Noise: SFBG Music Blog - The new old-school: Stone Foxes rock the blues

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By Kat Renz

It’s rare to visit a MySpace site or see an opening band and say, “Holy crap, they’re gonna be huge.” Had I been on the scene in the '60s or old enough to drive to Seattle in 1989, the exciting shiver of finding a band in their infancy reeking with inevitable promise would feel perhaps more familiar. Today, not so much.

So I was totally unprepared for the Stone Foxes. Though I know it’s a fatal blunder for music writers to prophesize, I’ll do it anyway: the Stone Foxes are gonna be huge. They’re the least pretentious band I’ve heard in, like, forever, which means everything in a modern music scene tainted by image-obsessed emo-tiveness and outsider status posturing.

First I loved their name and second appreciated their MySpace page’s photographic homage to blues-rock influences of yore (the Who, Sabbath, the Faces, Neil Young, et. al). But such attractive details were immediately trumped by their music: pure rock 'n' roll, so heavily and blatantly rooted in the blues, augmented with a hearty helping of country’s paradoxical blend of naiveté and grit.

The Foxes, all between the ages of 20 and 24, sport a sound startlingly beyond their years, and at times they seem to be channeling the Black Crows (“Black Rolling Thunder”). Other times they could be playing a track you somehow missed off one of the first three White Stripes albums, relying on the same unfettered chords and catchy progressions, but with a snarl and three-man vocals that makes Jack and Meg seem rather ghostly (“Beneath Mt. Sinai”).

There’s the dead-ringer for CCR’s “I Put a Spell on You,” only the Foxes call it “Sweep a Road,” its bated breath of minor arpeggios anticipating the onslaught chorus. These boys aren’t going for pretty Byrds harmonies. Instead they take full advantage of the vocal power of a trio - and sometimes the entire quartet. They ignore the jammy psychedelia infusing the current non-metal rock trip for tight collaborations you can sing along with and stay awake through.

Like the aforementioned Creedence tune, which was originally done by bluesman Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the Foxes cover several blues standards as well as write their own. They get gruff on “Rollin’ and Tumblin,’” a traditional circa 1928 (“If you don’t like my peaches don’t go shakin’ my tree”). Unlike Zeppelin, the Foxes have enough decency to credit Willie Dixon when they use his songs. They join the ranks of Howlin’ Wolf and Cream in covering “Spoonful,” as well as “Little Red Rooster,” a seemingly mandatory right-of-passage for all legendary blues-rock bands to take their shot at, including the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Grateful Dead, the Doors, and Canned Heat.

Though they liberally borrow hand-me-down songs and have a sound that’s undeniably derivative, the blues are nothing if not sustainable and evolve-able, and it seems the Stone Foxes probably will be as well: their significance lies in their ability to put as much importance into the songs as in the sound. Both their take on immigration in the slippery, country-inspired “Mercury” and the anti-war growls of “Under the Gun” remind us nothing sounds better than thoughtfulness and sincerity.

Their self-released, self-titled full-length debuted late August at a show at the Rickshaw Stop. Though the Foxes opened, they had the best draw, hands down. Three of the blues boys hail from Fresno’s foothills, where they’ve developed a substantial fanbase. In the two and a half years they’ve been in the city - adopting bassist, vocalist, sometimes guitarist, and songwriter Avi Vinocur along the way - they’ve moved through the tiers of San Francisco venues, from Brainwash Cafe and Red Victorian open mics to bars like the Rockit Room and Edinburgh Castle to clubs like Fat City and the Red Devil Lounge. And if their upcoming show at Slim’s is any indication, they’re now on the cusp of breaking into bigger venues.

Thanks to a nascent but well-connected management team – including Joe Barham, aka Joe Rock, music director at 107.7 the Bone, and Rob Weldon, a 13-year veteran in marketing and promotions with the likes of Roadrunner Records, IRS, and Warner Bros. – the Foxes are getting played on over a dozen radio stations throughout the West, including full rotation at Merced’s 92.5 KBRE, which equals the same amount of spins as, say, the new Metallica album.

The band wasn’t even going to press the album, initially intending to just burn some copies. After laying it down, though – a three-day process that involved recording together in one room at their collective house, the Fox Den – they realized they’d created a product worth mastering. They gave the task to John Cuniberti, who’s worked with Ringo Starr, Aerosmith, and the Dead.

With all this momentum, will the relatively unknown Stone Foxes catapult out of San Francisco before ever really blowing up here first? Though such a scenario seems more than feasible, the whole crew wants to settle their sound into the city before conquering the rest of the world. Plus, two of the four Foxes are still finishing college, though they did mention, laughing, that if the Black Crows or Wilco needed them to open (hey, it’s happened - look at Port O’Brien), they’d probably consider it.

Stone Foxes
With Bhi Bhiman, the Moondoggies, and Doug Ellington
Sat/18, 8:30 p.m., $13
Slim's
333 11th St., SF
(415) 255-0333