Exclusive: How 3 of Rubix Kube's members became close friends of AEW's Chris Jericho

On this year's Chris Jericho Rock 'N' Wrestling Rager, the New Jersey-based rock band known as Rubix Kube had everybody talking. Known for putting on its The Eighties Strike Back Show, Rubix Kube not only plays a lot of your favorite pop and rock songs from the 1980s note-perfect and tone-perfect, yet also does so with plenty of costumes, choreography, stage props and humor.

Beyond its top-notch stage show, Rubix Kube's lineup has some very interesting players in it. Guitarist Steve Brown and bassist P.J. Farley both came of age in the hard rock band Trixter, who had MTV hits and toured the world with KISS, Warrant and Dokken; Brown has since played live as a member of Def Leppard, Tokyo Motor Fist and Danger Danger. Drummer Joey Cassata was a member of ZO2, which toured alongside KISS and Alice Cooper, and starred in the IFC comedy series Z Rock.

Fronted by vocalists Cherie Martorana and Scott Lovelady, Rubix Kube was joined onstage during the January 2020 cruise by "Le Champion," Chris Jericho himself. SCU's Frankie Kazarian also got on-stage with Rubix Kube for a song at one point.

In the midst of the cruise, I had the pleasure of interviewing Martorana, Lovelady, Brown and Farley in-person before their second gig about how Rubix Kube first got onto Jericho's radar, future band plans and more. Audio of the full chat is below -- as heard on the all-Jericho-Cruise edition of the Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz podcast -- while part of the conversation has been transcribed below exclusively for Sportskeeda.

Tour dates and more about Rubix Kube can be found online at www.rubixkube.com.

On how Rubix Kube wound up on Chris Jericho's cruise:

Steve Brown: Chris is a huge Trixter fan from back in the day, one of our biggest supporters. A huge fan of our second record, which is kind of a cult classic now, a lot of people never heard it because it came out in the fall of 1992. Grunge had taken over and had wiped out the 80s rock scene.

P.J. Farley: Ironically the name of the record is Hear!

Steve Brown: No one "hear"-ed it. (laughs) Fast forward to 2008, when we put Trixter back together, Eddie Trunk -- who's a great friend of ours, our Jersey brother -- he was doing something with Chris and we met Chris at NAMM a couple of times but never spent any time [together]. Chris was doing Eddie's show and was like, "Hey man, I wanna hang out with the Trixter guys." We wound up going to the TGI Friday's in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. We had some drinks and it was the beginning of the lovefest that we have for each other.

10 years later we have this group chat with Eric Martin from Mr. Big, who's a huge part of it. The huge part of it is that we talk to each other more through that group text than we talk to our best friends in the world, our wives, our friends. (laughs) It's sad but it's so much fun.

Cherie Martorana: How Joey met him was over 10 years ago, when Joey and our bass player David Z -- in rock and roll heaven, no longer with us -- and Paulie Z had their show Z Rock on the IFC Channel. Chris Jericho was a guest star on that show and they became fast friends and that was over 10 years and how those guys became buddies... Six degrees of separation, it was inevitable.

P.J. Farley: We were meant to text each other constantly. (laughs)