The room may be gone, but the feeling isn’t.
Michael DeGreve, the longtime musician in residence at Cheyenne’s Hitching Post Inn, will launch a YouTube livestream recreating his old Hitching Post set, he said earlier this week on the Cowboy State Daily Radio Show.
For 30 years, DeGreve’s request‑driven performances turned the Hitching Post lobby into the capital city’s after‑hours living room. And even after two decades away, the memories of those nights haven’t faded.
“It amazes me… how many people still care about those nights,” he told radio host Jake Nichols. “Hundreds of people recounted those stories to me… they wrote me to tell me what those nights meant to them.”
The livestream is part of a bucket list of creative ventures he’s trying to finish against the backdrop of a terminal illness. DeGreve was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2021 and told he had no more than five years to live. It’s been four and a half years since then.
But people who know DeGreve don’t count him out. After all, reinvention is his signature move, from walking away from an All‑American basketball path to perform on the Sunset Strip at the height of psychedelia or turning a two‑week Wyoming gig into a 30‑year calling.
Which is why another project — as he nears 78 — feels exactly like him.
“This is going to happen very soon… do the show that I used to do… and do my toast,” he said.
He’ll stream the set from the “Ahimsa Lounge,” a studio space at his home in Grants Pass, Oregon.
“Ahimsa comes from the Hindu word meaning nonviolence and respect for all life. That’s about as political as you’ll hear me get these days,” he said.
He intends to take real‑time requests and revive his signature toast, and if the reproduction is true to form, he’ll share a few of the stories that made those nights so memorable, a sampling of which he shared with Nichols.
‘Hollywood Hills Hippie'
He recounted watching Jimi Hendrix open for the Mamas and the Papas at the Hollywood Bowl.
“He opened with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it didn’t happen for me right away…(But) then he went into ‘Foxy Lady,” and the girls started throwing their clothes on the stage. It was so powerful. I’d never seen anything like it. Still never have. Nobody ever played like that before, and I was like, “I don’t know what this is, but it’s amazing!”
It wasn’t long after that DeGreve proved his own musical chops in the Hollywood scene and found himself dropping acid with Hendrix outside the famed Whisky a Go Go, “a pretty fun time,” he told Nichols, adding that Hendrix “was kind of shy. That thing that he did on stage was one thing, but he was just a really nice guy.”
DeGreve also laughed about one of his big misses: the night Stephen Stills invited him to jam with him and Eric Clapton in a hotel room at Colorado’s Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre.
He was star struck and nervous. When he got to Clapton’s room, there was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and he heard female voices inside, so he headed back to his room. Shortly after, the phone rang.
“It was Steven (Stills) and he said, 'You coming down to play or what?’” DeGreve said.
By now, however, a hard-partying weekend had caught up with him.
“I’d been awake for a day or so, because it was my birthday weekend, and I said to (Stills), ‘No, man, I think I’ll pass.’” DeGreve recalls, sarcastically writing it off. “I didn’t do it! Not that it bothers me 40 years later.”
By the early 1970s, DeGreve was an ascendant talent in the Hollywood music scene. His band The Truth made a trendsetting album with major Motown producers. He was a respected peer of the likes of Janis Joplin, and he’d been one half of a young L.A.’s power couple in his marriage to the actress Susan Sennett.
But the Hollywood life lost its glamour once he got a taste of Cheyenne.
He arrived in a Volkswagen van in 1977 with the intention of sticking around for a two-week gig. But he liked the place so much he stayed for the next 30 years
“I had no idea what Cheyenne, Wyoming, would think of a Hollywood Hills hippie, with all my hair and stuff. But (I thought) this is wonderful. Everybody I’ve met treats me wonderfully,” he said, emphasizing his instant rapport with Paul Smith, the former owner of the Hitching Post Inn.
“It was the intimacy. It was like a family.”
He stayed long enough that there was an intergenerational impact.
“I sang ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ to some of the kids, and they grew up and then I’d sing it to their kids,” he said.
From the Ahimsa Lounge, he may yet have a chance to play it for their grandkids, too.
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
