The Man Who Became the Band

My freshman year of college, I ruptured my eardrum. I was a music student, and the plan was to become a band director. The doctors told me my days playing trumpet were over.

I switched to guitar. Not because it was a brilliant career strategy. I switched because I was not ready to stop being a musician.

That decision set the pattern for everything that followed. Every time the obvious path disappeared, I built another one. The instrument changed. The dream did not.

I had been trying to make a go of it with my band, Black Roses. Then the drummer disappeared right before a string of shows. I had two choices: cancel or become the missing band.

I spent a week recording drums, bass, rhythm guitars, and everything else the songs needed. Then I walked into the venue with a desktop computer, a 24-inch CRT monitor, my guitars, and an amp.

The owner looked at me like I had lost my mind. “I'm your band tonight.”

I had finished some of those tracks only hours before load-in. It was terrifying, awkward, and completely unproven. It also worked. The venue wanted me back. Then another venue did. Then another.

An audience member said it after hearing me play “Signs” by the Five Man Electrical Band. I had not named the act yet. The crowd did it for me. The One Man Electrical Band was born.

The full name worked beautifully in conversation. It did not work nearly as well on venue marquees. I showed up to find all kinds of weird versions waiting for me: “I ME Band,” “Mike Carr,” “One Man Band”—anything except the actual name.

So I shortened it to OMEB. Four letters. Harder to screw up. The T-shirt came later: “Where's the Band?” on the front. “I AM THE BAND” on the back.

People told me a heavy-metal guitarist with a computer would be laughed off the stage. Cincinnati gave me the chance to prove them wrong.

I became the house band for the WEBN Dawn Patrol, playing everything from their Pregnant Bikini Contest to the Labor Day Fireworks Celebration. I was hired as featured local support inside Riverbend Music Center as audiences arrived for shows headlined by KISS, Mötley Crüe, Styx, Poison, Journey, Megadeth, and others.

I opened the OMEB School of Rock, grew to 55 students, played five or six nights a week, and recorded with country artist Bobby Mackey.

Cincinnati was the proving ground. It was never meant to be the boundary.

Within a year, I went from 55 students to 20 and from playing five or six nights a week to two or three. The recession hit. The bar scene changed. Rates collapsed.

The WEBN Dawn Patrol was retired. The Riverbend work disappeared as national contracts began restricting preshow entertainment. Several doors closed at once.

I looked at the numbers and made the hardest call of my career: it was time to get a “real job.” The problem was that nobody wanted to hire me without a degree.

Music had always been the place where being different stopped being a liability. I was not ready to lose that. I just needed to build another route back to it.

I returned to school as an adult while continuing to play whenever I could. I finished a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 18 months, completed an MBA, and then kept going.

The degrees did not magically make people overlook the long hair or the rock-star appearance. So I decided to make the credential impossible to ignore.

In 2019, I defended my PhD in Business Administration and Marketing Management. The musician who had once failed out of college after rupturing an eardrum became Dr. OMEB.

The professional breakthrough came from a grocery store. I created a campy Pink Floyd parody for a Rivertown IGA meat sale. The video went globally viral, and the store doubled its event sales.

That campaign turned the doctorate into proof. I became a marketing executive, taught marketing at the University of Cincinnati and Thomas More University, and eventually moved into communications and digital marketing consulting.

The look people said would keep me out of the room became the reason nobody forgot me after I entered it.

The day job grew, but the music never stopped. The collaborators simply started getting legendary.

I began recording and performing with Vinny Appice, drummer for Black Sabbath and Dio. We later co-founded Sabbath Knights. I also recorded with Todd Sucherman of Styx on productions drawing musicians from around the world.

With Cincinnati Vampires, our version of “Close My Eyes Forever” crossed one million plays on Facebook. Across performances, releases, collaborations, and social platforms, Dr. OMEB videos have generated more than 10 million views over his career. The music was reaching farther than the physical stages ever had.

But I was still trying to keep the traditional live circuit alive, even as those rooms became harder to fill. By 2025, I was running out of reasons to keep forcing it.

By June 2025, I was done with the live circuit. I canceled my remaining gigs. I had spent years walking into half-empty rooms and wondering why I kept showing up for spaces that had stopped showing up for me.

Then my friend Alexa Rae said, “You should play on TikTok.”

My answer was not inspirational: “Nobody's going to watch my old fat ass on TikTok.”

She told me I would be surprised. She was right.

The songs that could not hold a bar crowd could fill a worldwide broadcast with people who had been looking for exactly that sound. Same talent. Same songs. Different room.

The Wrong Room The music was still working. The room was not.

The Right Room A global audience had been waiting on the other side of the screen.

I went live on TikTok in August 2025. Within months, the audience multiplied, the same people began returning every week, and a livestream became something much bigger.

Rock n' Roll Church is now the center of the Dr. OMEB brand: Sunday Service at 9:00 AM Eastern, midweek services on Tuesday and Thursday, and a worldwide Congregation gathered around real rock, conversation, requests, and community.

The Congregation is everyone who gathers, listens, returns, and helps protect the room. The Clergy is reserved for the inner circle.

Today, the wider Dr. OMEB audience has grown to more than 84,000 people across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. New music and collaborations continue to expand the world beyond the weekly broadcast.

I wanted to bring happiness to people with music. Now I get to watch it happen in real time every week.