Michael V. Drake was born in New York City and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, and Sacramento, California. He is the son of a doctor and a social worker. His mother graduated from East High School in Youngstown, Ohio, before attending college in Baltimore. The family lived in Baltimore, Nashville, Tennessee, New York, and New Jersey before settling in Northern California. He graduated from C.K. McClatchy High School at Sacramento, California in 1967. During college summers in the early 1970s, he worked at the original Tower Records.
