“And then he came over and took my hand and said ‘you need to go see your teacher’,” Lane recalled of the then-third grader. “I just thought he was special. That was a simple gesture. I thought he was a ‘good big boy’.”
Lane said her regard for Mick deepened after she began managing Canal Street Tavern, the legendary Dayton bar and music venue he opened in late 1981 at
308 E. First St., in Dayton’s downtown.
>> RELATED: Mick Montgomery, staple of Dayton music scene, dies
“If he loved you, he would do anything for you,” she said of Mick.
Mick died Saturday morning of natural causes at Kettering Medical Center.
Funeral services for the 71-year-old are set for 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 20, at Tobias Funeral Home, 3970 Dayton Xenia Road, Beavercreek.
A Canal Street Tavern-style hootenanny will be held that day starting at 6 p.m. at
The Brightside Music and Event Venue, 905 E. Third St., Dayton.
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Canal Street shut down after one final show Nov. 30, 2013.
Canal Public House took over the former Canal Street space when the club closed. That business lost its licence in March 2016.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
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5th Street Wine & Deli rebranded itself and opened in the space as Canal Street Arcade and Deli in June 2017.
Musicians and music fans are invited to attend the free celebration.
Friends and family members say Mick brought hundreds of national acts to Dayton and provided a showcase for local talent.
Lane said there were few things Mick loved more than music and that was expressed by the work he did to present in his beloved and intimate listening room.
The club was simple, she said, noting it had a wooden floors that probably should have been replaced.
>> MORE: Street named for local music icon to be dedicated
Canal Street’s bathrooms were notorious for being anything but modern.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
The crowd wasn’t fancy and neither were the drinks.
“It was a good drink in a clean glass,” Lane said.
Those things didn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
“He always put music first. He put it before making money. He certainty put it before alcohol,” Lane said. “He wanted music to be the focus of that club and it was.”
Lane, a noted Dayton musician, started hosting Canal Street’s musician’s co-op that first year it was open and was its manager the 10 or so years that followed.
Before his passing, Mick was set to revive the co-op the first Friday of each month at Hannah's, 121 N. Ludlow St. in downtown Dayton, starting at 9 p.m. Feb. 2, 2018.
Lane will now step in for the friend she considered a big brother.
“Mick has fought a long hard battle being sick,” Lane said. “I said, ‘go on brother, you’ve been a strong man.’”
WYSO host Tod Weidner, a local musician and former co-op host, said Mick changed his life.
Wiedner was among the local musicians who shared stories about Canal Street at
Canal Street Stories: A Celebration and Reunion on Saturday, Jan. 6 at Yellow Cab Tavern.
Mick, a Yellow Cab fan, was there for the event and over the moon.
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“It was really nice that we were able to give him a night,” Weidner said. “ I am glad he got to bask in the adulation.”
Weidner said he was naive the first time he walked into Canal Street as a 21-year-old contestant in the Dayton Band Playoffs, then an annual battle between local bands.
Weidner’s band, the Rehab Doll, was creamed 130 to 30 by the far more popular band Walaroo South.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
Despite the loss, the Ludlow Falls native was hooked on Canal Street.
“I fell in love with the place immediately. It was a very welcoming room,” he said. “It wasn’t much to look at. It was a weird little room and it was dark, but it had a mojo to it. A room takes on the magic of the people that played there.”
The club hosted everything from folk, blues and country rock to bluegrass, indie rock and punk. Canal Street also drew well-known acts, such as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Los Lobos, The Del McCoury Band, Leo Kottke and Bela Fleck & the Flecktones.
Before the band Phish became popular, it played Canal Street to a crowd of just 17 people.
“The more I traveled playing music, the more I knew I took it (Canal Street) for granted,” Weidner said.
Mick, Weidner said, was an evangelist of good music and strived to “hip” others to new artists and sounds.
“I literally owe him everything,” he said. “I was a complete musical tadpole before I played Canal Street.”
Before Canal Street, Weidner likened his music knowledge to looking through binoculars backwards.
Afterward he said it was like seeing in cinerama.
“Any eclectic knowledge I really have about music I have to credit to Mick and Canal Street,” Weidner said. “It was really great exposure to things I would never have seen. It was such a education every time I walked in there.”
Chris Montgomery, the eldest of Mick's three children, said he knows it is cliche, but he is blown away by the expression of love for his father.
Chris said he was about 13 when his dad, at the time an art teacher at West Carrollton High School, bought the spaces that would be Canal Street from the red-haired owner of Evelyn’s Corner Cafe.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
Chris said his father, a guitarist, filled his world with music.
“He wasn’t a business man,” Chris said. “He was more about the musicians than growing an empire or making a huge amount of money.”
The Oregon District home Mick rehabed is filled with CDs, albums and cassette tapes.
“He usually listened to it all,” Chris said. “He would want to tell everybody about it, in his own words, “ ‘turn them on to it’.”
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Chris, now a deafblind education specialist at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Austin, Texas, said his dad passed down a love of music.
“I grew up playing music at Canal Street,” he said. “I can’t imagine a world without music. It is very much a part of my being.”
Mick was extremely proud of his children and even as he grew ill, took steps to make sure they spent time together, his son said.
Mick's daughter, Hannah Montgomery, is studying law in Washington, D.C. His son, Eli Montgomery, lives in Dayton.
The Dayton native's list of survivors also include siblings Dennis Montgomery of Minnesota; Kathy Holt of Alaska and Patti Montgomery of Florida.
“We loved him a lot,” Chris said. “He was not a typical dad, but we wouldn’t have wanted any other dad.”
Mick left Dayton in 1967, a year after Chris was born.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
Credit: Photo courtesy of Jan Underwood
The 21-or-so-year-old ended up on the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco, ground zero of the counterculture.
Jamy Holliday, a long-time Canal Street manager and member of the seminal Dayton bands Mystery Addicts, Haunting Souls and Luxury Pushers, said Mick's time in San Francisco and time in the1960s folk scene influenced the listening room he created in Dayton.
>> RELATED: Mick Montgomery: Never say he was a ‘hippie’ at heart
“He respected musicians,” Holliday said. “He was always very supportive of providing a stage where the accomplished and the not-so accomplished could play the same stage.”
Mick, Holliday said, was about music being a unifying force.
Holliday was an eyeliner-wearing 17-year-old with a 14-inch mohawk when he first started working at Canal Street as a doorman for shows ranging from bluegrass to rock.
Canal Street hosted the Women’s Series in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The yearly series featured lesbian and other feminist performers.
Holliday said there were few problems because it was about the music.
“He really did believe that music was an equaling and leveling instrument,” Holliday said of Mick. He sacrificed himself. He ate, slept and breathed Canal Street Tavern.”
Former Dayton Daily News photographer Jan Underwood took thousands of photos at Canal Street during its more than three decades of operation.
Mick wanted Canal Street to be a listening room in the purist sense of the term.
Underwood said that all changed the night in 1984 that Jim "Rev. Cool" Carter, a longtime WYSO DJ, brought the cow punk band Rank and File to Canal Street's stage.
“We started handing table and chairs fire brigade style off the dance floor,” she said.
She said those who frequented Canal Street were a family.
“I took my son there when he was young because it was a safe place go,” she said.
“If someone was drinking too much, they were not able to stay and ruin the night for everyone else.”
Underwood said music was Mick’s life, and he wanted to share that love.
“I went in there so many times and he’d say you have to check out this act that is coming next week, she said. “You would not be disappointed.”
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