Meet the Band
Higher Ed comes at you straight out of California State University, Long Beach (GO BEACH!). They were started by two Dirtbags, Dean Monica and Dr. Rob, in the wild and heady days of 2022. Also known as the “Docs who Rock,” they bring the fire with rock & roll originals and covers from Roy Orbison to Alice in Chains.
As a youth, Dr. Collie Conoley forged his love of music and talent for the bass guitar as an underwater clown in a small Texas town. While distracted for many years researching psychotherapy and positive psychology, his focus is now rock and roll. As the oldest member of the band, the members have uncovered that he has missed many years of rock and roll during years of academic distraction. Fortunately, the band has devised a rock and roll boot camp for him. Now, he’s living the dream of every underwater clown!
Daniel Carpenter-Gold grew up driving around the back roads of Maine, listening to strictly the best rock & roll on Stephen King’s own WKIT and the wild piano sounds of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard on his dad’s cassettes. A couple of wrong turns later, he ended up in Long Beach, rocking out with a buncha nutty professors and scaring the locals.
Dr. Monica Lounsbery is Higher Ed’s lead vocalist and the most badass dean the College of Health and Human Services at Long Beach State University has ever seen. She grew up singing karaoke with family and friends until that fateful day when she put too much rock into her rendition of “Cherry Bomb” and destroyed an entire bar. Since then, she hid her superpowers until she found a vessel strong enough to contain them–and that vessel is Higher Ed. The contradiction between Dean Lounsbery’s kickass vocals and her position as an academic leader is so strong that most collapse into dust upon discovering it, but the few who survive agree that it makes her more relatable.
Brian roared into Hollywood in the early ‘90s with nothing but an air mattress and his drum kit stuffed in the back of his tricked out Bandit Trans-Am. Since then he has provided beats for notable Southern California acts Ritual, The B.O.L.T., The Insecto Circus, and legendary horror punk band Haunted Garage among others. He has also collaborated with singer-songwriters Ian Fleming, Leighanne Zubovic and Mark Keenan. Brian’s childhood drumming influences were on the proggy side … Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins. Being a Gen-Xer, of course he owes the heavier edge of his drumming style to ‘90s icons like Stephen Perkins, Chad Smith, Jimmy Chamberlain, Matt Cameron, Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins. He is super excited to be rockin’ with his new project Higher Ed from Long Beach.
If you were to say that Rob was a psychologist, brain scientist, professor, and guy who appears on a lot of those true crime television shows that you binge watch, you wouldn’t be lying. He spends a lot of time talking to people who do bad things… you know, like killing people and stuff like that. But that’s kind of a downer and probably not the kind of thing you want to read about on a website for a rock band. He also shreds on guitar…
