Previously known as Innerlimit (through 2006), the Four Kings create what they call "baby-making music" out of O.B. One place you won't see them playing is the Bean Bar, near Sports Arena, where they were scheduled to appear in summer '07. According to singer/guitarist Drew Bent, "We show up with 75 of our own people and are ready to play, only to have the promoter tell us that there was a mistake and that he sent us the wrong date. This was at 9:30 p.m. He said he would compromise and put us on at 1 a.m. All of our fans and friends did not want to wait around for a 1 a.m. set on a Thursday night at an all-ages venue. We couldn't come to a compromise with this guy, so I told him to stick it."
The band then set up their equipment in the Jiffy Lube parking lot across the street from the Bean Bar. The band played until around midnight. "A friend of mine is the head manager at Jiffy Lube and opened the place up for us so we could draw power," says Bent. "The cops miraculously never showed up to bust us. With all the commotion stirred up from the confrontation at the Bean Bar to the parking-lot madness, our free show ended up with a crowd of around 100 people."
The four members of the Four Kings attended Point Loma High when they got some unexpected attention in 2003. Bent says, "A friend of a friend told us that he really liked our band, that his father owned Signature Sound, and he was starting a record label and he was interested in meeting us."
Signature Sound is the Kearny Mesa studio that has recorded blink-182, P.O.D., Switchfoot, and Jewel.
"Our producer was Joe Marlett. He's worked with the Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, and Queens of the Stone Age." Bent says the band's five-song EP "...was a really good record. But we didn't know what we were doing. We were 16 and 17. We had no idea of the business end of things. Our productivity was crap. We acquired girlfriends. We got lazy.... [Signature Sound owner Luis Arteaga] is a very conservative Christian man. We're kind of a bunch of partiers. He dropped us. Last year we started gaining our senses. We knew that we had a good thing, but we were wasting our time and not doing anything with it.
"If you want a top-of-the-line recording, you have to spend at least $10,000. We got that the first time, but because we had a hookup, we only had to spend a sliver of that. The main reason we didn't go back to Signature Sound was because we couldn't get the same deal, and it was out of our price range."
So the band (by then renamed Four Kings) turned to Love Juice, a bargain studio in Riverside.
"We got 124 hours for $600. But we ended up with something adequate. I'd say you get a good bang for your buck at Love Juice. It's literally a mom-and-pop operation. The studio is in their home. They brought us in their house and gave us a home-cooked meal." The nine-song product is titled Classic Masquerade.