Biography
About the Artist
Michael “Spiderman” Robinson is an Oakland keyboardist, writer, arranger, producer and band leader whose playing runs from the Bay Area soul explosion of the 1970s straight through to today. He describes himself in four words: multi-platinum keyboardist, writer, arranger, producer, band leader — and the records back it up.
He came up through Vitamin E, the Oakland soul-funk group assembled in the orbit of drummer and producer Norman Connors, which cut Sharing for Buddah in 1977. When that band ended, the core regrouped as BRIDGE — an Oakland/Berkeley septet built, in the band's own words, to bridge every style and market at once. Alongside Robinson on keys stood Paul Smith, Jon Bendich, Adrian Barrios, Pat Duffey, Claytoven Richardson, Derick Hughes and Debravon Lewis.
In 1981 Bridge spent four weeks in Boulder, Colorado cutting an album for Bang Records, Ilene Berns' CBS-distributed label. Sixty-five thousand dollars went into it and the record was shelved. The demos that had won them the deal sat for nearly twenty years — then surfaced in 2000, and again in 2020 on Switzerland's High Jazz Records as Crying For Love, where they became a Modern Soul classic. Track seven is “Sweet & Wonderful,” which Robinson co-wrote with his bandmates Derick Hughes and Debravon Lewis.
That song had already traveled. Robinson registered “Sweet and Wonderful Love” with the United States Copyright Office in April 1980 — words, music and arrangement — and in 1981 it became the title track of Jean Carn's album for Philadelphia International / TSOP, produced by Norman Connors and sung as a duet with Glenn Jones. The players on it included Nathan East, David T. Walker and Paulinho Da Costa.
The same year, Robinson played piano on Debra Laws' “Very Special” for Elektra. The album label copy credits him on that track and no other — Bobby Lyle plays piano on the rest of the record, and Larry Dunn's synthesizer is on six tracks, neither of them on this one. Two decades later the finished master was sampled into Jennifer Lopez and LL Cool J's “All I Have,” a number one single.
On the road he has backed Frankie Beverly and Maze, Cameo, Con Funk Shun, GQ, Tom Browne, Karyn White, John Lee Hooker Jr., Kenny Neal and Joe Louis Walker.
He has kept writing the whole time. Beginning in 1978 he filed twelve of his own compositions with the Copyright Office — among them “Astro Traveling,” “Taste of Your Love,” “Lady of Rhythm,” “Wind Your Body Clock” and “The Gigolo” — and he writes for his hometown teams, with songs for the Oakland A's and the Warriors. He is an ASCAP writer and publishes through his own company, MRRobinsonMuzik.
Later chapters keep the thread running. He is credited across pianist Ricardo Scales' 1999 album Obsession, returns on 2004's Destiny, and co-wrote “Feelin' Fine” for vocalist Breno Brown — more than forty years after Bridge, still making records with the same circle.
He is still working, and still playing. The catalog above spans nearly fifty years, and most of it was built in rooms where nobody was writing anything down.