Steve Lieberman

He is the youngest son of Lester Lieberman (1928–2012), a quality control technician, and Ilene Lieberman (née Marcus) (1930–2014).

Lieberman was married four times and divorced three times by his 33rd birthday and widowed at age 60.

Steven Paul Lieberman (born June 21, 1958), also known as the Gangsta Rabbi and The King of Jewish Punk,

(Hebrew name ליב פרץ בין אליאזר ה־בדלן ה־נזדי or Lev Ava'ran bar-Eli'ezar ha-Bad'lan ha-Naz'ari) is a Jewish-American punk rock /metal singer, songwriter, multi-instrumental musician, composer, arranger, producer and former village comptroller residing in Freeport, New York.

Steven Paul Lieberman was born on June 21, 1958, in Brooklyn, New York to a working-class Jewish family.

Lieberman is often considered an outsider musician, This has been partially attributed to his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder, which first struck him in 1970 at the age of 11, as well as his decade-long fight with progressive leukemia in his later years, which ultimately was deemed terminal and has become a recurring theme in his lyrics.

At the time of his bar-mitzvah in 1971, Lieberman, already an observant Jew, acquired a bass guitar to fill a vacancy in his junior high school jazz band.

He picked up the instrument and started playing it upside-down and backwards.

After passing the jazz band audition, he had developed a crude system of chords for the bass; when properly distorted, they mimicked the major chords of the 6 string guitar.

Forgoing this method for more conventional bass playing, Lieberman became the bassist for hard rock as well as jazz-rock fusion bands throughout high school, where he developed a lead bass style influenced by John Entwistle.

During this time, he suffered from major depressive disorder and committed parasuicide at age 17.

Amidst episodes of depression and mania, Lieberman graduated from college in 1980 with a BBA in accounting, where he worked his way up to become town comptroller by 1998, a position he held until his retirement in September 2014.

He was on hiatus from music through much of the 1980s except for recording a vinyl single "Nuclear Blitz (Edits 96 and 85)" in 1984, playing all the chords and leads on the bass guitar.

On the early primitive-sounding cassette releases during the 1990s he played chords and leads on a distorted bass accompanied by a Yamaha DD-6 drum machine.

He planned to return to music briefly in the spring of 1991, to commemorate his 20th year of playing the bass, this time accompanying himself with a used Yamaha DD-6 drum machine.

By year's end he recorded a 13 track cassette called Bang The Bass Bopmania.

Overdubbing tracks by using two portable cassette players, Lieberman started writing and recording bass-only crude punk/hardcore music.

There was a free paper in the New York area at the time called The Musician's Exchange that would review Lieberman's cassettes and those of like-minded musicians in a column called "Independents' Day."

This resulted in trading tapes amongst the musicians and circulating them throughout the underground.

Lieberman recorded under the "Bop Bop Bigger Bab'el" moniker from 1991 to 2001.

In 1994, Steve Lieberman began to study the Bible continually, as he did in the years following his bar-mitzvah.

He is a Hebrew Nazarite, the founder of The Bad'lanim, a minority sect of Judaism and a vegetarian since 1995.

By 2002 as he started releasing commercial cd's, he added and featured flutes as well as various brass instruments and a variety of Eastern instruments.

In his later years, he has added 6-string guitars and arranged and played a full brass and woodwind choir in an effort to fuse punk rock with marching band music and jazz, and eventually opera and classical

In 2009, Lieberman signed a multi-album deal with Jewish indie label JDub Records, taking the place of Matisyahu on their artist roster.

His 2010 song "No Festival of Lights (On This Hanukkah)" has received honorable mention placement in the Song of the Year Award

Although Lieberman's music seemingly had little commercial success, unaudited download and stream sales of his first 40 records approached 20,000,000 in 21 years as of July 2023.

As of the spring of 2011, Lieberman, a town comptroller by trade, was "the world’s only Orthodox Jewish heavy metal musician with a record deal", according to Newsday.

He shared the stage with Weezer, Andrew WK, Glassjaw, Ryan Dunn and the Misfits before retiring from performing in December 2011 to battle accelerated phase myeloproliferative leukemia.

Throughout the shows Lieberman's music was featured on, Russo described him as "Jethro Tull meets the Beastie Boys, a one-man Jethro Tull" as well as "an inspiration to all suffering from serious illness" Additionally, Lieberman enjoyed some success on college radio, where The Rabbi Is Dead peaked at No. 3 on KZSU Stanford University in 2012 and "Jewish Pirate" had a one-week appearance at No. 8 on WUSB (FM) Stony Brook University two years after release in 2008.

Over his career, he has commercially released 40 CDs and 38 cassette albums in the underground, using the Bop Bop Bigger Bab-èL moniker and reissued in 2016 for the 25th anniversary of his first cassette album, "Bang the Bass Bopmania" as "Bop Bop Bigger Bab-èL featuring Steve Lieberman".

On all his releases, Lieberman sings and plays all instruments.

He briefly returned to the stage in the spring of 2016 to perform Gangsta Rabbi's Quadrophenia performed in its entirety on a three-stop farewell tour as a solo act, accompanying himself on his trademark distorted bass, a 3-string Fender Stratocaster and alto trombone.

By the end of 2017, Lieberman refused all further cancer treatment.

From this time, he was in and out of home hospice care.

In September 2018, Lieberman's single, "The Diarrhea Song" had briefly appeared on the Apple iTunes Top 100 UK Rock chart, peaking at No. 22 and "3 Little Puppies" peaked at No. 19 on the Apple iTunes Top 100 Other Territories Chart two years later.

l.He received airplay on Rich Russo's free-form Anything Anything with Rich Russo radio show on New York City WRXP 101.9 and WDHA-FM 105.5 commercial rock radio stations.

He held the Guinness World Record for Longest Officially Released Song for The Noise Militia (#38/76) at 35 hours, 41 minutes and 9 seconds, from December 3, 2020, until October 2, 2021.

On June 1, 2022, Lieberman's sequel to "The Noise Militia" entitled The Post-Militia Pogo-Battalion(#39/77) was completed with a duration of 76 hours, 30 minutes and 27 seconds and was submitted to Guinness unsuccessfully to reclaim the record.

During the sessions of The Noise Militia, Lieberman experimented with the fusion of genres where he developed "Militia Punk" a mixture of noise-punk, thrash- metal and military music.