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Though the Raving Knaves have been playing together for over two years, their story really goes back much further than that, to the roots of punk in the late 1970s and the college/underground music scene of the 1980s and early ‘90s. Dave McLean, Adrian Foltz and Daniel Bayer each bring with them a musical past that, when joined with those of the other two, forms the backbone of the Knaves’ observational songwriting, punchy melodic sound and powerful live performances.

Dave McLean was a college student in Athens, Ohio, in 1979 when he organized Rick Ronco & The K-Tels, one of the first punk bands to appear on a scene dominated by more rural and hippie styles. McLean settled in Akron and played bass in the hardcore band, Urban Mutants and then organized the post-punk trio, Bongo’s Jungle Party. In the early 90s, he moved to Greensboro and formed The Calamities, playing edgy power-pop including McLean’s theme song “Big Empty Detroit.” McLean joined the rock ensemble Sin Tax, in 2003, as a guitarist, vocalist and writer. His guitar style is a mash up of Townsend, Ariel Bender and Keith Richards by way of Duane Eddy.

Adrian Foltz left his hometown of Greensboro in 1979, heading to Los Angeles with his band, the Loners. While in LA he supported himself as an Afro-Sheen salesman, an anecdote immortalized in the Knaves’s song “5000 Volts.” He played drums with seminal LA punk act, the Droogs, as well as singing with the Return in the late 1980s. He cut a CD with Sugar Spun in 1999 before returning to Greensboro and joining Eight Eyes, a power pop group fronted by legendary N.C. singer/songwriter Brad Newell.

While McLean and Foltz pursued their musical interests in the Midwest and on the West Coast respectively, army brat Bayer was forming his first band in his adopted hometown of Sanford, N.C. Slow Funeral, as they were called, consisted of Bayer, his brother Will and high school friend John Harrington. Cutting their teeth on a mix of originals and punk covers, the band went through a number of name and lineup changes as Bayer moved first to Chapel Hill and then Raleigh before eventually ending up in Greensboro. In 1995 he formed Sugarcoma, who performed several songs that later found their way into the Knaves’ songlist. Following the demise of that project, Bayer played with several blues, rock and R&B cover bands before joining the thrash/folk agit-prop band Boxcar Bertha, who played at rallies and progressive benefits during the height of the early-2000s’ antiwar movement before going on indefinite hiatus in the summer of 2007.

The Knaves came together in the fall of 2007, when guitarist Chris Micca, later bassist with the Malamondos, suggested to McLean and Bayer that they form a band to play songs by Dr. Feelgood and other British “pub rockers” of the mid-Seventies. Recruiting drummer Andy Foster, who had played in the Calamities with McLean, the band began working up a set of covers by the Small Faces, Animals and Manfred Mann, as well as originals both new and from members’ previous projects. After playing a handful of shows at the Green Bean, as well as a dotmatrix project performance in August 2008, Micca and Foster left the band. Deciding that one guitar player was enough, Bayer and McLean contacted Foltz through a mutual friend and reformed the Knaves as a trio. Since then they’ve played the Flatiron, Westerwood Tavern, Solaris, Blind Tiger and Somewhere Else Tavern, sharing the stage with the Leeves, Other Mothers, Rough Hands, Switchblade 85, Silver Bullet and the Tony Low Group, among others.

Songs like “Powerlines to Cleveland,” “Pho Hein Voung,” “Snapshots of Suburbia” and “Big Empty Detroit” transplant the “Little England”-isms of Ray Davies and Paul Weller to a uniquely American idiom, while “Mannekin Pis,” “Judgements, Fines, Liens or Divorce,” “Pray for the Wildcats” and “Missouri Jane” draw on a rich tapestry of American music for inspiration, from Chuck Berry to Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Ramones.

The Raving Knaves: Big Empty Detroit from Sean Coon on Vimeo.