Green Eggs & Ham (not the book) 40-Year Anniversary
- Kevin Leonard
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
Two natives of Laurel who play music as Green Eggs & Ham are playing a 40th anniversary show on August 24 at the New Deal Café in Greenbelt. But the duo’s band name isn’t the only unusual thing about them: since birth, they grew up as pals in Laurel and eventually became stepbrothers.
Growing Up in Laurel
The mothers of Jeff Aug and Steve Levine were best friends and pregnant with them at the same time. They even shared diaper changing tables at day care. The boys attended Hebrew school together at Oseh Shalom in Laurel, but lived on opposite sides of town. The Aug family lived in Bond Mill Woods and the Levines lived in Montpelier. In a 2015 profile in the Laurel Leader, Jeff and Steve said they “felt like brothers as kids growing up in Laurel.”
They both took lessons from piano teacher Naomi Madison just off Main Street. At 12 years old, Jeff started to play the guitar and took lessons from Jon Whitney in West Laurel. Shortly thereafter, “I got involved with music through Jeff, who had friends that got together and had a little garage band,” Steve told the Leader. Through Oseh Shalom and Laurel High School, the brothers became friends with Marty Friedman, who went on to worldwide fame as the lead guitarist with the heavy metal band Megadeth.
In a Zoom interview with the brothers, they talked about first starting out and their Laurel High days:
“I don’t know if I would have gotten into the harmonica if I hadn’t gone to Laurel because I started hanging out with Jeff and other musicians. I wanted to learn something. I had to learn guitar. But it was just too complicated. I tried to learn harmonica, and it took. I bought my first harmonica at Rockwood Music in Laurel. Remember that shop?” Steve asked me.
Steve and Jeff’s first public performance was in their sophomore English class at Laurel High School in 1985. In front of their class and English teacher, Mrs. Clay, Steve and Jeff performed “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” by Reverend Gary Davis as a part of a folk poetry lesson. After this performance they took on the name Green Eggs & Ham. They credited a classmate, Heather Werner, with coming up with the name.
As Steve remembered it, “She had a t-shirt that said ‘Green Eggs & Ham’ on it. And we were looking for something cool.”
Their collaboration quickly accelerated. “We had a really cool drama teacher, Mrs. Van, and she used to put on these after-school events. Any kids that had a rock band would be able to play at these events. And that was really the only time most of us got a chance to play until we had graduated from high school—that we actually got to play concerts. She would put on these events and the whole school would show up. It was a lot of fun,” said Jeff.
Stepbrothers
In the Spring of their senior year of high school in 1988, Jeff’s mother, Harriet, died of cancer. That Fall, Steve and Jeff attended the University of Maryland in College Park. They both lived in the same dorm a few rooms apart and played their music together wherever they could, in coffeehouses, open mics, and small clubs. A few years later, Steve’s mother married Jeff’s father and they became stepbrothers.
“Steve and I are soul brothers before we are brothers in the legal meaning of the word,” Jeff told the Leader.
They both graduated with bachelor’s degrees in English from the University of Maryland.
Steve was always more attracted to the blues and became a member of the Baltimore Blues Society, D.C. Blues Society, and a writer for Living Blues Magazine, Music Monthly, and the DC Blues Calendar, as well as performing with Big Daddy Stallings, Blue Smoke, The Delta Project, One Thin Dime, and the acoustic blues trio The Resonators. He played with different bands at DiGennaro’s and Oliver’s Tavern in Laurel. These days, Steve currently performs in the Cadillac Jump Blues Band throughout the DMV.
After college, Jeff started a rock band called Sorry About Your Daughter with friends from school, toured the world, released rock albums, and then started on a solo career. He had a #1-selling album on the U.S. iTunes Acoustic Music Charts, was featured on NPR and the latest Atari Teenage Riot albums, performed as guitarist for British wave icon Anne Clark, and had many tours throughout Europe with artists Allan Holdsworth, moe., Johnny A., Carl Verheyen, Stu Hamm, Soft Machine, and Albert Lee.
Although the brothers have played with numerous bands and artists since their college days, they always look forward to playing together as Green Eggs & Ham. With a band called Blue Wall the brothers played at Delaney’s Irish Pizza Pub. Green Eggs & Ham has played at Laurel’s Main Street Festival and the Montpelier Mansion Festival, as well as venues in College Park and Greenbelt. Steve has traveled to Germany for gigs there, as well.
“Rock and Acoustic Country Blues”
Jeff describes their music this way: “Green Eggs & Ham has always been rock and acoustic country blues. I always tried to pull it into more of a rock and acoustic direction. And Steve was always more of the—what do you call it? Let’s say the purist.”
In addition to his extensive performing as a solo artist since moving to Germany in the late 1990s, he also formed his own booking company, Maximum Booking, which handles booking for over 30 bands and artists worldwide.
A resident of College Park, Steve’s day job is a library researcher, but since Jeff’s move, he has had a steady stream of gigs with different bands and recording dates.
Jeff has a new solo album and last year completed a tour in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Germany. This year’s tour included Italy, Spain, and France.
To celebrate their 40 years of playing together since their English-class song in 1985, Green Eggs & Ham will be performing at the New Deal Café in Greenbelt on Sunday, August 24, 2025, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. The show is free to the public, but reservations are recommended. The show will also feature Jeff’s 15-year-old son, Oskar Tauber, who has been playing shows with Jeff’s acoustic country blues combo in Germany since 2020. The show will feature “the best rockin’ acoustic country blues, including material made popular by the Grateful Dead and Hot Tuna, as well as plenty of originals,” according to Jeff.
In addition to the show in Greenbelt, while he is in town, Jeff is trying to put together a hometown solo concert performance show in Laurel. The last time he did that, in 1992, he played a sold-out concert in the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center.
Kevin Leonard is a founding member of the Laurel History Boys and a two-time winner of the Maryland Delaware District of Columbia Press Association Journalism Award.
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