Stonefox shows are dramatic, booze-drenched affairs with lots of head-banging, blues-riff shredding, and ambient guitar noise that end with tiny frontman/guitarist Jordan Cruz flying headlong into the drum kit or some other mass of instruments. The energy builds until the crowd and the band are reeling out of control, but what's most remarkable about Stonefox is the synchronicity among its three members.
Ian Witlen
Get down and dirty with Stonefox this Saturday.
Details
Stonefox, with the Freakin Hott and Zombies! Organize!! 8 p.m. Saturday, May 29, at Propaganda, 6 S. J St., Lake Worth. Tickets cost $5. 561-547-7273;
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Even when not driven by the mad energy of a live show, the trio of 23-year-olds that comprises Stonefox appears as one unit with three heads as they look up, calm and expectant, from the tiny booth in the corner of the Duck, a brick-walled juke joint in their hometown of Boca Raton. Guitarist David Barnard looks squished between drummer Jeff Rose and Cruz, but despite the fact that the band called it quits just five months ago, they don't seem to need too much personal space from each other now.
On May 1, Stonefox played one unofficial, but still well-attended, reunion show at the Poor House in Fort Lauderdale under the name Falco, and the band will play an official reunion show Saturday night at Propaganda with the Freakin' Hott and Zombies! Organize!!.
Before its farewell show last January, Stonefox had released two 12-song albums — the second, Back on the Wire, just a few months before the breakup — and undertaken six tours, two of which were ambitious journeys that led them to the Northeast and as far as Cleveland and Chicago in less than two years. Through incessant local performances, they'd developed a good deal of buzz and a sizable following. Just when whispers of A&R attention began after the Miami Music Festival last December, Stonefox imploded.
After a well-attended farewell show at Fort Lauderdale's 1921 venue in January, the local scene was suddenly left without its youngest promising new band. What we didn't know at the time was that Cruz had issued an ultimatum that didn't sit well with his band: New York, or else. "I was born and raised in Boca Raton," Rose says, "and I never had a problem with living here. I think that was one of the things that led to the breakup."
Reflecting, Cruz says of the ultimatum, "I guess that's not the best way to present it to someone if you want them to come with you." Just a couple of days after the show, Cruz set off for Brooklyn, where he started putting together a new band called the Electric Heels. The experience, Cruz says, made him long for what he'd left behind: "It was like when you have an ex and then when the next person comes along you think, 'The old person did this.' I was thinking when I was playing with people in New York that I wished it was Stonefox."
Distance had the same effect on Barnard. "It took the misplacement of the band to make us realize what we had." He reflects on the band's origins: "When we first made 'Neckface' [a song off of the band's first album, Dead in the Sun], we worked on it all night almost and then we put it on in the car and we were like, 'What the fuck did we just do? It's not out there, and we love it.' And we forgot about that."
All three members of the band agree that the strain of having a fourth member, bassist Ross Fuentes, threw off the easy chemistry of the jamming that fueled their prolific songwriting (Stonefox has more than an album's worth of unreleased material) and limited their live show.
"We've all known each other for a long time and gone through growth spurts together. We're as close as actual siblings," Cruz says. "When we brought someone else into our mix, it kind of fucked everything up. Yeah, it expanded our sound, but when he joined, it was like someone playing catch-up."
When it comes to playing and jamming, Barnard says, "We don't have to talk about it. What we did was just teaching."
Rose adds, "We tried to write new songs, but it just didn't gel."
Jordan summarizes, "It became too political in the band because it stopped making progress after a while, and we were spinning our wheels."
Fuentes, whom New Times reached by phone, acknowledges that the band did "have an extensive back catalog that I didn't know and that they'd been playing together as Legère [a band all three members were in before Stonefox]. But," he says, "the thing that made that difficult was the personal beef and grudges that had been held for a long time. People would get frustrated, and I wouldn't understand personal things."
Fuentes, who met Stonefox when they toured through Atlanta and started traveling with them soon after, says he moved from Atlanta to Florida last October to play with Stonefox when it became apparent to him that the band was not, as had been discussed, going to relocate to Atlanta. When he got to Florida, he found that the vibe had changed: "The three of them were not getting along that well. There were a lot of personal problems with the members, and it was not the way I expected it to be. We weren't having practice that often. I wanted to play all of the time, and everyone else had something going on."
