When he was a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, Mick Hellman was hellbent on playing drums in a rock band. His father, Warren Hellman, a wealthy San Francisco investment banker and private equity investor, had other ideas for his only son.
“My father actually got on me about it, saying, ‘I don’t want you doing this. It’s not what you’re supposed to be doing,’” Hellman recalls. “And then over the Christmas holiday, my bandmate pawned my cymbals to buy drugs and alcohol. I was like, ‘My father’s right. This is a terrible thing to do with my time.’”
The irony of the situation is that all these years later Mick Hellman, at 63, is the drummer and leader of the popular rock band the Wreckless Strangers. And his late father is beloved in the Bay Area as “the bluegrass billionaire” who founded and funded Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (HSB), a free festival in Golden Gate Park that has become an annual San Francisco live music tradition, drawing hundreds of thousands of fans over three days every fall for the past 24 years.
Hellman, who lives in the city, is telling me the story of his unlikely musical journey after a sound check at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley hours before a recent Wreckless Strangers concert celebrating the release of the band’s new six-song EP, “Blue Sky Fantasy.”
After his rock ‘n’ roll misadventure in college, young Mick stopped pounding drums and hit the books, dutifully upholding the three-generation tradition of men in the Hellman family, graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics and going on to get his MBA from Harvard Business School, just as his father and grandfather had before him.
“The one thing I will say about my dad is that he was a hard-ass when I was growing up,” he says. “There’s no question about it. But it’s hard being a parent. You want things for your children. And one of the things he wanted for me was to have some linear trajectory in terms of getting through university and finding a job and having a career.”
Breaking away on bikes
For 14 years, he worked at the San Francisco private equity firm his father co-founded. When he finally broke away from his dad, it wasn’t to run off with a rock band, it was to become a professional bike racer.
“My father was shocked, but he was really supportive when I did that,” he remembers.
In a competitive athletic family like the Hellmans, that support isn’t surprising. Warren Hellman won the national championship in ride and tie racing, combining horseback riding and running, five times in his age category and competed in the grueling Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile ultramarathon. His mother, Chris, a onetime British ballerina, was a champion ski racer.
Starting with mountain bike racing and road racing, Mick Hellman advanced to cycling competitions in the velodrome, trying out for the U.S. Olympic team in 2008. He didn’t make the cut, but came close, finishing fourth in a qualification race in Los Angeles. His training partner, Rob Anderson, is now the Wreckless Strangers rhythm guitarist.
While he pursued his passion for racing, his father had rediscovered his love for the banjo and started Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in 2001. Over the years, many members of the large Hellman clan, including Mick’s daughters Avery and Olivia (he and his wife of 40 years, Sabrina, have five children), were drawn into the festival’s enchanting musical orbit, learning to sing, play instruments and perform in various aggregations each year at HSB. Even his late aunt, philanthropist and arts patron Nancy Bechtle, got into the act, fronting a band she called Nancy and the Lambchops.
But Mick remained outside the fold, content to focus his energies on his racing career.
“HSB was my father’s thing, and there was maybe a little father-son tension between us,” he says. “He would take the kids and I would go race bikes.”
But his ears would perk up when his daughters brought home records by Americana singer-songwriters like Robert Earl Keen and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my god, this stuff is really good. It’s amazing and I need to hear more of it,’” he says.
Playing his first gig
Finally, in 2013, he reluctantly agreed to back up his daughter Olivia and the Texas singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore on a rendition of “Jackson” at HSB that year.
“I was terrified,” he remembers. “After that I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’d better learn how to play.’ So I took a lot of lessons.”
After attaining some proficiency on drums, he formed a band, originally called the Well Known Strangers, to showcase Olivia, then an aspiring country singer.
The band compensated for its lack of polish by playfully calling its style “brutal country,” releasing an EP of mostly cover tunes followed by a debut album with original songs by Olivia and the band.
“In the brutal country days, she was a hobbyist and brutal country was about all I could play,” says Hellman and laughs. “It was a good fit to do it that way and people seemed to find it entertaining.”
The Hellman family and their musician friends were emotionally shattered when Olivia’s fiancé was killed in an ATV accident two weeks before their wedding. The band’s album, “TMI,” included “A Song for My Daughter,” a compassionate tune Hellman wrote as a letter of condolence to Olivia, who moved to Nashville to grieve and continue her singing career as Olivia Wolf.
Becoming the Wreckless Strangers
After Olivia departed, the band decided to forge ahead, changing its name to the Wreckless Strangers (another band already had the name Well Known Strangers) and hiring seasoned Marin singer Amber Morris to share lead vocal duties with lead guitarist David Noble, formerly of the band Poor Man’s Whiskey.
Morris had already been working with Hellman, his daughters and other family members as their vocal coach, so she already knew the support the Hellmans have given the music community and that she would be part of a band with a leader who encouraged the songwriting aspirations and talents of its members.
“We’re one of the few bands in the Bay Area right now playing mostly original music,” she says. “And Mick really supports that.”
On the new EP, she co-wrote “Never Give Up,” an anthemic rocker with Hellman driving the sound with a strong Latin music groove.
“I want the music to evolve and grow and encourage people’s creativity,” he says. “I want it to grow and expand.”
From its brutal country days, the band’s sound has indeed evolved into a self-described “Bay Area gumbo” ranging from rock and R&B to country and Americana. The new EP includes a tune, “Lost Souls,” co-written by Marin rock legend Bill Champlin.
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In 2008, Hellman founded his own investment company, HMI Capital, and is its managing partner. With a day job like that, he has the wealth and resources to give his band every chance it needs to succeed. After his father died in 2011, he acquired his Neanderthal Records label, which he owns, as well as its spinoff, Neanderthal Touring. There aren’t many local bands with the kind of top-of-the-line gear and professional organization the Wreckless Strangers enjoy, from management and booking agencies to publicists and producers for records and videos. Nearly every song has its own music video, and the new EP has been released on CD and streaming platforms as well as on a 33-rpm album in multi-colored vinyl with the new EP on one side and the band’s previous one, “Orange Sky Dream,” on the other.
“I do the financing of it,” says Hellman of the band. “But mostly I sit in back and play drums. I love, love, love to play. And I love the people in the band.”
He seems to have taken to heart a maxim from his father, who once compared money to manure.
“If you hold onto it, it stinks,” he said. “But if you spread it around, good things grow.”
In addition to the Wreckless Strangers, Hellman rehearses once a week with Marco and the Polos, a band that features his three sisters: Judith (keys, hand percussion), Tricia (guitar, banjo) and Frances (vocals). He’s proud of his daughter Avery Hellman, who calls herself Ismay professionally and has fashioned a career for herself as an indie-folk singer-songwriter with a new album, “Desert Pavement.”
The band as family
That same strong sense of family the Hellmans foster also extends to the Wreckless Strangers.
“They hold the musicians they work with very close to them,” Morris says. “Mick is always talking about building the family circle.”
During the pandemic, the six band members — Hellman, Noble, Morris, Anderson, keyboardist Austin de Lone and bassist Joshua Zucker — continued to meet online and work on writing and recording new material. Even though there were no gigs, Hellman generously compensated them for their contributions, ensuring that no one was struggling too much financially.
“He made sure nobody was dying out there,” Morris says. “We were all able to keep afloat.”
No one has been more essential to the Hellman family’s musical development than de Lone, a respected Mill Valley keyboardist and singer who was the Hellman family’s musical director long before becoming a founding member of the Wreckless Strangers. When de Lone was struggling with serious health issues earlier this year, Hellman got him a driver, medical therapists and assistance in putting on a benefit show for de Lone and his wife, Lesley, produced at the Great American Music Hall during HSB.
“He did some really nice things to help me out in a really rough situation earlier this year and I didn’t have to pay him a penny,” de Lone says. “He’s very thoughtful and respectful to everyone. He’s just a super nice man.”
Being a buttoned-down financier during the day and a rock ‘n’ roller at night is the kind of double life that even Hellman’s father would likely approve of now.
With his band, the trim, fit drummer exchanges his conservative business attire for musician’s threads and a pair of tinted shades that are hip enough to make Bono envious.
“My life is pretty simple, really,” he says. “I work. I play music. The music fits the job well because it’s an evening and weekends thing. It gives me a nice counterbalance. I feel like it’s a really good fit.”
• Details: The Wreckless Strangers perform a dinner show at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 11 at Rancho Nicasio at 1 Old Rancheria Road in Nicasio. Dinner reservations are available from 6 to 8 p.m. Admission is $24, which includes just the music. More information at ranchonicasio.com.
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net
