Cliff Wheeler

This son of North Carolina has been a journeyman player for nearly four decades performing in venues across the state and the southeast. Cliff began his musical journey playing bass with the hard rock band Knight Heir in the early eighties. Always the songwriter, Cliff wrote the lyrics and helped with the arrangements of their original songs. A few years later Cliff met guitarist Gary Orlando. The two joined forces to form MZ Dangerous and several bands thereafter. Cliff wrote the lyrics and the two together wrote the arrangements. The bands including this combo thrived and found themselves opening for national acts and garnering interest from record labels. In the early nineties Cliff and Gary went their separate ways musically. The two reunited in the late nineties for a short run with Cliff’s newest musical venture “Twister”, an alt-country band. The band met with modest success and released one EP. Following the end of Twister and being a new husband and father, Cliff took a hiatus from performing and writing. Meeting Robert Watson several years later changed that. Cliff and Robert began performing as Watson-Wheeler doing acoustic shows and with a full band as The FOG, a blues rock band covering Texas, Delta and Chicago Blues. Cliff’s time with the FOG reignited the fire to write that had been smoldering for nearly a decade. In the summer of 2016 Cliff went into seclusion on Oak Island, North Carolina for ten days and the songs on Wheeler are the result.