance what is regarded as the first psychedelic rock poster, a style that would be used by numerous music acts to come.

Butcher said he’s visited the Red Dog Saloon and it’s still going, with Charlatan photos on the walls.

The Charlatans didn’t achieve a national reputation for themselves, but they were well known locally and were one of the main features at the Summer of Love concerts in Golden Gate Park in 1967. “I recall that they had a big reunion at the 40th anniversary concerts there in 2007,” Butcher said.

The Charlatans also reunited for performances in 2015 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the group’s formation.

After the Charlatans, Wilhelm didn’t stop playing or writing music.

“And so, as music is all about changes, Mike and I were in a number of different groups over the decades that followed – but we were always in touch,” said Melton. “I remember when he joined up with my old Sunset District commune members from the ‘Flamin' Groovies,’ and he formed his own aggregation, ‘Loose Gravel.’ I was privileged to play with his band, ‘Hired Guns,’ several years back at the Blue Wing Saloon in Upper Lake.”

Melton said there's a killer track that's surfaced on the internet of Wilhelm playing with Melton’s old band, Dinosaurs, in the mid-1980s. The video can be seen below.

As a member of the Flamin’ Groovies, Wilhelm toured around Europe. In a 2009 interview with then-Lake County News music columnist Gary Peterson, Wilhelm recalled playing in Manchester, England, following the English-French punk rock band The Stranglers, whose members had beaten up a critic.

“When the Groovies hit the stage the next night in the Beatlesque costumes they then favored, the audience was, shall we day, a tad unfriendly. So the band left, then Wilhelm came out again, alone, ‘dapper and dangerous as usual,’ as [musician Peter] Case put it, and simply said in his Johnny Cash deep bass voice: ‘We agree with The Stranglers; there are older laws.’ The Manchester audience remained most respectful for the rest of the evening,” Peterson wrote.

In a 2007column on recalling the Summer of Love, Peterson called Wilhelm “the greatest unsung guitarist of his generation,” a man who “still had that 1967 glow in their eyes.”

For many years Wilhelm called Kelseyville home, playing around Lake County – you could see him at the Blue Wing Saloon in Upper Lake or even the Lake County Fair – and in the Bay Area and the West Coast, where audiences embraced his legendary virtuosity.

During his time in Lake County, he assembled bands with heavy duty talent such as himself, his old friend Melton and folk musician Don Coffin.

He also continued to garner accolades, with his work in creating the San Francisco Sound celebrated in the Charlatans reunions and Wilhelm inducted into the American Heritage International Blues Hall of Fame in March 2012 as a great blues artist of San Francisco.

Melton said Wilhelm also worked with community radio station KPFZ on its show “Buckaroo Man,” which broadcasts at 11 a.m. the last Saturday of the month.

On Thursday, Melton said, “When I spoke to Mike last week, he was mixing down songs for the broadcast ... tune in, if you can!”

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.