Fat Mike

Michael John Burkett (born January 16, 1967), known professionally as Fat Mike, is an American musician and producer.

He is the bassist and lead vocalist for the punk rock band NOFX and the cofounder and bassist of the punk rock supergroup cover band Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.

Burkett started out with his first band False Alarm in 1982.

He credits Joe Escalante of the Vandals for introducing him to punk rock when he was 13 at a summer camp.

While attending Beverly Hills High School, Burkett began his musical career with the band False Alarm.

After the band split up in 1983, he met Eric Melvin and Erik Sandin and formed the original line-up of NOFX.

He attended college at San Francisco State University and graduated in 1990 with a bachelor's degree in Social Science and a minor in Human Sexuality.

According to the book NOFX The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories, Burkett has said that he received the moniker "Fat Mike" from "one of the guys from [the band] Subculture".

He is of Jewish heritage but is an atheist.

He has also appeared as a guest-vocalist on a number of other bands' tracks including "Peter Brady" on Screeching Weasel's 1993 album, Anthem for a New Tomorrow.

Other appearances include "Beware" by Randy, "Mr. Coffee" and "Lazy" by Lagwagon.

Burkett can also be heard heckling and requesting "Free Bird" at the end of the Lunachicks song, "Missed It," off their 1996 album, Pretty Ugly, which he also produced.

He also appears as a guest vocalist on the Dropkick Murphys single "Going Out In Style".

Burkett is the owner and founder of Fat Wreck Chords.

Burkett recorded the Cokie the Clown EP with NOFX, playing Cokie on both the cover of the EP and the music video for the title-track, "Cokie the Clown".

In the video, Burkett dresses as Cokie and puts white powder into his squirting flower, which in the song he describes as "my own special blend of X, coke, and K".

Cokie then walks around Chicago squirting powder in pedestrians' faces, as chronicled in the song itself.

The video was shot during the punk music festival Riot Fest.

He had never been very active in politics before then, admitting that he never even voted until 2000.

However, he was driven into political activism because of Bush, whom he viewed as "the most ridiculous president in the history of presidents."

Punkvoter.com targeted 18-to-25-year-old punk fans and other disenfranchised young people and encouraged them to vote Bush out of office.

At its peak, the site was getting 15 million hits a day and ultimately raised over $1 million.

As with Punkvoter.com, Mike organized the Rock Against Bush campaign to mobilize punk fans and musicians against President George W. Bush.

Fat Mike founded the website Punkvoter.com in 2004 in an effort to mobilize the punk community to vote George W. Bush out of office in that year's presidential election.

Fat Mike's band NOFX, along with many other well-known punk artists including Alkaline Trio, Green Day, and Jello Biafra, embarked on a tour of American college campuses in the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election.

Mike hoped to go beyond just protest and actually educate kids about why they should vote against Bush.

At the shows, he would hand out free DVDs of Uncovered: The Whole Truth About The Iraq War, a documentary that questions the Bush administration's motives in the Middle East.

To coincide with the tour, Mike released two Rock Against Bush compilation albums on Fat Wreck Chords featuring new music from some of the bands on the label.

The albums sold over 650,000 copies and proceeds helped fund the tour, as well as going toward magazine ads and billboards in swing states.

Burkett lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Fat Mike has made several appearances as Cokie the Clown, but one of his most memorable was at Emo's, a popular nightclub in Austin on March 20, 2010, at the South by Southwest festival.

He recounted several graphic and disturbing stories about his life, and played several songs both previously released and unreleased.

He also tricked several members of the audience into drinking tequila, before showing them a video of himself filling a partially full bottle of tequila to the top with urine to shocked reactions.

The stunt was later revealed as a joke on NOFX's website, which showed Fat Mike switching out the urine bottle for an untainted one before making audience members drink it.

Burkett has since been banned from Emo's. However, in NOFX's autobiography Burkett claims that the urine was indeed served to the audience.

In 2015 Burkett premiered a musical titled Home Street Home which he co-wrote with Soma Snakeoil and Jeff Marx.

In 2019, Fat Mike released a solo album, in the character of Cokie the Clown, titled You're Welcome.

The album features Fat Mike as Cokie as well as Dizzy Reed (Guns N' Roses) and Travis Barker (blink 182).

In 2023, Burkett formed his newest project Codefendants, alongside fellow punk rock musicians Ceschi and Sam King of Get Dead.

The group seeks to break genre barriers and produces a mix of hip hop music, new wave, and punk rock.