Former Pastor Finds Music Cathartic

It took a 30-year high school reunion to crumble Steve Staicoff’s musical writer’s block.

The former minister turned accountant had long relied on music as a creative outlet and as “cheap therapy” for stress, but for some reason, the songs had just stopped coming to him. Then last year, he went to his Bayless High School class reunion, and the floodgates opened.

He remembers thinking: “What have I been doing for the last three decades? What have they been doing for the last three decades?”

Suddenly the Kirkwood man started writing again and produced enough songs to put out a new CD, his 10th solo album. The Devil Dreams of God (available on iTunes), which he recorded and produced in a spare bedroom of his home, is filled with reflections and questions about life as he nears the half-century mark this year.

“I was about to turn 50, and I was asking questions,” he said. “I wrote a lot of these songs while I was riding my motorcycle.”

Many of his songs draw from his experience as an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church.) “Jubilee,” for instance, alludes to the Christian concept of a special time of forgiveness of sins or debts. He said he was asking himself, “What debts do I need to let go?” 

But it is not church music--Staicoff calls his style "heartland rock," and he counts among his many influences The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Steely Dan.

Staicoff, who grew up in the Affton area, is the chief financial officer for the United Cerebral Palsy Heartland, which works to provide programs and services for people with disabilities. He earned an accounting degree from Southeast Missouri State University, but his first love was music.

“I found the guitar at 10, and it was all over after that,” he said. “You find a guitar and a couple of Beatles records, and that’s it. I wanted to be the next John Lennon.”

Growing up, he joined a succession of bands that played in the St. Louis area and was thinking about a career in music, but by the time he was entering college and checking out employment statistics, he chose the safer path into accounting.

He continued playing in bands through the years but also felt pulled from another direction. That led him to attend in Webster Groves and to become ordained in 1999.

As a minister, Staicoff served and then Overland Christian Church until leaving full-time ministry in 2007.

During his time as a pastor, Staicoff kept his hand in music, performing mostly in church groups but not as much in the secular world, where a job might keep a band out into the wee hours of the morning.

“You can’t play out on a Saturday night and be in the pulpit on Sunday morning,” he said. His solo work also slowed, he said, as he poured his creative energy into preaching.

These days, Staicoff is back to performing. He plays keyboard and guitar and sings with Uncle Hulka Band, a '70s and '80s cover band that plays in the St. Louis area once a month or so. Like Staicoff, all the band members have regular day jobs.

“It’s just something for us to blow off steam,” he said. “We’ve never made money doing music. It’s a labor of love.”

Staicoff also plays bass in a praise band at the church where he is an elder, Community Christian Church in Ballwin.

And he spends hours producing music in the spare room studio he dubbed RevStev Studio in the house he shares with his wife and teenage daughter. In addition to guitar and keyboard, he plays bass, mandolin, even harmonica when it’s called for.

Already he has eight or 10 songs written for his next CD.