I think Chris is just a forgotten man because of the success of Clumsy. Bassists usually don't get much glory (believe me, I play bass) and when you only appear in one album and it wasn't the band's most famous album, it's definetly going to be tough to get recognition. Duncan and Chris are two toally different player. I think Chris is more about the riff. He'll play something in the intro that'll get your attention but then he'll play it/have the producer loop it over and over again in the verse (Blind Anniversary, Naveed, Hope, etc.). Duncan is more of a guy who plays the right fills at the right times to alter the depth of the sound. He doesn't really play a specific riff (ok fine, Monkey Brains) but instead the riffs that he plays are throughout the song. Like for Chris, you can evaluate him based on whether you liked the first 10 seconds of a song. For Duncan, you have to listen to the whole song and try to imagine what it would sound like without the bass.
As for Mike, I'm trying to put two and two together here and I'm going to throw this theory out there. Form some of the interviews I've read/heard, Raine usually says something about how they started to do everything live when the hired Bob Rock (as opposed to layered). Then you read what Raine said in that interview that Stong Alibi posted about how Mike wasn't good in the studio. I think that influenced them to fire Mike and hire Bob. Mike probably had to do like 20 takes for every song and this annoyed the rest of the band because they would book some studio time, hoping to get a lot done but end up having to wait and book more time because Mike couldn't put everything together in the time allotted.
Around this time (late 2000) Raine began to fear that OLP was going to burn out because their stuff was being played on the radio like "once every 45 minutes." They had to change their sound in order to be successful but Mike on the other hand, didn't come up with the type of guitar riffs that the rest of the bad felt was good. So I'm guessing Raine probably went to the Columbia Records executives for advice and that's when they recommended Bob Rock because Bob had a lot of "success" with Metallica. The problem was that Mike still made a lot of mistakes and the stuff he was playing just grew old with that band. They wanted to make a comeback with a new sound...sort of like Green Day with American Idiot. Bob and Mike had a lot of tension between them because the way Mike played the guitar was too "complicated" which led to a lot of mistakes.
To cut it short, Mike took way too long, band couldn't take it anymore and they hired Steve because he could do things in less takes. Eventually they just decided to do everything live full time because it was easier and less time consuming (and because Steve could pull it off). They just stopped calling him and telling him when the next rehearsal/studio session was and when the band stops calling you for a period of time, you just naturally figure out that you've been fired. When Heathy was being made, the band also took a long time to do the album, though it wasn't their fault this time...it was Bob's. But once again the album took a long time to make in studio and the band got all grumpy again. Plus, the record label didn't want to give the band a huge budget to make it, which is why they keep saying that they were lucky to enter the music business in the early 90's when labels actually funded bands well. I'm guess OLP paid for a significant portion of the cost overruns on top of the fact that the album didn't sell very well anyways.
Wow that was a long train of thought
