ROLLER STILL ROCKING: Ian Mitchell, 42, a former guitarist  for the Bay City Rollers, now lives with his wife in Mission Viejo  and works with computers.

 
Fame is a powerful thing.

Powerful enough to make little girls rush a moving limo carrying boy rock stars.

Powerful enough to make the boy rock stars (grown men if you check their IDs) prance around in tartan knickers. For half a decade. On TV.

Fame is even powerful enough to make Ian Mitchell, an utterly ordinary guy knocking back a low-cal beer in the bar of a suburban chain restaurant, fascinating.

"Fame doesn't disappear all at once," explains Mitchell, a computer worker who lives in Lake Forest.
He's something of an expert on this. A quarter-century ago, Mitchell became a Bay City Roller, guitarist and sometime front boy for what was, at the time, the world's biggest boy band.
His initial ride as a Roller was brief: seven months, eight days. And it came near the end of the Rollers' three-year run atop pop music.

Still, the power of fame is such that Mitchell, 42, remembers every nanosecond. Fondly.
"Fame just sort of drifts and drifts and drifts away ... very slowly, really," Mitchell says, lowering his hand like a leaf twirling out of a tree.

"Then you gently hit bottom."

To know Mitchell you've got to know this: Twenty five years ago this month, the Bay City Rollers were the biggest act in pop music.

Think Backstreet Boys plus 'N Sync. Think Jackson Five with less talent but a bigger audience.
Finally, think of the rock 'n' roll universe circa 1976, with a broken-up Beatles, a whale-sized Elvis and all punks at least a year from mass consumption. The Rollers - fluffy and packaged and addicted to tartan clothing - were all we had.

God help us.

The Rollers danced. (OK, they hopped.) They sang. (Honest, Mitchell says, all rumors about lip synching were bogus.)

But most of all, the Rollers wooed.

That wasn't new, of course. Pop stars have made teen-age girls swoon for generations. Frank did it. Then Elvis. Then the Beatles.

The Rollers did it, too, but with a twist. Instead of going after teen girls, the Bay City Rollers openly courted their little sisters. Girls 11 to 14 were the biggest Bay City Roller fans in the band's home country, Scotland. And little girls continued to be the biggest fans in the first half of the 1970s as the band toured, and eventually conquered, Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan.

"On tour, the policy about girls was that they could look but not touch," Mitchell says, laughing. "And that's how it was, too. Roller girls were just way too young."

By 1976, the Bay City Rollers phenomenon - a trend so big that some shops in London were selling all-tartan clothes in honor of the band's primary contribution to fashion - was about to hit the United States.

In January, the band's single "Saturday Night" hit No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100. And as the pop music spin machine cranked into gear, American girls were starting to collapse into the same eardrum popping frenzies already seen around the world.

There was just one problem: One of the Rollers' co-founding brothers, Alan Longmuir, wanted out. He was weary of touring (360 dates in 1975) and, at 24, he was getting a little long in the Roller tooth.
On April 1, the band announced that it replaced Longmuir with Ian Mitchell, a 17-year-old from Northern Ireland who, until then, had been studying communications by day and singing in the Young City Stars, a Bay City Roller tribute band, by night.

Dads around the world ignored that news. But their daughters, and granddaughters, cared deeply. It was a controversy.

"People thought I'd pushed Alan out or something. It wasn't true," Mitchell says, still clearing the air three decades later.

Ultimately, the magazines that covered the news the closest - glossies like Tiger Beat, Sixteen and Teen Beat - pronounced Mitchell a true Roller. Mitchell, pixie-esque and, at 17, the only band member within shouting distance of being a boy, was a genuine hormonal phenomenon.

"He was definitely the cute one," says Wendy Antanaitis, whose Mission Viejo bedroom, in the mid-1970s, was posterized with Mitchell's unwrinked face.

These days, Antanaitis gets a closer look. They're married.

"Everyone knew he was the cute one," she adds. "He still is."

The couple exchange glances. Wendy sighs.  "Our life would've been very different if he hadn't been a Roller," Wendy says later.  "Maybe we wouldn't have our life the way it is."
 

AT HOME: Mitchell plays for his wife, Wendy Antanaitis,  and father-in-law, Edward Antanaitis.

There is a familiar rhythm to the stories told on VH1's "Behind the Music" - fame, infighting, depravity, lost wealth, breakup, reunion tour. The episode about the Bay City Rollers, which aired again this month, follows every script point.

Within two years after Mitchell "retired" in late 1976 (he got to sing lead on the title song for the BCR album "Dedication" and stuck with the group through tours of the United States, Europe and Japan), the band was starring in "Bay City Rollers Meet the Saturday Superstars," a quickly canceled kiddie show. By the mid-1980s, band members were ensnared in a legal battle over lost royalties - a battle that has yet to produce much money for the people who performed the music. Eventually, their former manager did time in prison.

Mitchell, for his part, missed most of the bad stuff. After leaving the band he embarked on what he figured would be a blistering solo career.

"I was young, and it looked promising," he says now.
"I was an ex-Roller."

But that fame - powerful as it was - was decidedly a mixed blessing for his music career. Mostly, Mitchell zigged when he should've zagged. He was under contract to play pop music in the late '70s, a time when the when the world's biggest band, the Sex Pistols, openly described itself as the "antidote" to the Bay City Rollers and to pop music in general.

In the early 1980s, when haircut bands like Flock of Seagulls were making hits, Mitchell tried a stint at glam-rock, a genre that rose and fell 10 years earlier and would again, a few years later.

"It was fun. I wore a garter on stage, that sort of thing," Mitchell says, his Irish accent only partly erased by a decade in America.

Mitchell even tried softer, acoustic music in apartheid South Africa. His band made a name by being one of the few at the time to cultivate a mixed-race audience.

"It was a little thing, but I'm proud of it," Mitchell says.

But he never totally left the Rollers. In the mid-1980s he performed on a BCR reunion tour of Australia, though he was one of two band members who didn't abandon the tour before the final gig. Then, in the late 1980s, when Mitchell was running a construction company in Redondo Beach, he ran into another ex-Roller while shopping at a Ralphs.

"We saw each other, hugged, and decided to give it a little go," he says.
They played clubs in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area before being stopped in their tracks by a lawsuit from another Roller.

"It covered expenses," Mitchell says, laughing. "And it was really fun to, you know, have a lot of people watching again."

Fame is powerful, but not powerful enough to make Mitchell rich.
His music, he says, never turned much of a profit. Instead, it allowed him to stay in nice hotels and to ride in a lot of limos. "You live great on the road," he says. "So you stay on the road."

But Mitchell has achieved an undeniable sort of notoriety. The Bay City Rollers remain a strong draw in Germany, the country that once embraced the musical stylings of "Baywatch" star David Hasselhoff. Mitchell has played BCR reunion tours in that country.

The band is also big in Japan. Last year, Mitchell was surprised when he walked into a Japanese bar to find that the place was packed to honor ... Ian Mitchell.

"They started clapping when I walked into the room. I kept looking to see who they were going on about."

The Bay City Rollers - and Mitchell - were even mentioned by name in an episode of "Friends." They're a joke in the show (Chandler reveals himself to be deeply geeky because he's too knowledgable about Bay City Rollers trivia), but Mitchell shrugs that off.

"We taped it," Wendy says. "And we still go crazy when Chandler says, 'But Ian isn't playing anymore."

Mitchell says music remains a passion, if not quite the dreamy one it once was. He produced a record last year for an Australian actress hoping to cross over into pop music. And this month, he installed enough computer equipment in his home to essentially mimic a music studio.

"I still play," he says. "It's still something I love."

But being a rock star, a famous rock star, probably isn't in the cards. His full-time job - a job that takes up his time and, he says, his passion - is in computers. "I'm a geek now," he says. "It makes me happy."
Still, being a Roller hasn't completely faded. He won't disclose where he works, for example (it's a well-known company) because, he says, the public might cause a ruckus.

"There might be a lot of calls at work and such, and that wouldn't be good," he says.
Mitchell and Antanaitis don't have kids. Both are working at jobs that they hope will make them wealthy someday. They're saving for a new house.

And Mitchell has only one musical goal this year. It's not Roller-related. He plans to cut a Christmas CD, sell it over the Internet, and give the money to his church, Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Aliso Viejo.

If that's a comedown from playing in front of a stadium filled with squealing girls, Mitchell isn't complaining.

"What's it like to not be famous after being really famous? It's not bad," he says, looking at Wendy.
"I still get the perks."
 

Copyright 2001 The Orange County Register
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