The Stone Coyotes: Press

“The Stone Coyotes are a rare wild beast in a domesticated music industry.”

“The Stone Coyotes’ hefty sound melds AC/DC’s charging power chords with a country troubadour’s literate observations.”

“The Stone Coyotes crank out unpretentious rock that has grime on its fingers and transcendence in its heart.”

“Poised to be the coolest husband-wife-and-son rock and roll trio ever…Those wary of a hype short on substance should rest assured – this family has the chops to back it up.”

“Powerful and gritty, with just a hint of sweetness and sorrow.”

“Likely one of the festival’s best discoveries… The Stone Coyotes rocked and shocked the Horseshoe audience Saturday night with their AC/DC meets Patsy Cline sound.”

[Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazettete on Friday, Dec. 15, 2006]
It's a chilly night at the end of September in downtown Northampton. The sky is clear, a handful of stars barely visible beyond the glare of street lights. Outside the Iron Horse a line is forming, men and women running the gamut from college students comparing student ID pictures to a pair of older couples discussing the joy of travel after the kids have grown up. A dog barks on the other side of the nearby courthouse and someone says, "It's them."
"Them" is the Stone Coyotes, a Greenfield-based family rock trio. And indeed, a white Ford Windstar LX pulls up to the sidewalk, literally at the front door, and Barbara Keith and Doug Tibbles, two-thirds of the band, get out. Their appearance quiets the crowd, exactly the way a rock'n'roll star's might. But there is no sense of awe. Many of the fans know these two by name. One even makes an impromptu song request -- "Plain American Girl." Keith is gracious, making note of the request, even though her mind is on the tasks at hand. There's equipment to schlep inside, a sound check to run through.
A few moments after Keith and Tibbles show up, the third band member arrives. It's their son, bass and sometimes guitar player John Tibbles, who ends up lugging the group's heaviest equipment into the club. Keith, wearing a white leather jacket, supervises.
The Stone Coyotes, mainstays in the Valley since the mid-1990s, remain fiercely dedicated to the local music scene while enjoying a national reputation. They routinely frequent area clubs -- the Iron Horse, the Brass Cat in Easthampton, the Route 63 Roadhouse in Millers Falls -- but they also rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in the entertainment business.
Consider: Keith's songs have been covered by the likes of Barbra Streisand, Tanya Tucker and Hank Snow. Her ballad "The Bramble and the Rose" is a folk staple featured in Sing Out!'s renowned "Rise Up Singing" songbook, which has over 1 million copies in print.
Best-selling crime novelist Elmore Leonard discovered the Stone Coyotes at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and modeled the band Odessa after them in his novel "Be Cool," even using Keith's lyrics in the book. He joined the band for a words and music tour that included shows in L.A. and Boston.
The band's CD "Dreams of Glory," released earlier this fall, was in the top 10 on XM Satellite Radio's Xcountry channel. "Fire It Up," their 2005 CD release, was 19th on XM's top 50 albums that year.
Yet the Stone Coyotes remain a bar band that has embraced a do-it-yourself mentality. They record their CDs in their studio in Greenfield. Doug Tibbles does the cover artwork. They don't have roadies or publicists or hair stylists. Every week they single-handedly mail orders for their seven CDs to fans across the country.
At the Iron Horse on this night the Stone Coyotes will shine the way they always do. They've got enviable musical chops and eminently danceable rock songs. They've got poetry and pump-your-fist-in-the-air anthems. They love their fans (Keith won't forget to play "Plain American Girl" tonight) and the sentiment is clearly mutual.
They open the show with "Dreams of Glory" off the newest CD. It's a hard-rocking tune that draws several dancers to the floor. When the last chord is echoing in everyone's ears -- and the dancers are waiting impatiently for the next song -- Keith gives a small bow and an elegant wave. "It's so nice to do our CD release here," she says. "We go way back with the Iron Horse and the Pioneer Valley."
Then, with a quick glance at husband Doug, Keith leads the band into "All Dressed Up." By the time she starts singing the first verse, the dance floor has filled by a factor of 10. The Stone Coyotes are at the top of their game tonight, and the energy is electric.

THE STONE COYOTES is a family band, though its image is probably not what the conservative promoters of "family values" have in mind.
Mother, father and son tend to wear mostly black, with signature dark sunglasses. They often look like they've just stumbled out of -- or are about to amble into -- a biker bar in the middle of nowhere.
A reviewer writing in Toronto Now called their sound AC/DC meets Patsy Cline. It's a good start to understanding what makes this band tick, but like many other efforts to pigeonhole them, it falls a tad short.
It's true, for example, that Keith's guitar playing owes a lot to brothers Angus and Malcolm Young of AC/DC -- bar chords and straight-on rhythms rooted in the blues. It's also true that Keith's voice has a twang reminiscent of the rich country timbre of old country singers like Cline. But where AC/DC never strays from hard-rock anthems, the Stone Coyotes can run the gamut from a fuzz-drenched cover of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" to acoustic ballads without breaking a sweat. And Cline's polish doesn't match up with the edginess of Keith's voice.
That blend of raw country and punk-tinged rock is front and center in the band's cover of Dolly Parton's about-to-be-spurned-lover classic "Jolene." Parton pleaded with the lovelier Jolene not to take her man, making the song a haunting if melodic supplication. You knew she'd survive being jilted, but there was still something a little too passive about it.
The Stone Coyotes start "Jolene" with Keith strumming an acoustic guitar while crooning the opening chorus. But then the group segues without warning into distorted power chords and a scorching solo courtesy of John Tibbles. Keith's voice is almost taunting. In her hands the song becomes a challenge -- not please don't take him, but I dare you to take him.
The Stone Coyotes aren't given to histrionics. Barbara Keith's right hand is often a blur as she strums her guitar, and she might sway a bit when playing solos, but mostly she stands stock still to the left and a step up from Doug Tibbles' drum kit. To her right, John Tibbles straddles the stage, sometimes lifting his guitar high overhead. It's the sole gesture that's remotely rock-like, although given the weight of his dual bass/six-string, he might also be giving his back muscles a break.
Between songs, Barbara and John will often meet in the middle of the stage, John ducking his head so his mother can talk to him. These little asides always end in grins, as if Barbara is reminding her son to do his homework. Behind them, Doug looks like a raptor in black shades, tense with energy that can only be released by pounding a drum. At 66, he's the senior Stone Coyote, though the obvious relish he brings to playing music belies his age. Not halfway through the Iron Horse show, he plays so hard he actually breaks his snare.
"It's OK," Barbara tells the audience. "That was our sacrificial snare. There's more where that came from."
While Doug fetches a backup from the Windstar, Barbara and John do a percussionless version of "Plain American Girl," off the band's 2002 release "Ride Away From the World."

BARBARA KEITH'S VOICE AND GUITAR-playing take up a lot of space, but she's a slight woman with a polite but intense stare that sometimes feels like she's boring holes in your skull. Over a lunch interview at the China Gourmet in Greenfield a few days before the Iron Horse show, Doug Tibbles has to remind her several times to eat.
"I try to get myself out of the way," she says when asked how much of her personal life has worked its way into her writing. "To me, the best songs are timeless, like 'Red River Valley.' It doesn't sound like anyone wrote them."
Keith eschews a confessional approach to writing -- song as therapy -- in favor of a more novelistic approach -- song as story. While the band's roots are pure rock'n'roll -- AC/DC and the Ramones, say -- lyrically, they're anchored in the same folk tradition that spawned Bob Dylan. Ghosts wander empty streets, musing on old crimes or recalling fatal shipwrecks. Motorcycle rides turn into sojourns through history. Coal miners forge fraternal bonds while awaiting rescue in shattered mines. Civil War soldiers grieve their war-torn families.
"What I hope is that the songs are universal, that the feeling is in you," says Keith, leaning over her still untouched wonton soup. "I want the song to be totally real without making it about some exact person ... it's really about the feeling underneath," she says.
But listening to the song "The First Lady of Rock," it's hard to shake the feeling that Keith isn't being at least a little autobiographical. Doug Tibbles came up with the title -- "I do the jokes, she does the poetry," he quips -- but Keith wrote the lyrics.
She said, "I tried to be quiet, I really did.
I studied hard - I was a good kid
But there's something in my bones, something in my soul
that makes me crank the distortion just as loud as it will go."
She said, "I'm not after glory, I'm not after fame
You might not even know my name
I'm no rock giant, if you know what I mean
I'm 5'6," I weigh 114."
Keith grew up in Deerfield. Her father played piano and owned an enormous record collection that included everything from folk to big band. When Keith was in fourth grade at Deerfield Elementary School, her classroom teacher, Barbara Broadhurst, brought a Telecaster with her name on it in mother of pearl to class. She was Keith's first guitar teacher.
"I learned everything I could put my hands on," says Keith, ticking off traditional ballads, early 1960s' folk classics, Buddy Holly, Hank Williams. "My guitar became my best friend. It went everywhere with me."
In the mid-'60s, Keith took her guitar to Vassar College, and then to New York City. She played at the infamous Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village and at the Fillmore East. She then headed to Los Angeles to shop her songs to major labels, finding a welcoming market. Her professional songwriting credits include songs covered by Olivia Newton-John and Barbra Streisand. In 1972, she recorded a solo album, "Barbara Keith," alongside notable studio musicians like Jim Gordon and Lowell George.
It should have been an auspicious start to a long career as a singer/songwriter. And it might have been if it hadn't been for two things: Keith's sneaking suspicion that she still hadn't found her own sound, and her partner Doug Tibbles' decision to sit down behind a drum kit on a lark. Tibbles was an L.A. native and television writer whose credits included "The Munsters," "Bewitched" and "Andy Griffith."
If Keith was in search of a certain sound, Tibbles was in search of a way to be creative without TVs' corporate pressure. The two were moving in the same entertainment business circles and gravitated toward each other like lone wolves in search of a pack. They co-wrote "A Stone's Throw Away," the closing tune on Keith's album.
Tibbles was 37 when he started playing the drums. "All I had was a sense of time -- that was it. I hit the drum and Barbara started jumping up and down and I thought, oh no, I have to start playing the drums."
"I heard the backbeat -- the real strong snare," says Keith. "I'd been waiting for it forever. It struck a chord and it reverberated immediately."
That drum beat is the centerpiece of this oft-repeated story of how the Stone Coyotes got their start. It's a quasi-magical moment. Efforts to pry beyond it -- Tibbles had really never touched a drum before? -- are in vain. This is a band that likes to keep itself shrouded in a bit of mystery. Tibbles hit the snare. The rest is history.
Keith returned her advance to the record company, Reprise shelved the album and Tibbles quit writing for television. The two headed back to their Los Angeles apartment to start over.
"We lived a clearly renegade life," says Keith. She and Tibbles "woodshedded" -- an intense focus on practice. They didn't play out, they didn't produce CDs. They just concentrated on honing the stripped-down sound they wanted.
Sometimes, recalls John -- who started playing bass at 11 and has never played with any other band -- his parents would load the drum set and guitar into a beat-up van and drive to a beachside parking lot in Santa Monica. They'd practice in the open air for hours.
It was, he says, one of the few times he was embarrassed by them. "One time, one of my friends said, You know, I think I saw your parents playing in an old van the other day.' I said, No, I don't think that was them."
"Now the truth can come out," Doug says. "He hates us."
As the laughter fades, Barbara shakes her head. "But those old days ... it really paid off. Playing in a parking lot -- it does get your groove down."
"That was it - we took a chance," says Doug in a tone that for a guy who spends part of lunch inventing palindromes -- Wonton? Not now -- is nearly reverential.
"We've done nothing but take chances," says Barbara, to which John adds, "no plan, no safety net -- nothing."
And for a moment, the three are silent.

BUT THE SILENCE -- like the woodshedding -- ends. The band was always set on sharing the music. They just weren't going to rush into it.
By the mid-1980s, Barbara had brought the family back to her native western Massachusetts. Their intense practice was yielding results. It wasn't perfect, but they liked what they were hearing.
First as the Barbara Keith Band, then as the Coyotes, and finally as the Stone Coyotes, they began to play the occasional bar gig. They recorded some songs. In 1998, they released "Church of the Falling Rain," on their own Red Cat label. College and indie radio stations picked them up. Elmore Leonard heard them play during a trip back to L.A. Lots of people were hearing them.
More CDs followed on Red Cat along with a steady schedule of live shows. The Stone Coyotes have ridden a slow-cresting wave of indie air play, exposure on the Internet and old-fashioned word of mouth.
Now every year the Stone Coyotes travel up and down the East Coast, playing live in the major cities between Boston and Philadelphia. They head back to L.A. and play shows there. They do the rock festival circuit in Texas -- flying South each fall for gigs at the Cajun Catfish Festival and other shows.
They have homes in Greenfield -- Doug and Barbara in one, John in a place he just bought -- as well as in Texas. They maintain a steady diet of Valley shows -- their next gig is New Year's Eve at Pearl Street in Northampton -- keeping their live chops sharp and trying out new songs. They write new tunes, answer emails, update their Web site, fill orders for T-shirts and hats and CDs.
"Sometimes you think: Maybe [we want] just a calm normal life where everything is predictable," says Keith. "But then there's something that keeps you on this path that's a reward in itself. You can't stop. You see glimmers of that resounding in the people who discover us that we were right to go on."
"We're kind of plain folk," agrees Doug. "We're not highfalutin' -- we just want enough money to keep doing what we're doing. If the songs didn't excite us or didn't excite the audience -- we would quit. You can't kid yourselves."

BACK AT THE IRON HORSE show, the Stone Coyotes power through a greatest-hits-and-some-that-will-be song list. They do "Odessa" -- a languid country rocker Keith wrote for Leonard's "Be Cool." They do "Party Down the Hall," another tune off their latest CD, which features a cast of characters that might have stumbled out of a Bob Dylan number circa "Highway 61 Revisited."
A girl walked by dressed as a ghost
I guess it's a costume ball
A man came as a pirate
It might not be a costume at all
Keith plays her Gibson SG -- Angus Young's guitar of choice -- which is a break from her usual diet of B.C. Rich six-strings. The B.C. Rich guitars, she says, "are perfect when I want to heavy metal out." As the clock closes in on midnight, the band can't contain its obvious pleasure. Doug Tibbles throws an extra roll in at the song's end. Keith takes a longer solo. They smile at one another, as if to say, Isn't this a blast?
For a couple who turned their backs 30-some years ago on what most people would have considered pinnacles of success, this has to feel good.
The Iron Horse show ends on a familiar note -- "Rock Harder Than You" off 2003's "Rise From the Ashes" CD. It's Keith at her angriest and the band at its tightest. Keith tosses off solos, her fingers dancing high up on the fretboard. John lays out complicated bass rhythms that mesh neatly with his father's spare, in-the-pocket drumming. The audience -- most of them looking more tired than the band -- feed on the band's energy, and the band feeds on theirs.
During lunch at China Gourmet, Keith had said that playing rock'n'roll was a dream come true -- for her and her husband and son. Their recipe for success, she added, was simple. "The one thing you can't do is take yourself too seriously. You can take your art seriously and your music seriously but you should have a light heart."
It's an interesting counterpoint to Keith at the Iron Horse, half-shouting, half-snarling the chorus to "Rock Harder Than You:"
No matter where you go
No matter what you do
I'll make it a point
To rock harder than you
It's a battle cry, both promise and challenge. Keith and the Stone Coyotes are still following the reverberations of Tibbles' tap on that snare so many years ago. Tonight, at the Iron Horse, the band members remind themselves -- and their fans -- just how seriously they take these songs.
But when the song ends, Keith is once again courteous and kind, the hippest mom you know. Doug is getting "Dreams of Glory" CDs out for fans already lining up with money in hand. Someone has pulled John off the stage for a hug.
"Thank you," says Keith, waving a last time to the shell-shocked but gratified audience. "It was so nice to be here tonight."