The Liquid Pope days
Yeah, so they say punk is dead….. And I fucking laugh and say, if you think punk is dead, then you were never punk!!!!
Liquid Pope was the incarnate of myself and 3 other Sober Musicians….
Lead Vocals: Marty Clark….. Good Old Marta!!!! Heh, if she sees this post she will be pissed i used the name Marta!
Bass: Tony Scott
Drums: Eric Steck
and me…. Aka Rob Lee……Lead Guitar, Back up vocals, and principle songwriter.
It was about 1993 and I had been messing around with some local musicians and mostly playing the blues, and folk stuff……i had written a few tunes and i just couldn’t find anyone who wanted to put a new group together… so i just floundered around until i met Marty……She had real pipes, and a pretty good Janis Joplin style…. i hit her up and we began working together…. i was writing loads of music, but for some reason i couldn’t seem to write for a chick… but i kept at it and soon enough i have a few good folk/punk songs…. it wasn’t really punk, and it was definitely not folk either…..one of the first songs i wrote was “Concrete World” it was a quirky acoustic number and it had a cool vibe…..and then came “Dirty Boulevard“. I wrote that song in about 2 hours, after making a trip to Hollywood with Steven, Marty’s boyfriend at the time.
Marty and I were pretty popular, as we played lots of coffee houses and places were the cool people hung out… but i got bored with the “golf clap” crowd… and soon we were looking for players to fill out the rest of the band…..Some time earlier i had went to a sober jam session and saw Tony playing bass…. he was pretty bad, but he had a Natural energy that made up for it!……. so now like 1 year later Marty brings Tony over to audition… I was really not into it…. all i could visualize was his playing as i remembered it, and that pretty much killed the idea for me…… so here he is and he is playing, and he is actually good, he didn’t sound like the bass player i had heard about a year earlier… so we add Tony to the lineup and started searching for a drummer…..So Tony knows this guy named Eric and he is sober too…. so we bring him to the studio i was working at so we can hear him…. fuck he has so many drums that it takes him longer to set up than it does for us to bash out the few songs i have actually written for the group!!!!!!…… Eric is good and we pull him in and we now have a real band…. and i go to work and really start writing!
In no time we have a 45 minute set and I set out to book showcase gigs for us….Because i work in a studio that caters to the popular punk band of the time i get loads of cool gigs as opening band at some of the coolest clubs….. We had opened for The Humpers, X Members, Rule 62, The Descendants, AllDay, and many others!!!!!! So now we’re popular, and i now gotta add that at the time the band name we chose was “Killjoy”, but as it turns out Jack Grisham of “T.S.O.L” had a new band, named “Joykiller” and so we came up with “Liquid Pope” as a play on dope and booze being our God!
So being the maniacal slave driving leader of the band, i was pushing the band… pushing hard….and all the time i was writing new songs, and fine tuning my sound. To me tone is the most important thing in live music… and i went thru some serious changes to get the right sound.. but with the help of Rich West, Brian Coakley, John Godell, and others I found my sound and I was off and running!!!
We were playing almost every weekend, and things seemed to be happening for us. We had amassed a small following, we were getting better, But there was still something missing. Mainly Marty and Eric only practiced when we were in rehearsal which was killing me and Tony! Marty didn’t know how to be the front chick and it took a lot of effort to get her motivated. After countless amounts of yelling, screaming, pleading, – and one time I actually fired her, – she took off and was the brash, rude, and perfect front chick for band! But Eric was a different story, it seems that the more popular the band got the less interested he got! Finally after a blow up in rehearsal I fired Eric because he refused to give the band 100%! I was pushing the band hard because I wanted to make us popular, and most of all I wanted to find a label to record us and put us on tour.. Tony was actually the hardest working member of the band, he spent more time then me practicing which was evident in his playing, and he was soon handling most of the management of the band. I was writing every night, and Rule 62 front man Brian Coakley co-wrote I Know with me. The sound I could hear in my head was finally materializing in the band. We were getting tighter, more popular, and my guitar playing was a attracting interest from members of some of the real popular punk bands on the scene.. I didn’t even know it until Tony had mentioned it to me. This of course pumped me up, and made me work that much harder on writing more material for the band. I was living in the studio, working for Rich by day and writing by night.
So now Tony is booking for the band, we have some upcoming dates and no drummer so I put an ad in the recycler, and we wait. We get a few calls and run a few auditions but none of them had what we were looking for, so we waited some more, then one day we get a call from the musician referral service and they gave us a free ad listing, and the first call we get is from Eric Steck. Eric had moved from Kansas City a short time before hooking up with us, and even though he wasn’t a punk drummer per se he had power, timing, and a tight less is more style! I talked to Eric on the phone for about 30 minutes and we set up an audition for him. While we were still looking for a drummer I had written quite a few new songs one of which was Cash. This song was to me the defining point for our sound. Eric made the audition and within 10 minutes or so I could feel a vibe and by the look on Tony & Marty’s face I knew they were feeling it too. After about 30 minutes we took a break and the 3 of us left Eric in the studio and talked about the audition and in a matter of about 2 minutes we agreed that Eric was who were looking for, but I wanted to take it one step further. I had just written Cash, and no one other than myself had even heard it. So I played the tape for everyone, and showed them the parts, and we played it. This locked it!!!!! Eric played the song like he had written it. His power made this song come to life!
So now we got a full band, about 6 new songs, and still one upcoming date. This was a happy time for me. I was starting to see some positive results for all of the hard work me and the other members put in, and things were slowly coming together for Liquid Pope!
Well in true drug addict fashion, i started shooting dope again. Don’t ask me how i go from good to fucked over night, but that is exactly what happened! I guess it all boils down to i liked the feeling of playing while on heroin. Funny, but for some reason dope always pumped me up and gave me energy & control on stage, and i could really focus on playing my guitar. But the bottom soon fell out of that fucking brilliant idea……I am no different that any of the countless other musicians who have crossed that same dirty bridge only to find that the cost was always higher than the benefit! So soon i was strung out and hocking and steeling shit to cover my habit….. and it is starting to show. Things were going well for the band….we had a fat blistering set, and we were getting some local notoriety. Rich West was too good to me and my band.. He went out of his way for us, and he even became our producer.. On a side note he was so impressed with my song Dirty Boulevard that he agreed to help me get a spec deal and get a pro recording of the song. those of you who don’t know Rich West was one of the keyboardists for Stacy Q & SSQ.
Well i don’t remember the exact time line, but it kinda goes like this….. Eric joined the banded, we busted ass teaching him the material, i was writing more, we recorded new demo’s with Eric to sell at shows and to send to the indi’s. I am shooting more and more dope, and i guess the band and everyone around me can see the change that being strung out makes…..So we are the second act on a major show at the Clipper in Long Beach, the headliner was The Humpers We were pumped and ready to kick ass….but i had to make a stop and get loaded first! I tell tony that i have to eat and he takes to me to my connection, and waits in the car… I bang a bag and i bail. Little did i know that the band was on to me, and they were planing to quit the band.. so the show is fucking the best show we had ever done….we actually sell all of the demo tapes we had, give away almost all of the free stickers, buttons and fanzines we had..and the time we were actually a band was that night.
So a few days pass by and then i come to the studio and notice that all of the bands gear is missing from the locker we had. I freak thinking we had been ripped off, so i start calling the band… one by one i get no answer, so i leave messages, and no one calls me back…….finally Tony calls and says we need a band meeting…and when they all show up i can see it in their eyes……and i think that deep down inside i knew it all along… they let Tony do the talking and he laid on the line… they knew i was getting loaded, and they didn’t like it and they were all leaving… that was is it… and all i could do was lie, and say i wasn’t shooting up, i pretty much told them all to fuck off, that all of the music was mine, and that i would get new members.
A short time later i ripped off Rich for about $500.00 cash, and took my acoustic guitar, and some of my stuff, left all of my other gear in the studio, and set off for Hemet California to a old get high partner.. and just sort a dropped off the music scene as quickly and silently as i had arrived..Through out my travels i ended up losing all of my master tapes from our recordings, my writing notes,and lyrics, and all of the memorabilia from our days as a up and coming local act!
Where is everybody now you ask??
Tony is still living in California, and is a mortgage loan officer for a local bank, He was playing bass for a band called the D-Mags, but he left after a year for personal reasons.
Marty is doing what Marty always did…..being Marty. she never played in another band after Liquid Pope.
Eric as turns out is a porno star, and living in Hollywood California… i guess his roommate was doing porno and got him into it…. I actually saw a clip of him one night while at a motel with this chick i picked up… and once i saw it was him, i sat up and just busted out laughing… the chick thought i was a fucking retard… but thats ok… i still got laid!!!!
Rich West closed the studio… the lovely City of Cerritos California didn’t like the supposed negative image (their words) of running a business that catered to the Punk and underground music scene. they put a lot of pressure on him so he closed West Sound Studios! So last time i heard he was working for a non-profit company.
