Category: Spotlight

Think about the movie Police Academy for a second. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? For most people, it’s that sound effects guy. That guy who could turn his voice into a helicopter or machine gun. We all watched that movie, and somehow that’s the part that stuck out the most.

The same thing happens with Spaceballs. Michael Winslow is on screen for a little over a minute, and still, you know exactly who he is and what he does.

Winslow is coming back to the Black Hills. What he’s doing on stage now has moved well beyond those early impressions. The show isn’t constructed around a single bit or a recognizable trick. It’s been developed over time and carefully crafted into what it is now.

I had the chance to speak with Michael ahead of his return to Rapid City, and the conversation moved like his work does. One idea bent into another, and the conversation was fluid, filled with stories from a different era.

I came prepared with some pretty well-crafted questions. It didn’t take long to realize I wasn’t going to be able to follow them down the page. What I got instead was a glimpse into how he thinks, how he tells stories, what shaped him into the person he is, and how he uses his abilities to craft a truly unique experience. After our brief chat, I started to understand how what once felt like a novelty had etched itself into our collective consciousness all these years later.

What he’s bringing on stage now isn’t quite what those of us who know him from those earlier films might have in mind. When I asked what people could expect, he said, with a hint of a grin, “it’s a surprise.”

Long before any of that, before the stages and the films, he was already playing with different ways to compose sound.

When cassette tapes came, he started experimenting with recording his own sound effects. He described it almost like a system. One recorder playing back while he added another layer on top, then feeding that into a second recorder, adding more, and sending it back again. He described it as a fight scene assembled out of nothing but sound.  Layer by layer, passing it back and forth until it felt full, like a room filled with people who weren’t actually there. The method hasn’t really changed. Only the scale has.

Winslow’s biggest asset is still his voice. The sounds are still there, but the performance has grown into something closer to a concert. Only, he is the band, creating the instruments himself, recording and looping them in real time until the song comes together. Along the way, he threads in stories that become part of the entire experience.

His rise didn’t come from nowhere. Early on he was living out of his car, bouncing between opportunities, eventually landing at a radio station in Pasadena, KROQ. At the time, it was a strange mix of surf, punk, and new wave, the kind of place where things weren’t fully defined yet. Even then, he didn’t arrive there in any traditional sense. Someone needed a voice on air, and he stepped in. There, he’d layer his sounds over songs live on the air, adding effects and bending the music as it played.

He was cast in Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie after a casting director saw him in the San Francisco Big Laugh Off, where he made the finals. The production ran on improvisation, and they found a way to work him in. Not long after, while opening for Count Basie, the sound cut out mid-set. Without much hesitation, he pushed a small orange amp and microphone into Basie’s piano and kept it going. Moments like that seemed to lead him to his next adventure. From ther it was on to Police Academy, where most people first remember him.The work kept building, and to date he has more than seventy film and television credits. He appeared in all seven Police Academy films as well as Spaceballs, where he first worked with the legendary Mel Brooks. Now, he’s returning to that world, and to Brooks, with Spaceballs 2.

When I asked about influences, he didn’t list the names I had in mind. He talked instead about the people he’d been around.

“There were a lot of folks,” he said. “I don’t even know where to begin. So many people helped me along the way.”

He talked about watching careers unfold in real time, Kim Cattrall moving into bigger roles, Steve Guttenberg into Cocoon and Three Men and a Baby. In Back to the Future Part III, he became Michael J. Fox’s footsteps for a scene. It wasn’t framed as influence so much as exposure. He was in the room while things were happening, taking what he could from it each time. “They weren’t all gems,” he said. “But that’s life.”

Over time, you can see that instinct in how he works. Winslow talked about sound like someone might talk about dialects; learned, and slightly different for everyone. One sound leads to another. You might start chasing a guitar tone and end up somewhere else entirely, closer to percussion, in a place you wouldn’t imagine things to go.

“It’s a language,” he said. “Some sounds stay fixed, recognizable, tied to a specific place or identity, but most of it is in motion.”

That same instinct carries into how he approaches a room. Every space has its own personality, and each experience is crafted for that moment. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a few hundred people or tens of thousands, what matters is whether the connection happens. He recalled seeing Tracy Chapman for the first time, just her and a guitar on a massive stage, and the whole place settled, like the heartbeat slowed down together. That’s the standard for him, not scale or production, but connection, and the ability to customize each performance for the space you’re in rather than bringing the same set from place to place.

Right before we wrapped up the conversation, I asked if there was anything I had missed, anything he wanted people to know that we hadn’t covered.

“no, but I do have some music for you.”

 He told me to listen to two songs.
Romantic Warrior by Return to Forever.
The Seduction of Claude Debussy by The Art of Noise.

I took that seriously. When someone gives you a song, it’s usually for a reason.

I put the songs on as I started going through my notes, and it didn’t take long to feel like he wasn’t just sharing music, he was inviting me to follow it somewhere. Romantic Warrior builds and shifts constantly, never settling into a single idea for long, while The Seduction of Claude Debussy takes what you think you know and blends it into something else entirely.

After a while, it clicked. The songs moved like our conversation did. He crafted that conversation just as he creates his sound, bending it, and letting it unfold until everything came together.

Throughout the interview, he stayed just out of reach of the obvious answers. Questions like what the audience can expect or whether he has a favorite sound never really landed cleanly. He moved around them, letting the idea drift instead of pinning it down. But at the very end, he gave me two songs, and suddenly the answers were there, just not how I was asking for them.

And that’s the point. It isn’t meant to be explained. It’s meant to be experienced. The songs were a way in, but the real thing happens in the room, in real time. If you want to understand what he does, you’ll have to be there when it happens.

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Michael Winslow returns to Rapid City on March 27 at 707 Sports Bar & Nightlife, with a show that starts at 7:30 PM. The performance leans more toward a live concert than a traditional comedy set, with Winslow creating and layering sound in real time, shaping each piece as it unfolds in the room.
The night also features host Morgan Preston and a lineup of local Black Hills comedians, with a social hour beginning at 6:30 PM.
General admission tickets are $25, with VIP available for $45.
Tickets are transferable but non-refundable. This is a 21 and over event.
Tickets and additional details are available here:
https://thepark.ticketspice.com/michael-winslow-2026

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Michael Winslow & Friends

707 Sports Bar & Nightlife,
March 27, 2026
Social Hour 6:30 PM. Show starts at 7:30

TICKETS:
General admission:$25,
VIP: $45.
Tickets are transferable but non-refundable.
This is a 21 and over event.
Tickets and additional details are available here

First anniversary Bash Featuring MoonCats and Dakota Shivers Brewing

March 28, 2026 • 2:00 pm @ The Prairie Dog Taproom

The whole thing started over bourbon in Spearfish. A buddy asked Michael Chidiac what he planned to do with his retirement. Four drinks in, they were talking about hot dogs. Five years later, they’re throwing a party.

That conversation eventually produced a pop-up tent in Custer, a food truck that blew over in one of those Black Hills thunderstorms, two seasons at Miner Brewing, and eventually a home alongside a lazy creek outside of Hill City. Along the way, Michael and his brother Jimmy were cataloguing everything that drives people crazy about going out. They called it the “eight waits.” The table, the order, the drinks, the check. The problem was never the food or the beer. It was all the time in between that nobody was giving back to you.

When Miner sold, they started looking for a permanent place to call home. Jimmy pushed Michael toward a former Smokejumper Station on 1.6 acres in Hill City. Michael wasn’t sold until Jimmy took him out back. There was a creek, and a natural cove between two structures that framed a stage almost perfectly. The sun set behind it. The audience would look in. He saw the vision immediately.

The Prairie Dog Taproom opened in the spring of 2025 and was built around the idea that your time there is yours. The taps are self-pour, the food is ordered by QR code, and the menu features hand-stretched pizzas, bison burgers, and artisan hot dogs. The conversation doesn’t have to stop for a refill or a check-in from a server. You stay as long as you want and leave when you’re ready. On busy nights, that difference shows up in small ways. People settle in instead of hovering. Groups spread out instead of lining up. It’s not unusual to look around and realize no one’s paying attention to their phone.

The music side took shape the same way. Michael and Jimmy brought in production engineer Nate Moon, who has spent 15 years running sound and lights for major regional acts. Nate turned a 30-day outdoor build into something that stopped them cold on opening night. Camp Comfort played under the lights, and the three of them sat in the back and watched the shadows move with the performers, the sun dropping behind the stage, the whole yard glowing in a way nobody had planned for. They had been drawing up a permanent covered structure. They scrapped it that night.

In year one, the Prairie Dog hosted 70 shows. They brought in five Nashville acts, a patriotic series featuring the 147th Army Band, local Rapid City staples, and regional acts nobody in the southern hills had seen before. When a show didn’t fill the way they’d hoped, the venue gave people their ticket money back. Not because they had to, but because the kind of place they were building was worth the patience it required to grow the audience.

As they round the calendar into year two, acts are calling to get booked based on what they heard from artists who played there. The crowds are getting bigger, and the brothers already have 40 shows booked before the first anniversary party has even happened.

They’re continuing to bring in stronger regional acts while keeping space open for local performers who are part of the fabric of the Black Hills scene.

It’s less about building something new and more about understanding what’s already there. A year in, Prairie Dog Taproom has started to settle into its role. A place where the experience of a show still feels personal, even as the crowd grows.

At the end of the month, they’ll mark that first year with a full-day bash on the creek. Dakota Shivers Brewing out of Lead takes over the taps at 2 p.m. Buckskin Cult from Spearfish follows at 4. MoonCats, the North Dakota Americana act that became one of the venue’s defining bookings in year one, closes the night. A special Irish-inspired menu runs through the day.

As the sun drops behind the stage and the lights come up, The MoonCats will take the stage the yard alongside the creek will fill up in the same way it did that first night.No one in a hurry to leave, no one waiting on anything, just folks there for a good time and one heck of a party!

First anniversary Bash Featuring MoonCats and Dakota Shivers Brewing

March 28, 2026 

2:00 PM
Dakota Shivers Brewing (Lead) tap takeover

4:00 PM
Buckskin Cult (Spearfish)

Evening / Headliner
MoonCats (North Dakota Americana)

All Day
Irish-inspired menu available

March 12, 2026 • 5:00 pm @Lost Cabin Beer Co

Some touring bands pass through the Black Hills once and move on, while others thers keep finding their way back. For the North Dakota trio MoonCats, the Hills have slowly become something closer to a second home. The band returns to Lost Cabin Beer Co. this Thursday, continuing a relationship with the region that has grown steadily over the past seven years.

“We’ve built some really strong relationships in the Black Hills,” said Scott Balliet, the band’s manager. “The crowds show up and make us feel accepted. Not just like visitors, but almost like locals.”

That connection grew through the kinds of friendships that form on the road. Time spent with the Camp Comfort crew and legendary host Dana Nordquist helped turn the Black Hills into a place the band now circles back to again and again.

“The Black Hills is like a home away from home,” Balliet said. “The vibe here just fits with what we do.”

MoonCats aren’t really folk, bluegrass, or Americana. Their sound doesn’t sit neatly into any one genre, so they made up their own: “Americonscious Campfire Folk.”

“We all grew up sitting around campfires playing music,” Balliet explained. “Our songs try to capture that feeling. You don’t need a big stage. You just need something that pulls people together.”

That idea shapes their live shows. Banjo, upright bass, guitar, mandolin, harmonica, and washboard all rotate through the set as the band mixes original songs with the occasional cover. The goal is about creating a shared moment in the room.

“We want people to leave the burdens of the outside world behind for a while. Detach, unplug, be present, connect… and get lost in the joy.”

Since forming in 2018, MoonCats have released four full-length albums and toured across a dozen states, building a following through the same kind of small venues and tight-knit communities that make nights like this possible. Their current run of shows reflects that momentum. The band is on a short tour that will take them to their first-ever performance in Denver, part of an effort to share their sound with new communities along the road.

Even as they branch out into new territory, the Black Hills remain a regular stop on the map. Lost Cabin this Thursday likely won’t be the last visit this year. The band hinted that they expect to roll back through the region again soon, continuing a relationship that keeps growing each time they pass through.

If their past visits are any indication, Thursday night at Lost Cabin will feel less like a tour stop and more like a gathering of old friends.

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The Moon Cats will be featured on Prairie Musicians, a Prairie Public television series that highlights artists from across the northern plains. Their episode premieres March 19 at 9 p.m.

Learn more about the program:
https://www.prairiepublic.org/television/prairie-musicians-2026/