Muggs Shot
Detroit musician’s first memoir chronicles a dramatic, fulfilling life
Tony Muggs started thinking about writing a book about his life back in 2005 — but it took 17 years to get there.
“I just never got around to it,” says Muggs (nee DeNardo), a Detroit musician who co-founded the award-winning Muggs, leads his own band Dude and is part of the tribute bands Rattlesnake Shake (Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac) and Mega Weedge (Ween). “I never had the inspiration to sit down and thoughtfully start putting it together.”
And when that time finally came in December of 2016, Muggs acknowledges the recently published “Autobiograffitti” — the first of two planned memoirs — did not come easy.
“I was very naive,” Muggs, 49, says with a chuckle. “It’s hard to write a book. It’s a battle of attrition. I learned to not be so cocky and just break it down and write on my iPhone in a bar or cafe for three or four hours at a time and then go back and edit it. I did that process for about two and a half years, and now here we are.”
The 365-page “Autobiograffitti,” which the St. Clair Shores resident published himself, offers a frank and detailed look at a portion (birth until the beginning of 2003, not sequentially) of what’s been a dramatic life — not the least of which was suffering a hemorrhagic stroke on Sept. 4, 2001, that left Muggs, then a bass player, paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak. While his best friend and guitarist Danny Methric put the Muggs on hold while DeNardo recovered, he through therapy and sheer determination worked himself back into a functional shape, even learning to play his bass parts on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, inspired by the Doors’ Ray Manzarek.
“I always thought I was going to make it,” notes Muggs, the son of an undercover Detroit police officer and the middle of five children raised near Detroit City Airport. “I’ve known I can do whatever I put my mind to from a very young age. Even when the stroke happened it was, ‘Let’s pull up the boot straps and get to work. I have things I want to accomplish in my life and the clock is ticking.’
“My mom used to say ‘tomorrow is promised to no one’ — and don’t I know it. So what’s making it? Success to me is being in the Muggs for 20 years and releasing albums and touring the world and now releasing a book. I’ve come from the depths of hell all the way to this fairy tale life I think I have now, and I know to be grateful.”
The stroke wasn’t Muggs’ only brush with mortality, as he reveals in “Autobiograffitti.” When he was 2½ years old a plane crashed into the backyard
of the family home; Muggs and his older brother and father, who were building a swimming pool at the time, were not seriously injured, but a neighbor mowing his lawn and the family dog suffered fatal burns from the fireball.
“Man, if I’m a cat, sincerely, I only have two lives left,” he says. “I’ve thwarted death so many times, it’s crazy. And my dad’s been through so much, too.
“Both of our lucky numbers is 13,” adds Muggs, whose birthday is Dec. 13. “You have to have broad shoulders to be a 13 guy. It’s come up throughout my life, and my dad’s life. It seems appropriate that a…plane crashes in our backyard.”
Amidst the trials and tribulations, “Autobiograffitti” has plenty of positives — Muggs’ passion for music and his sibling caliber relationship with Methric, as well as the great success of the Muggs that’s included six albums, more than a Dozen Detroit Music Awards, the use of the band’s songs in movies, TV shows and ads, and a 2007 appearance on Fox TV’s “The Next Great American Band” competition. Muggs also chronicles the many good people he was surrounded by while growing up.
“One of the reasons this book is so important to me is it’s a message to never give up,” Muggs explains. “And it’s a message for stroke survivors everywhere to not give up. I coin the phrase
‘turn reality on its sometimes cruel head.’ You can be successful, but you have to believe in yourself. I know this all sounds corny and cliché, there’s a reason clichés stand the test of time. — they’re true.”
He also took great care to name-check as many of his musical colleagues from the Detroit rock scene as he could in the book. “There’s more to come in the second book, too,” Muggs says. “I felt like if somebody else wrote a book I’d hope I would be part of that, so I took it seriously to get as many bands in as possible.”
Muggs has not yet started work on the next book but knows what it will cover and is buoyed by the confidence of having one memoir under his belt. His next work, however, is the second Dude album, also titled “Autobiograffitti” and due out next year. Muggs recorded it with help from a variety of musical friends and Hazel Park-based co-producer/engineer Carl Kondrat — who Muggs is also working with on an aboutto-be-started third Dude album — and has been sitting on the finished product since just before the pandemic in March of 2020.
“There are little crossovers from the books to the album,” Muggs says. “‘Autobiograffitti’ the album is a collection of stories. I tend to write from a personal standpoint, so a lot of it is true stories of my life disguised in song. I like to do that.” He did, in fact, consider putting both “Autobiograffittis’ out at the same time, but was dissuaded by Methric.
“Danny’s a big reader,” Muggs notes. He said, ‘Release the book first. Let your fans know who you are, your sense of humor, your struggles that you’ve been through. That in turn will make the album more poignant.’ It was great advice, so I decided to do that, and I think it’s still unique.”