Front Porch Campaign
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| Record Labels: | Quarterstick, Three Little Girls | ||
| Started By: | |||
| Based In: | Louisville | ||
| Largest show: | ? people | ||
| Last show: | ? | ||
| Reunion show: | N/A | ||
| Number of Members: | 6 | ||
CONDUCTING THE CAMPAIGN FROM HOME
A Brief History of Some of Louisville’s Most Musically-Erudite Rockers
By Hank Baker
Front Porch Campaign began in the fall of 1996, about exactly a century after William McKinley coined the term to describe his laid-back method of gaining the presidency. However, whereas Front Porch Campaign’s methods may bear more than a striking resemblance to McKinley sitting on his porch in Ohio and carefully spinning soundbites, their music is anything but laid-back. Raucous, raw, and driving, like sixties garage, at times melodic and homespun like the Byrds, the band speaks – loudly – from experience.
The year of the campaign centennial wasn’t the first time the members had started playing together, nor was it the first appearance of that name. Their history is somewhat storied, even when considering the incestuous nature of most music scenes. It begins somewhere in the mid-nineties, in Louisville, Kentucky, immediately on the heels of an especially fertile and good period of underground rock music, both locally and nationally.
After the demise of their early-nineties all-ages staple bands Lather and Sancred, guitarist/singer Brian Kaelin, bassist/singer Scott Bacon, and drummer Adam Colvin started playing warehouse spaces and parties in Louisville’s thriving-but-clubless underground music scene under the name Locust Grove. Described by one show-goer as “swamp rock,�? the band played a mix of fuzzed-out garage and Jesus Lizard-informed groove rock, covering the Who’s “Boris the Spider.�? The combo unfortunately never recorded formally and met its demise in autumn 1995 when Bacon and Colvin moved to the Florida Keys. In the interim, Kaelin returned to the bass and did a short stint in local character and onetime Palace Brother Chris Layton’s ragtime rock quartet Zig Zag Way.
The following summer saw the return of the rhythm section from the Keys and the release of a rehearsal version of LOCUST GROVE’s “Nitta Yuma�? on the cassette compilation Case of Psionic Awareness. Kaelin, who had been almost continually four-tracking on his own during the nine-month hiatus, released a solo contribution, “Boardwalk Swinger,�? on the same compilation under the name Front Porch Campaign. By autumn, the three had recruited fellow co-conspirator and local badass Chas. Wm. Chip Ludwig Jr. to provide extra Mig-amped power, and began rehearsing in Colvin’s Germantown apartment, cutting a four-track demo and playing around the Louisville area.
The group’s energetic songs took a new take on the post-Yardbirds sound that’s inspired generations of bands, done with enough respect for innovation to mindfully sidestep all the cliches of lame-assed Stones ripoff bands that sound as tired as Jagger’s looked for the past decade. Spurred on by Kaelin’s sometimes-melodic, sometime-tortured vocals, Bacon and Colvin’s well-honed rhythm machine, and smeared over with a shimmering wall of amplified guitar noise, the quartet’s live shows immediately garnered interest. Often the group would close the show with “Bleed Baby Bleed,�? a four-chord blaster Ray Davies wished he could’ve written, and guest cornet player Tony Wollard of the Belgian Waffles would add to the frenzy by bleated away over the ending. Reviews (http://www.tbw.nu/raves/fpc.shtml ) invoked Nuggets, the classic 1968 compilation of the best of the thousands of post-British invasion bands stateside, and not without good reason: the FPC included in their repertoire a version of the Spiders’ 1966 classic “Don’t Blow Your Mind.�? (For the uninformed, the Spiders were an Tucson, Arizona garage band fronted by one Vince Furnier. The band and later the man would later morph into ghoul rockers Alice Cooper.)
By spring 1997, the quartet had recorded material with Paul Oldham (who would go on to become the live and studio engineer of choice for Royal Trux as well for his enigmatic brother Will) and was planning on releasing a split LP with local pals, the Beefheart-Fripp-inspired power trio the Calf-Fiends. However, the demise of the Calf-Fiends made the self-financed project look less realistic, and internal pressure split the band sometime in mid-1997.
Louisville being a small town, and all parties involved being more-or-less dedicated to the pursuit of music, some shuffling was inevitable: Ludwig got behind the kit and got together with Bacon and the Calf-Fiends frontman J. D. “Jack�? Daniels to form Das Kapitan, while Colvin took over the drum throne for James Barber’s ‘77-style Nothing. Eventually Kaelin was recruited for Das Kapitan, and the band of four songwriters underwent a virtual creative orgy in summer 1998, recording again with Paul Oldham at his newly refurbished Shelbyville studio before dissolving in the fall when Ludwig abruptly his return to the Keys.
Co-existing alongside Das Kapitan was Dome Deevz, which was started by guitarist Joe Hennessey after his departure from Louisville’s criminally underrated Swans-Joy Division-inspired Wino. The band began as a home-recording project with Kaelin, but eventually came to include Bacon and Colvin as well, who had played with Hennessey a few years prior in the short-lived noise rock group Droon. With all members rotating instruments and vocal duties, and adopting a more collective songwriting philosophy, the band explored territory beyond the more traditional singer-songwriter ethos of the members’ preceding groups. With the demise of Das Kapitan, Dome Deevz solidified into more of a live band and began playing out more consistently throughout 1998 and 1999, doing local shows and a one-off at Baltimore hipster dive the Ottobar.
In summer of 1999, bad luck hit the band again when Hennessey sustained a severely broken arm in an automobile accident, leaving him unable to play for an undetermined amount of time. The band decided to continue as a trio, reinstated the original Locust Grove-style lineup, took the Front Porch Campaign name back, and began playing out more aggressively. While recovering, Hennessey continued to work with the band, producing some remarkably hi-fi live recordings of the band and booking them with the occasional out-of-town act. (Hennessey currently plays in the Defilers with Bacon.) By the fall, the band recorded another demo on eight tracks with local engineer (and frontman for the Electrolytes) Jesse Simpson. The band, playing more consistently at this point for the first time since its inception, began to garner a small local following, appearing with CHARM CITY SUICIDES, the ORANGES, WHITE STRIPES, and at local scenester Chad Castetter’s now-infamous DIRTY THIRTY, a gala-style thirtieth birthday party. April 2000 saw the group embark on an ambitious digital recording project with Craig McClerkan of Without Further Ado. Due to technical complications, the sessions were never finished, although one track, “Lasso,�? made an appearance on the Better Days Records compilation Cheap Thrills 2 late in 2001.
In spring 2001, feeling a need to write material requiring a second guitarist, the band recruited veteran drummer Brett Holsclaw, who had played with acts as varied as the Glasspack, Zig Zag Way, and Evil Twin Theory, and Bacon moved to guitar. Holsclaw lasted until the fall, but eventually was wooed back by the Glasspack. Longtime co-conspirator and friend of the band Richard Vier, also formerly of WINO, briefly played with the group, performing on as well as engineering several eight-track sessions in the fall of 2001. The band self-released the Vier-recorded sessions as their first full-length in November and Vier departed shortly thereafter. Currently, the group has been able to re-recruit Holsclaw, and plans to play out in promotion of the release.
One remarkable thing about the FPC is the sheer amount of material the band has amassed. Kaelin and Bacon are both prolific songwriters on their own, so the band is never in short supply of new material. In addition, with all the bands that have been variously absorbed into and come out of the core group, the band’s back catalog of Kaelin and Bacon-penned songs is likewise impressive. Between the three founding members, Colvin estimates that they know “at least 40 songs or so.�? In other words, for the one official album they have, there are at least four unreleased ones – and no shortage of new material, for the time being, at least.
Will this campaign take them straight into the White House? Probably not, which isn’t a bad idea considering the company they’d have to keep there, but it should at least good enough for a few shows at the Black Cat down the street. And if nothing else, it should keep with the tradition and keep the throngs coming to pay tribute, 1896-style, to the band.
FRONT PORCH CAMPAIGN DISCOGRAPHY
“Boardwalk Swinger�? on Case of Psionic Awareness, CS, 1996 [out-of-print] “Bleed Baby Bleed�? on Redneck Buddhas 01,CS on Redneck Buddhas, 1998 [out-of-print] “Lasso�? on Cheap Thrills 2, CD on Better Days Records, 2001 Front Porch Campaign CD on Acaciac Records, 2001
Many of the other local bands mentioned in this article also appear on the above compilations, which were released in limited quantities, mainly to document what the compilers felt were rare or unique moments in Louisville’s continually-turbulent scene.
Members:
Earlier:
- Brian Kaelin - guitar, vocals
- Chip Ludwig - guitar, vocals
- Scott Bacon - bass, vocals
- Adam Colvin - drums
Later:
- Brian Kaelin - guitar, vocals
- Scott Bacon - guitar, vocals
- Adam Colvin - bass, vocals
- Brett Holsclaw - drums
- Richard Vier - drums
- Corey Smith - drums
Releases:
- ?
Compilations:
- ?
Shirts/Merch:
- ?