Carnage Asada Drummer, Steven Reed, On Blackness and LA Punk
When Steve pulled up to my house in South Los Angeles one Sunday, he came bounding up the walkway like a man half his age. He’s 70. Talking about a black punk band out of Philadelphia called Pure Hell. Steve was fumbling through his Android phone searching for the video.
“I want to show you this group called Pure Hell, in the early ‘70s,” Steve said excitedly. Eyes beaming, smile shining. “This is like the early 70s. This is heavy stuff. They’re one of the great bands in music history.”
Steve’s not just a fan—he’s lived through the rise of L.A.’s punk and rock scenes. He’s the drummer for Carnage Asada, a band with George Murillo on vocals, Tony Fate on guitar, David O. Jones on bass, Dave Travis on cello, and at one point, Dez Cadena of Black Flag. Before that, he played in Legal Weapon and cut his teeth in jazz battles and garage bands in the ’60s.
But he wasn’t just reminiscing. As he talked about Pure Hell, his message was clear: Black people were always in punk. People just don’t know.
“Some of the first punk music was Black Orient. And Bad Brains came a lot later, [doing] their thing. But they didn’t get a lot of the credit,” Steve said.
Steve’s words reminded me of something filmmaker Ryan Coogler said in an interview segment posted on Instagram. He said as a kid, he avoided comic book stores—didn’t feel welcome. That changed when his cousin, a Gen X nerd from Oakland, walked proudly into those spaces and bought what he wanted, uncaring of the side-eyes. That confidence planted a seed.
“I want you to see this because me and punk rock… I got involved with it because of the money. They wanted a soundtech. That’s how I got involved with it… Meeting, Randy Stodoloa (founder of the Alley Cats) and those different people.
“Talking about that period of history is really intense,” Steve said.
Steve explained that in Punk’s early days in Los Angeles, the punk sound would muddy up the sound of the vocals.
I already knew talking to Steve meant figuring out how to get him to talk about 55 years of music and make it make sense when I began to write this thing.
His point was that black artists have always been at the forefront of music and rarely get the credit they deserve.
Before joining Carnage Asada, Steve was a part of the band Legal Weapon as a bass player. His band went on a European tour, but for some reason, the drummer wasn’t able to go. So Sharon Needles came in and played bass and Steve played drums.
At the time, Steve hadn’t played drums in a long time, so he just went for it. So when the tour ended, he said he was ready to do something different.
“In the early 90s, English Frank was having these big parties and bands were playing on Gower Street. Legal Weapon was invited to play. When they got there,” Steve said.
He said he saw these three guys on stage watching George, the vocalist for Carnage, do his spoken word, Dave Travis play cello, and the bass player David Jones.
But Steve saw an opportunity to do something different.
“How about two basses?” Steve linked up with Carnage Asada when he was 39 years old. Steve described their sound as very “arty” and noted they didn’t practice.
“We’d just jam and George would recite his spoken word because he’s from East LA and everything.” And he just did his little spews, and we just played music behind it. We did that for a long time.
Steve explained that after a while, drummer Dave Markey (who worked with a plethora of bands, including Nirvana, The Ramones, and Black Flag) joined the band, so they had drums.
“So it was two bass players, a drummer, a cello player, and George. Then Dez Cadena got in the band from Black Flag. He joined the band and he played with us for a little while. He did the first record with us and another guitar player David Green. So that’s how we started,” Steve explained.
Steve’s transition to punk music started somewhere between Legal Weapon and Carnage Asada. But he had already been a musician since he was a teenager.
started with Legal Weapon in the late 1980s, cutting his first singles with the band, “Squeeze Me Like an Anaconda” and “The World is Flat” in 1992.
Steve measures his introduction to LA’s punk scene with his close collaboration with Legal Weapon founder Kat Arthur.
Steve explained that the members of Legal Weapon weren’t really Punk musicians. But they were able to put their lyrics in that direction.
“They were able to do that because Kat was a Blues singer and Brian was a hell of a guitar player,” Steve said. “They were able to play that kind of sound and get away with it.”
Steve’s love for music began in tragedy. Before drums, he and his friends built motorbikes. Then his nephew died in an accident. To heal, his mother took him and his sister to see Duke Ellington at Royce Hall in 1966. Steve was just 11, but Ellington’s drummer, Sam Woodyard, “blew my mind,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m gonna be a drummer.’”
His mother promised to support him if he stuck with it. Soon after, while driving along Washington Boulevard, they saw a sign for drum lessons. That’s how Steve met Jack Sweet, who once took over Gene Krupa’s spot in Benny Goodman’s band. “He was a great, great drummer,” Steve said. “That’s how I got my start.”
Soon after, Steve encountered a band playing out of a garage in his neighborhood. He later returned to the house and knocked on the door, and said, “You guys need a drummer?” They became a four-piece band with Steve as drummer to became The Magicians—Steve’s first band, playing Top 40 hits at school dances and sharing stages with the likes of the Johnsons, Three + One, which evolved into The Brothers Johnson.
Steve credits music with keeping him out of gangs. “My family was kind of involved with that. Music saved me,” he said.
As a teen, he attended Hamilton High School, drawn in by its outdoor jam sessions. “I was an okay student, but I just wanted to play,” he said. To earn money for gear, he took driver’s ed and became a gardener one summer. This setup shaped the rest of Steve’s life as a working musician playing with some of the greatest bands, many would argue, this planet has ever produced.
Even though his father was a saxophonist who likely played with bands on Central Avenue in the ’30s and ’40s—and even knew Charlie Mingus—Steve doesn’t remember talking much about music with him. “My love for it came from somewhere else,” Steve said.
Steve competed in school jazz contests, including one against the Apex Jazz Workshop from Dorsey High, which featured future stars like Azar Lawrence and Charles Fowlkes Jr. “We did all that stuff, and I was a drummer back then, too. I was just a kid.”
Later, Steve joined Frenz, a rock group that became Nightwatch. Signed to Whitfield Records in the late ’70s, they clashed with label expectations. “They wanted us to dress like The Undisputed Truth and look like Kiss,” Steve said. “We just wanted to wear jeans and play.”
The band toured the West Hollywood circuit—mostly white spaces. “We were a Black rock band. It was wild. But even bands like Motley Crüe and Quiet Riot respected us.”
He mentioned Slash too, who had a Black mother but never publicly embraced his Blackness. “I don’t blame him,” Steve said. “He did what he had to do. But for us, it was different. Even Black people had a problem with us.”
“He had to get in there and do his thing. He’s a great musician, and it worked for him. But for us, we were doing this thing, and even black people had a problem with us.” They would say, you’re just black boys playing white music, and one of my best friends called me a “‘peanut-face white boy.’”
Steve’s retort was, “Look at Jimi Hendrix. Look at Arthur Lee. What do you call them? But they didn’t understand all that stuff.”
