Here's a clip of Fred "Mickey" Finn, who has had a remarkable career. I'll tell you just about everything I know about it and I may have some of this wrong…
Fred and his wife Mickie ran a very successful nightclub in San Diego in the sixties. He played piano and fronted a jazzy, energetic Dixieland band. She played the banjo. People packed Mickie Finn's, as the club was called, drinking beer and singing along with the very loud music. It was so popular that in 1966, NBC put on a series called Mickie Finn's, which was just them and their band playing jazzy tunes for a half-hour. I remember watching and thinking that it was just about impossible to feel depressed or listless listening to them play. I was disappointed when it was replaced by a sitcom that didn't do as well.
In the early seventies, the club in San Diego closed and around that time, Fred and Mickie got a divorce. I'm a little fuzzy on the timing but I think at that point, Fred began billing himself as Mickie Finn or sometimes Mickey Finn or Fred "Mickey" Finn. He married again — to another woman who looked somewhat like his first wife and could also play the banjo — and the act went on, headlining for years in Las Vegas and later touring.
I saw them in Laughlin, Nevada in the mid-eighties and if you'd been in Arizona at the time and opened a window, you probably heard them there. They were real good but real loud…and again, so lively and happy they could have put a smile on Buster Keaton, even in his present condition. After the show, I tried to go over and meet Fred (or Mickey or whatever his name was that week) but a neckless casino guard wouldn't let me anywhere near the performers.
I believe The Mickey Finn Show still tours now and then, probably in venues I will never visit. Aside from the decibel level and the part where Mr. Finn asks everyone in the audience to pinch, tickle or hug the person sitting next to them, I'd love to see him again. The guy was (and I presume still is) a really fine player of the piano and a showman extraordinaire. Here's a little of what he did or does…