In the late 1960s, a doctor’s wife drove her teenage son from the Los Angeles suburbs to blues clubs in South Central and dropped him off to play guitar with touring legends. That teenager, Michael Leonard Mann, born in 1954, was so convincing on stage that Buddy Guy and Junior Wells gave him the name Hollywood Fats. This episode explains why a nickname from Chicago masters amounted to a baptism into the blues world, and how a suburban kid earned it through timing and feel that could not be faked.

We follow his 1970s work as a sideman for Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Jimmy Witherspoon, J.B. Hutto and James Harman, and his decision to trade that prestige for creative control by forming the Hollywood Fats Band in 1974 with Al Blake, Fred Kaplan, Richard Innes and later Larry Taylor of Canned Heat. The conversation then tracks his 1980s pivots into Canned Heat, The Blasters and the punk-adjacent Dino’s Revenge, and why Chicago blues and hardcore punk share the same DNA. His death from a heroin overdose in 1986 at age 32, the day after a gig at the Music Machine, ended that experiment, but his bandmates later reunited as the Hollywood Blue Flames with Kirk Fletcher and kept releasing his unissued live recordings through 2019.

• A wealthy white teenager welcomed on South Central stages by the architects of the blues
• Why he left Muddy Waters’ orbit to start his own band, explained through a sous chef and a food truck
• Canned Heat, The Blasters and Dino’s Revenge: how blues vocabulary fit the fury of LA punk
• The grim reality behind the tortured musician myth and a fatal overdose at 32
• The Hollywood Blue Flames and the posthumous live tapes that refused to let him become a footnote