Born in Victorville and raised in San Diego (City Heights and Lakeside), Stephen Rey says he is a vampire when asked how old he is. “I’m ageless.” In person, Rey is a picture taken from the pages of a book about ’50s truck-driving rock and roll. He is a rip-cord muscled rocker in a wifebeater with an air of menace and a roached acoustic guitar played through an amplifier that sounds as if on the verge of a blowout.
“I probably sound like I’m in diapers, compared to Link Wray,” he says. “I saw him in L.A. once. I hitchhiked up there to see him.” Stephen Rey and the Slicks released their full-length Old Fashioned Future in summer 2011, and he also plays bass with Lady Dottie and the Diamonds.
In 2012, Rey put together a new band called Sex Trash, with Nathan Beale playing leads on an old Telecaster and Tim Lowman (Low Volts) manning a marching drum with a hubcap screwed into the side of it. Simple, primitive, but ferocious. Says Rey, “It kind of haphazardly happened.” Rey and Lowman are roommates. Beale lives in L.A. (the two are also members of Lady Dottie and the Diamonds).
2013 saw the debut of a new Rey project, a honky tonk duo with drummer Anders Larsson called Two Wolves.