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The following are excerpts from an "as yet untitled" story, in the words of our good friend, Tom Maguire.

I like to think of it as a tale of "the little band that could.. or should've.. or almost did!"

I hope you enjoy these bits for now.. more to come.

-Kevin

It’s been said of the Sixties, “If you weren’t there, you couldn’t possibly understand.”

I find myself struggling with that same sentiment as I attempt to tell the tale of SOUL, the best damned band in the world…of which you’ve likely never heard. Two great guitarists, a solid rhythm section, fabulous vocalist…and, most importantly of all, some honest-to-God songs that melded masterful musicianship with insightful, thought-provoking lyrics, forming a whole that was much, much more than the sum of its parts.

It’s a tale that, for the most part, takes place in the Hollywood of the early Nineties, when the storied Boulevard was at its most bereft: shops closed at sundown, packs of runaways roamed the streets and seemingly everyone and their cousin was riding that first glorious wave of methamphetamine intoxication. A far cry from the trendy clubs that line the Walk of Fame today, catering to the glitterati…back in those days, it was more of a gutterati. But I digress….

SOUL was formed by a quartet of musical maestros dissatisfied with their previous forays into the wild-n-woolly realm of the Sunset Strip and its fierce competition among bands. Kevin Roentgen was the front man, combining an amazing vocal ability with gritty guitar licks that would’ve had him serving as lead guitarist in most bands…but not in SOUL, where that honor went to the slide-guitar wizard known as Stef--a.k.a. Rudy White, who went by the moniker Stef Jillian in those days. They were joined by a monster bass player in Tristan Greth and, after a few months, added the final piece of the puzzle: drummer Kenny Pierce, who’d previously played around town with Taz and Imagine World Peace, was a powerhouse percussionist behind the kit, combining with Tristan to lay down the groove that couldn’t help but make your body move.

A few weeks after Kenny joined I caught my first live SOUL performance--and was in turn forever caught myself. Held at the late, lamented Madame Wong’s West, it was an incredible introduction to just how magical a rock & roll show could be. Songs like the propulsive “Lucky One,” the addictive “Back in Motion,” the rollicking “Bad News” and the beautiful ballad “Bluebird” were among the tunes played that night, each somehow sounding better than the previous number. Another attraction was the inordinate amount of lovely ladies in attendance--from the very earliest days, SOUL shows attracted some of the most beautiful women in town, which in turn helped to attract the jaded, cynical musicians to shows…resulting in SOUL becoming something of a “band’s band” amongst the local music elite.

One of the best things about those performances was the fact that, by and large, they didn’t take place in the pay-to-play palaces of the Strip, but rather at smaller clubs elsewhere in Hollywood: Club Lingerie, the Anti-Club in East Hollywood and X-Poseur 54 and Peanuts on Santa Monica Boulevard, venues that didn’t charge bands the usurious rates the Strip clubs did. And more and more, their best gigs were coming from an unexpected source: the booming after-hours scene, where SOUL were quickly recognized as the kings of the nighttime world.....

.....A major milestone in the SOUL story occurred in February 1992, when the band decamped to New Orleans to play a month’s worth of gigs during Mardi Gras. Following a blistering series of 32 performances in 27 days, the foursome made a brief detour to Memphis before returning to Hollywood. There they entered the studio of producer/engineer Joe Hardy, who’d worked with everyone from the Staple Singers and ZZ Top to the Replacements and Alex Chilton, and in the course of a day and half cranked out four new numbers and an Allman Brothers Band cover, “Whippin’ Post.”

While the cover was a truly amazing rendition, showcasing in particular the talents of drummer Kenny Pierce, it was the quartet of new songs that demonstrated just how rapidly the band was growing into a musical force. The demo opened with the snarling cynicism of “I Don’t Need You” before segueing into the softer, sentimental “Hang On, Little Sister”--the first SOUL song to directly address, lyrically, the growing methamphetamine madness surrounding the band. The opening lines capture the spirit perfectly: “Sun rise in the morning, same old lie/White line in the evening, just one last time…hang on,” while the next verse offers a jaded response: “If I choose to take the blues, don’t you change my ways/I’m too proud to cry aloud, so here I’ll stay.” This was followed by the lighter-natured “Maybe I’m the Fool,” an underrated number which opened with the whimsical lyric “Maybe’s a word that’s hard to define--perhaps possibly” (when asked later about the inspiration for the line, Kevin came up with a distressingly mundane response: he claimed to have looked up “maybe” in the dictionary, where it was defined as “perhaps; possibly.” Sigh.).

But it was the final original number they recorded in Memphis that would go on to become SOUL’s signature song: “Crucify Me,” an absolutely gorgeous tune with haunting lyrical themes concerning the quest for redemption: “Don’t try too hard to leave me scarred…just understand.” The song also featured a sonic innovation conjured in the studio: Stef’s guitar solo was fed through a Leslie speaker, a revolving three-cone system generally used with the Hammond B3 organ, but utilized to stunning effect on this song. It would go on to become the showstopper of the band’s increasingly frenetic live sets.

By the time the group returned to Hollywood in March 1992, a palpable change was in the air. The majority of the band had moved into a place on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Studio City, just off the 170 freeway. Within mere weeks of their return, the Rodney King verdict riots broke out across Los Angeles; I spent the second night of them with Kenny on Detroit Street in Hollywood, where we were greeted with the surreal scene of Yuppie apartment dwellers gathered on balconies, cheering homeless men pushing big-screen TVs up the sidewalk that they’d looted from the neighboring Circuit City. A couple days later we went to the SOUL house in Studio City, where Stef and I snuck out after curfew to make a couple phone calls and grab some smokes. On the way back, we noted that one of their neighbors seemed to be having a quite festive bash going on--imagine our amazement a couple weeks later, when we discovered it was none other than Rodney King himself who was living there!

There was one other thing that came about as a result of the trip to New Orleans, though--the first official SOUL T-shirts. Made of black cotton with white lettering, the front of the shirts depicted the “Praying Hands” logo underneath the word SOUL, lettered in an Olde English font. The back of the shirt was more visually striking, featuring a voodoo-inspired scene that included skulls and incense sticks, also accompanied by the Olde English-style lettering of the band name. It turns out that the back wasn’t just inspired by voodoo: Stef, a New Orleans native, pretty much just ripped off the logo of the legendary 19th century voodoo queen Marie Laveau, simply adding the word “SOUL” into the mix. At the time I questioned the intelligence of stealing from a voodoo queen, even one dead for over 100 years; Stef simply laughed off my concerns, but in the years since I’ve often wondered whether the Voodoo Queen did, indeed, get her revenge in the end…because from this point on in the tale, the band was bedeviled by a wide variety of bad luck and personal demons run amok.

First, the bad luck: while SOUL was hitting their creative peak in 1992, there was, alas, no one in the music biz around to hear. Gun-shy after the signings of, literally, dozens of mediocre Sunset Strip bands who would release a single album before disappearing back into deserved obscurity, major-label A&R execs were wary of anything coming out of Hollywood. Strike two was the emergence of “Smells like Teen Spirit” and the entire Seattle scene in the summer of ’91, resulting in most every A&R rep booking flights to the Pacific Northwest in search of the proverbial “next big thing”…while ignoring the current huge thing that was picking up increasing buzz in their own backyard......

.....As 1993 dawned, the SOUL fanbase gained a significant new addition: members of “outlaw” biker gangs started hiring the group to play their gatherings…and two biker brothers, Steve and Rod, were so enamored with the incredible music that they allowed the group to move into a house with them near the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in the tone-y Cathay Circle part of town. Perhaps the fact that the house was on “Hi-Point Street” should’ve been taken as an omen, for the partying became even faster and more furious that summer (and I should know--by that time I was, for all intents and purposes, spun out and homeless--and Steve was nice enough to allow me to crash at the house, too, whenever I absolutely, positively had to pass out for 12-18 hours). The group also picked up its first manager in 1993: Joey Meade, a protégé of Cathouse/Bordello nightclub founder and MTV VJ Rikki Rachtman, who helped get SOUL some sorely needed mainstream exposure....

(to be continued)