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 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. 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. 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 39 records topped 9,000,000 in 21 years as of September 2022. In September 2018, Lieberman's single, "The Diarrhea Song" had briefly appeared on the Apple iTunes Top 100 UK Rock chart, peaking at #22 and "3 Little Puppies" peaked at #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. 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 #3 on KZSU Stanford University in 2012 and "Jewish Pirate" had a one-week appearance at #8 on WUSB (FM) Stony Brook University two years after release in 2008. Life and career 1958–1991 the early years Steven Paul Lieberman was born on June 21, 1958, in Brooklyn, New York to a working-class Jewish family. He is the youngest son of Lester Lieberman (1928-2012), a quality control technician, and Ilene Lieberman (née Marcus) (1930-2014). 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