Michael Collins (featuring Andy Timmons)

Pull up a chair and stay with the signal, because The Zoo is rolling out “Michael Collins (featuring Andy Timmons)” by The Reddcoats, the long one from the 2021 self-titled record that the station is spinning in this Studio Session. This is not a three-minute single dressed up for the charts. It is an eight-minute-and-change hymn for the astronaut who never got out of the spacecraft, written and sung by a bassist who has spent a career standing just off the spotlight, and then handed to a Dallas guitarist who decided the solo should run almost as long as “Free Bird.” If you came in looking for hair-metal flash and nothing else, stay anyway. The flash is here. So is the ache.

The name in the title is Michael Collins, command module pilot of Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked the Sea of Tranquility, Collins stayed aboard Columbia, looping the moon alone. Every orbit he dropped behind the far side and lost the radio. No Houston. No crewmates. Just the dark, the instrument panel, and a planet hanging in the window. He later called that stretch the high point of the mission and said he never felt lonely, which only makes the song stranger and better. The Reddcoats do not buy the calm version. Matt Bissonette’s lyric keeps calling him home. “Please come home Michael Collins / Won’t you come home Michael Collins? / When Neil and Buzz were on, you were all alone.” Then the picture that still sits in a lot of living rooms: “Floating off the TV ’round the dark side of the moon / Spinning in the atmosphere, we pray you’ll be home soon.” A later line toasts him as a major general in a big balloon. It is a love letter and a worry at the same time, the way a good rock song can be both.

The band that cut it is a supergroup that refuses the costume. The Reddcoats are Matt Bissonette on bass and lead vocal, his brother Gregg Bissonette on drums, Andy Timmons on guitar, Wally Minko on keyboards, and Mike Medina on percussion and co-production. They finally put a name on the friendship in 2020, right as the road shut down. Matt has said the spark came on a day off in Dallas while he was out with Elton John. He met Medina at a gig Andy’s band was playing, and the three of them knew the room had to become a record. Quarantine forced the rest. Matt wrote a tune, sent the track, and let each player lay a part in his own studio. Half a year later they had nine songs and a debut, released January 15, 2021, under Matt’s own copyright. The name is a wink at British rock. Matt always wanted to see “The Reddcoats are coming” on a billboard. The double-d is the joke and the salute.

The Bissonette brothers have been doing this since the family band in the Detroit area. Gregg was seven and Matt was five when their father took them to see The Beatles. Matt, born July 25, 1961, came up through the University of North Texas jazz program, toured with Maynard Ferguson, then spent 1987 to 1992 in David Lee Roth’s band on A Little Ain’t Enough. Joe Satriani, Rick Springfield, Steve Perry, Don Henley, and a long run with Elton John, including the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, followed. Gregg matched him step for step: Roth, Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band, Santana, Don Henley, and a decade in the pit for the television show Friends, union residuals and all. Medina met the brothers more than thirty years ago at North Texas State, now the University of North Texas, and has played with Edgar Winter and Victor Wooten. Minko, a Grammy-nominated keyboardist, has worked with Pink, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Toni Braxton. These are not kids discovering a studio. These are session lifers who decided, around age sixty, that they still wanted a band of their own.

Andy Timmons is the North Texas piece of that puzzle, and the reason the song carries his name in the credit. Born July 26, 1963, in Scottsdale, Arizona, he grew up in Evansville, Indiana, started Taylor Bay at thirteen, studied classical guitar at the University of Evansville, then transferred to the University of Miami for jazz because the Dixie Dregs, Pat Metheny, and Jaco Pastorius had passed through there. Dallas got him next. In 1988 the Andy Timmons Band formed, and Epic pulled him into Danger Danger to finish the debut, shoot the videos, and open for Kiss and Alice Cooper. Two number-one MTV clips, a million records, four years in New York. He came home to Dallas in 1993 and built the catalog that guitar players still trade: Ear X-tacy, Ear X-tacy 2, the Pawn Kings record, Orange Swirl, Resolution on Steve Vai’s Favored Nations label. Along the way he was music director and guitarist for Olivia Newton-John, cut sessions for Kip Winger, Paula Abdul, and Paul Stanley, and played with Simon Phillips. He has said he and Mike Medina go back to the early nineties, and that he has known Gregg and Matt since 1978. Friendship, not a manager’s spreadsheet, built this band.

On “Michael Collins” he takes the space the lyric leaves him and does not give it back. In a later interview with the band, the players laughed about that solo: Andy called it the longest he had ever played, one second shorter than “Free Bird.” It does not feel like a stunt. Gregg’s drums and Matt’s bass keep a slow orbit, Minko’s keys hang like cabin light, Medina’s percussion ticks like circuitry, and Timmons sings on the guitar the way a good melodic player sings, long lines instead of a shred catalogue. He told International Musician that Matt left room for everybody’s personality, and that the remote sessions still produced moments that usually only happen when the whole band is in one room. They finally stood in one room in August 2021, one rehearsal, one gig, and discovered the audience was the missing instrument. A second album, The Reddcoats 2, arrived in 2024 with Ron Pedley added on keys. The first record is still the one that holds this song.

Collins died in 2021, the same year the track came out. He never walked on the moon, and he never seemed to mind. The Reddcoats mind a little. That is the rock-and-roll part. The man in the capsule becomes the guy in the band who holds the groove while somebody else takes the bow, the brother who has been playing since he was five, the guitarist who came back to Dallas and kept the gig honest. Hear it all the way through on The Zoo, the commercial-free rock signal that still believes an eight-minute song can be the point. The band keeps house at thereddcoats.com, Matt’s own pages live at mattbissonette.com and his Instagram, and Andy’s trail runs through andytimmons.com, Instagram, and X. A clean career sketch sits on his Wikipedia page, and the American Federation of Musicians told the origin story straight in International Musician. Please come home, Michael Collins. The band already did.