What is your recollection of the year 2001?

If you ask Keyboardist Rob Kleiner and the rest of the Tub Ring crew (Kevin Gibson-vocals, Trevor Erb- bass, Chris Wiken- drum, Jeff Enokian- guitar) they would tell you that they were busy winning over the most important fan of their entire career. Mr. Bungle’s Trey Spruance.

Rob met with Kevin (the lead singer of Tub Ring) several years after the band had already been around as a high school garage band. The band has actually been around since 1992 when Rob was more busy following Mr. Bungle as a star crazed roadie than working on any of his own musical projects.

Rob and Kevin became good friends upon meeting and turned their heads towards the same direction of success. Eventually Rob became an addition to the band and immediate set to changing their style to simulate his teenage musical mentors… Mr. Bungle.

The band began to blossom with a purple and pink polka-dot rainbow that led straight to a garbage dump site filled with mixed punk, classic rock, new wave, a-capella, pop, hard rock, speed metal and quite possibly the funky chicken.

Rob made sure not to become just another carbon copy band of Mr. Bungle and took all of these unique sounds and made sure that he was set far enough apart from Mr. Bungle to become their own entity… a love child of Mr. Bungle perhaps, but still very much their own unique sound.

As the band perfected their style, they realized that it was time to make their own album and asked Trey if he would listen to the bands demo CD and give them feedback. After listening to the demo, Trey decided to take on the project on himself and produce their first album, “Drake Equation”, of which in turn lead to their second album, “Fermi Paradox”, the next year (2002).

The new sound of Tub Ring was taking the world by storm along with two such similar genre bands, Dog Fashion Disco and Mindless Self Indulgence. Tub Ring has toured with both bands in recent years and Rob sings (even though he is a keyboardist) nothing but high praise towards their musical endowments.

Rob even played guitar along with Mindless Self Indulgence during a tour from 2004-2005… (to be continued)