One of the great things about Quad-City area musicians is their willingness to help a good cause.

Just look at how many items in the calendars published in our newspaper and on our Web site are benefits for families needing help paying medical bills or recovering from some sort of tragedy - and many of them feature musicians who always are willing to help at no cost.

Now one of those musicians is in need of help himself.

Mike Stroehle, whose musical career in the Quad-Cities stretches back to the Night People (the band that opened for Jimi Hendrix at the Col Ballroom in 1968), has been away from the keyboard for about three months because of an as-yet-undiagnosed ailment.

"He's got severe neurological pain in his abdomen, but they're not sure what's causing it and they've run a bunch of tests on him," said his brother and sometimes-bandmate, Jim. "As of right now, it's some sort of nerve disorder, but only in that one area there."

Mike has had the pain off and on for our a year, Jim said, but it has been constant since the summer.

Mike is one among a handful of full-time musicians in the Quad-Cities. Although this isn't a column about health-care reform, it is a reminder that being a full-time musician also means there's no comfortable insurance plan to fall back on.

"There's nowhere we can buy into a collective or anything like that to make it cheaper," Jim said. "We don't really make enough money to have individual health insurance."

The Stroehle brothers, whose father played with the likes of Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Bellson, have carried on the family tradition in a variety of groups.

Mike and his wife, Mary (a former surgical nurse), were piano-playing regulars for years at Steventon's in LeClaire, Iowa, and they, Jim and others comprise the Nitecrawlers, a standards, blues and classic jazz band that celebrates its fourth anniversary of weekly Wednesday night gigs this month at the Rusty Nail in Davenport.

The Nitecrawlers are playing at a benefit for Mike at the Rusty Nail, 2606 W. Locust St., Davenport, beginning at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 11. Other bands and performers are invited onstage for the benefit, which is scheduled to last at least until 10 p.m.

"We're hoping a lot of other musicians will show up," Jim said.

After all, it's for a good cause.

David Burke can be contacted at dburke@qctimes.com. He blogs at Quadsville.com and can be followed at Twitter.com/entguy1.