Jake Leg Stompers Web

Bill Steber

* “Rescue Me” by Fontella Bass was the number one Billboard song on the chilly November day when Bill Steber came into this world, humming along. Soon after he was playing two-finger hunt-and-peck renditions of Scott Joplin songs (with whom he shares a birthday) on his grandmother’s parlor upright, and blowing the dust off his father’s John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed albums.

The middle school years found Steber hiding under the covers past bedtime every Sunday night with a radio to corrupt his mind on the Doctor Demento Show with the likes of R. Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders, and Harry “The Hipster” Gibson singing “Who put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” After a brief flirtation with British psychedelia during the high school years, he began a lifelong archeological exploration into the depths of vernacular American music, culminating in bad impersonations of Neil Young and Dylan throughout his college days. But it was his lifelong dream to some day start a jugband with the possibility of entertaining tens of people by employing his voluminous, esoteric, and commercially irrelevant musical knowledge. At last that dream was fulfilled as middle age was breathing down his neck when in 2005, he ran into his old college philosophy prof., Ron Bombardi, at the Uncle Dave Macon festival. After helping him back up to his feet and apologizing, they formed the Jake Leg Stompers, a moment immortalized in Rolling Stone magazine with the following appreciation: “Of all the pre-war Revival bands currently playing in the greater Middle Tennessee area, the Jake Leg Stompers is one of them.” Currently Steber is operating a non-profit rehab center for the treatment of injuries resulting from exposure to 1980’s music.

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