The genesis of The Liquid Gooey came about as a result of many factors. By 2000, Jon Dekel had already sung and
played in a large number of Toronto bands, such as Incarnate,
Focus, Median,
Sensum, and The Great Elsewhere. While Jon
did enjoy playing with these groups, he found that they generally limited his creative input, and thus, a number of great
songs that he had written were going to waste because, in short, nobody wanted to play them. So Jon set about to change
things, and started The Gooey as a side project. He first recorded a number of songs as acoustic demos, but soon realized
that he would need a full band in order to be able to recreate his psychedilic stylings in a live setting. Giving himself the pseudonym Jon Glasswater, and joining forces with
Toronto musicians Jesse Kline (calling himself Mike Anbar), Mike Berengut and Mark Fischer, Jon set about to spread the
word about The Gooey through a series of summer shows over the summer of 2001. This line-up of The Gooey would soon
deteriorate, however, because the other three musicians were, in fact, three-quarters of Focus,
who had been on a break over the summer. Incidentally, Jon had once been the fifth member of Focus,
only to be booted because nobody really liked him. And so, in the autumn of 2001, Jon found himself bandless, with a stack of freshly penned songs.
At this point, Jon decided to call his long-time friend Aaron Murad (Mr. Moo), with whom he had played in
Incarnate, to play bass in the new Gooey line-up. The two of them set about to practice some of the new tunes, and decided
that the best choice for a drummer would be their old friend Aaron Goldstein, who had also played drums in Incarnate,
and in the meantime, had struck out on his own as a guitarist with the blues-rock quartet The Sporadic Grass Movement. The three practiced the new tunes, and debuted the new line-up at a show at the Kathedral on November 11 2001. The show was a relative success, but the band was missing something tonally. Mr. Moo left the band shortly after the show, because he grew tired of the droning basslines. Aaron decided that he would move from drums to lead guitar, because Jon needed some help in that area. With that, The Liquid Gooey Project became a joint effort between Jon and Aaron. A rhythm section was, of course, still needed. The boys quickly commissioned Isaac Klein, who had played in The Sporadic Grass Movement with Aaron, to play drums. After countless auditions, the boys settled on their old friend Adam Melnick to play bass, the current line-up of the Gooey was born.
