“We’d do Iggy’s “Dog Food” and toss dog food out to the crowd,” laughs guitarist James Ray (aka Cookie Chunks) in 2026. “We thought that would get someone’s attention.” He pauses, adds, “I remember the band Kix hated us because they had to go on after.”
Ray is talking of his former band Sybil, which collapsed in 1988, a few years after forming.
You can’t overlook the toilet on stage either, and the occasional blow-up dolls. Or how the slender gents donned lingerie for kicks. Was pretty cheeky to mix the satire of the New York Dolls debut album cover with the spirit of early Alice Cooper theatricals. By all accounts, their live show cooked.
After Ray’s former band, underground San Fran godheads Head On, had splintered, he grouped with a couple of fans and Sybil was hatched. The first gig, in ’86, saw singer Michael Marqueson (aka Roxy) appear in a prom dress wearing big plastic duck feet. “We were being completely stupid,” Marqueson said then.
Perhaps Sybil got more determined when they tarted-down, wearing trousers in lieu of stockings, garters and minis. They worked their asses off; wrote, rehearsed, flyered, starved. They went all in. Musically too.
“Everybody played their parts well,” Ray remembers. “We blended. The drummer and bass player rehearsed three nights a week on their own with a metronome just to get locked in.”
They were drawing big crowds in San Francisco and in their nearby hometown San Mateo. People drove in from three and four hours away to see their shows. But San Mateo is a mighty long way from the Sunset Strip, and location was everything in the mid-to-late ’80s badlands of countless right-time, right-place poof-haired dudes getting massive record deals. There were no rock ’n’ roll gods looking down on Sybil. Yet they managed to record an album in ’86. Shelved for whatever reason, Every Parent’s Dream (The James Ray Remaster) earned a proper release on Fervor Records in 2025, nearly four decades later.
So what were they about?
Rock ’n’ roll historians into obscure-o links would place Sybil closer to Detroit’s Trash Brats, London’s Hollywood Brats or Finland’s Hanoi Rocks than chart-topping ’80s acts like Poison. Sybil were rock ’n’ roll in a more fey, ’70s-glam way, closer to the Jayne County “man enough to be a woman” idea than some band shifting gears from a Judas Priest knockoff to cash in on Poison’s goofy version of “glam.”
More importantly, Sybil had the songs—easily better than anything Faster Pussycat ever coughed up. The trashy sides of the Coop, Dolls and the Dead Boys are here, alongside an obvious love of early Cheap Trick, the Buzzcocks and the Raspberries. They learned those power-pop lessons well. And good power-pop leaves room for innocence and vulnerability, qualities Sybil mostly sheathed beneath the strut and glam.
The churning guitars, drums and bass sound gloriously febrile, like a proper rock ’n’ roll album, while walls of distorted major-minor chord changes stay bubblegum delicious.
The riff-tastic breakup song “She Said”—which enjoyed airplay in France—sports a chorus that’s just a ridiculous singalong, the punk-rock pretty guitar harmony sealing the chorus. “Murder On My Mind” wallops the listener with an amphetamine rip of guitars straight outta UK circa ’78, and settles into a blast Lords of the New Church would’ve prayed to own.
“We had that magic,” Ray says. “I figured we’d go a long way. It just didn’t happen.”
The band split when Marqueson got strung out. Marqueson died in 2019.
“We wouldn’t have been the same without him,” continues Ray, who these days has a mastering studio set up in his house. “You have to wait for that time in space, where it all has to fit.” His voice trails off. “The rest of us [Drummer William Dellara, bassist Mark McLeod, guitarist Billy Wood]—still consider each other family. But we’re not stuck in ’86 with Sybil.”
– Liner notes by Brian Jabas Smith
