Roger Steen was born on November 13, 1949. He became a guitarist and songwriter with The Tubes, helping supply the music for a band whose stage productions turned rock songs into elaborate scenes of satire and excess.
His connection with drummer Prairie Prince began in high school in Phoenix. They played together in The Mouth, which became the Red, White and Blues Band. That group eventually joined forces with Bill Spooner’s band, The Beans, in San Francisco, bringing together musicians whose relationships predated The Tubes. In a June 1982 interview with Modern Recording & Music, Steen traced their beginnings to bands sharing the same small circuit of Phoenix clubs. He also credited their similar backgrounds and experience growing up together with helping the group stay intact.
Those connections produced “White Punks on Dope,” which closed the band’s 1975 debut album, The Tubes, produced by Al Kooper. Steen and Spooner developed its riff, while their Arizona friend Mike Evans supplied the lyrics. The song’s targets were close at hand: in a 2005 Classic Rock interview, singer Fee Waybill recalled wealthy young followers who arrived at shows with expensive cars and drugs. The band turned that privileged rebellion into a joke large enough to accommodate Waybill’s platform-shoed, disintegrating rock-star character, Quay Lewd. Steen’s contribution helped give the spectacle its musical foundation.
The spectacle could also compete with the work of arranging songs. “I was the guy who thought we should be more focused on the music,” Steen told Classic Rock in 2016. He remembered rehearsals veering into discussions of costumes before the instrumental parts had been fully worked out. His concern was practical: there was a song to finish underneath the production. That tension helps explain the particular demands of his job in The Tubes, where writing and playing sat alongside decisions about what audiences would see.
The balance shifted again after the band moved from A&M to Capitol. David Foster produced The Completion Backward Principle in 1981, bringing a more commercially successful chapter. Looking back in that same interview, Steen acknowledged the good that came from the collaboration while questioning which parts would endure. Selling records had become inseparable from the band’s artistic ambitions.
His own records gave him space to lead the singing, writing and production. On the 2013 album Roger Steen, he handled guitars and lead vocals and shared production with Robert Berry at Soundtek Studios in Campbell, California. Familiar collaborators remained involved: Prince contributed lyrics and drums to “Dig Deep,” while Waybill sang backing vocals on “Bone Dry.” The record put Steen’s name out front while retaining musical relationships built through the band.
That approach continued on How the Story Goes, released in 2023 and again co-produced with Berry. Steen co-wrote “Life Is Pain” with Waybill and performed its guitars, bass and vocals, joined by Prince on drums and Berry on keyboards. Elsewhere, the personnel became smaller still. For “Pantomime,” Steen wrote the song, sang it and recorded both guitars and bass. Its only other credited player was Prince on drums, returning the two musicians who had started together in a Phoenix high-school band to a recording performed entirely between them.
