The Stone Foxes
The history of rock and roll is full of feuding siblings, from Ray and Dave Davies up through Liam and Noel Gallagher. You don’t hear so much about harmonious brothers with over a decade of increasingly successful collaborations under their belt, but that’s the situation that Spence and Shannon Koehler find themselves in with their San Francisco–based blues rock band the Stone Foxes. Their bond has only been strengthened by Shannon’s health problems, which so far have included nearly a dozen heart surgeries. A self-titled debut earned little notice, but a followup in 2010, Bears & Bulls, scored a couple of minor hits with “Mr. Hangman” and “Stomp.”
Most of us got our first earful of the group’s blend of Southern rock and blues when their screeching version of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” was heard in a prolific Jack Daniel’s commercial (the one with a glowing white super-bee zooming into a whiskey bottle). The online chatter really began to build over the year or so it took to release the tracks comprising their fourth album, Twelve Spells. By putting out one free song per month and then compiling them along with concert and bonus material in August 2015, they managed to keep their name in the blogs during the whole two years they spent touring in support of the record.