Ian Mitchell has seen fame from both sides, and he enjoys walking down the streets now without being chased.

"I remember when I was leaving the group," said Mitchell, who will appear at Decatur Celebration on Aug. 2, leading the Bay City Rollers.

"I was standing in our manager's kitchen with my replacement, Pat McGlynn. We were buddies, and he said to me, 'You must be crazy, leaving this.' I said, 'Pat, I'll give you six months.' He lasted three."

The Bay City Rollers were a mid-1970s pop sensation. Their first U.S. single, "Saturday Night," went to No. 1, and the group had two other top 10 singles and an additional five that made the U.S. top 60.

The group was even more successful in the United Kingdom, with a pair of No. 1 singles and 11 that reached the top 10. (Interestingly, "Saturday Night" did not reach the singles charts there.)

The group's success led to an uncontrollable mania following the young men in the band.

"You couldn't understand it," Mitchell said. "It was just total madness, total insanity. You've never seen anything like it. It was literally impossible for us to walk down the street.

"You couldn't go out because people wanted to mob you, guys wanted to hit you. We were stuck in our homes. We had to have our groceries delivered. We couldn't go to a restaurant.

"I know there are people who will say, 'I wish I could have that,' but it's no fun."

One of Mitchell's most memorable moments within that mania remains captured on record.

"In 1976," Mitchell recalled, "we were at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto. There were 65,000 kids there. We were just doing a personal appearance; we weren't even playing. It wasn't three minutes that we were onstage before the kids mobbed the stage. They were kicking the police.

"That's when we were recording the 'Dedication' album, and that album had a song on it called 'Yesterday Hero.' The crowd noises on 'Yesterday's Hero' are from the CHUM radio recording of that event."

Thirty-two years later, appearances are dramatically different.

"It's a lot more relaxed," Mitchell said. "It's not so frantic. I've got nothing to prove to anybody. We're playing the hits and they like to hear them.

"Sometimes I'll tell stories, and sometimes," he added, starting to laugh, "I'll go on too long. People will say, 'Can you cut that one a bit?' "

Mitchell's Rollers are generally a seven-piece band - two guitars (including Mitchell), a bass, keyboards, drums, a singer and an occasional percussionist.

"It's very good," said Mitchell, who continues to tour in the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia. "There are a lot of fans in their 40s who never got a chance to see the Rollers. So it's all just good fun.

"We'll get some of them up on stage at the end to sing 'Saturday Night.' It is nostalgia, but it's fun. We make it fun for the audiences."

It would be easy to say some of the good feeling Mitchell receives from audiences erases the negatives of the original Rollers experience. But Mitchell doesn't see negatives, in spite of the loss of millions of pounds, money that's disappeared and remained untraceable even now.

"You can't just put it on one person," he said. "There were people in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

"We were all from small towns and working-class families. We had no education about those things. We relied on other people to take care of things."

As such, for Mitchell, at least, moving on away from the negative was not hard.

"It wasn't a difficult step," he said. "I had fun, and I made a few dollars. The reason I got into this to begin with was I just wanted to play guitar."

WHO: Ian Mitchell's Bay City Rollers.

WHEN: 5:30 and 9 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 2.

WHERE: Funfest Stage, Decatur Celebration.

ON THE WEB: www.ianmitchell.com

Tim Cain can be reached at timcain@herald-review.com or 421-6908.