” If you genuinely love and believe in what you’re doing, and you’re really good at it, then there’s a place for you, but you might not ever get rich doing it.” -Steve Leacock
by Karl Sorne
Being a musician in Tallahassee charts a strange course, and it’s hard to find someone who better exemplifies that better than Steve Leacock. By day he owns and operates Leacock Design Co., and you’ve likely marveled at his work around town without knowing it (logos for Brewed Awakening, the Liberty Bar and Madison Social to name a few). While his work in the design department is quite fantastic, that isn’t where his talent ends. Throughout his life music has interwoven itself into his fabric, starting with a definite choice by young Steve to be a horn player. He walked the usual paths that entailed, governed by militant band leaders who made him afraid to not be great, until he decided he needed to expand his talents.
From there his various musical endeavors have had levels of notoriety involving various bands and musicians (his band Standstill opened for Vanilla Ice in 2002) in order to pursue that love of music. After the horn, his next instrument was a guitar that was gifted to him with the caveat that he had to learn to play it, but along the way he has taught himself to play any instrument that needed playing. This love of playing has dictated his entire approach to the music scene. And to life. It seems apt to attribute his incredible stories and experiences to this attitude – not necessarily a “never say no” approach but rather the openness required to learn a new “instrument” when life throws him a curveball. In my conversation with Steve, he told me a story about a tour with one of his bands from days past that sums up this spirit:
One Small Step for Landmines went on a bunch of small, self-supported tours. Sometimes we borrowed an old Econoline van nicknamed ‘Ol’ Boo’ from one of our friends, and a couple of times we hitched a trailer to my Element which was really “fun” to drive through Manhattan. Eventually we started to look at options for getting our own van. Now, this was at the height of gas prices in the 2000s. We were a threepiece band, with me doing freelance design and the other guys working at a pizza joint when we were in town, so we were not well-to-do. Kevin, our singer, had the idea that we should go and get an old diesel van and convert it to run on veggie oil, and that way we could avoid going into credit card debt just trying to get from gig to gig.
Now, vegetable oil is a cool fuel, but it has some limitations. One, you have to install the system into a diesel engine. Two, the oil has to be heated in order to reach the proper viscosity to run through an engine without destroying it. Three, because of two, you have to start the engine up on diesel, wait for the heaters in the veggie tank to warm, then switch to the veggie oil. When shutting down, the same is true; you have to switch back to diesel before shutting down, so the oil doesn’t coagulate in the engine.
We found a huge shuttle bus for sale, bought it, and converted it. It was like our new clubhouse. We built bunks in the back, had parties in it; it was awesome. Then it was time to take it on the road. The first couple of outings were great. We all learned how to pump the oil, how the onboard filtration system worked, and how to find good oil. Chinese restaurants seemed to be our best bet. They were almost always happy, if a little baffled, to let us take as much oil as we wanted. Sometimes we’d hit a dry spell and have to go guerrilla, pulling up to the oil bin of a Red Lobster or Applebee’s and just pumping oil until someone noticed and ran us off. We smelled like french fries and freedom.
One February, we embarked on a long tour that took us up through Ohio, Michigan and New York. We were well-rehearsed and ready, but our fuel system, it turns out, wasn’t. As soon as we got out of Florida we started having weather and mechanical trouble. There were blizzards all over the northern half of the country. I spent an evening in white-knuckle terror driving the bus up a steep Tennessee mountain in a heavy snowstorm. The bus broke down multiple times, causing us to miss gigs while we huddled in the smoky waiting rooms of huge garages set up to repair tractor trailers. It was so cold that the vegetable oil was coagulating in the fuel lines that ran under the vehicle, so we wound up having to run on diesel anyway, which was more expensive even than gasoline at the time.
The cold required us to rely on the hospitality of strangers at night; our brilliant plans to sleep in the van did not survive a -3° Lansing, Michigan snowstorm. Once, in an insane quest to make it to a gig on time, Auggie, our drummer, and I watched silently while Kevin, our singer, drove us on I-75
through an almost total whiteout blizzard. Once in Georgia, nearly home, the bus’s brakes went out, and we coasted to a garage in a small town and went to sleep, waking up in the morning to explain to the puzzled mechanics what had happened. We eventually made it home and sold the van. In hindsight, maybe a Michigan tour in February was a poor move.
You can catch Steve playing his heart out with his current band Clever Girl. He recommends frequenting Waterworks, Bird’s, The Sidebar, Fire Betty’s, Liberty and The Moon for venues and keeping an eye out for Chilled Monkey Brains, Fungle Junk, Look Mexico and Catfish Alliance for bands in town.
