Rock ‘n’ Roll Never Forgets
Joe Rudd and the guitar go back 52 years.
“My grandparents gave me a guitar for Christmas when I was 7,” he says. “I hated playing it. Then they arranged for lessons with a nice instructor, so I had to keep going – if I quit, he would have felt bad.”
He kept on going, and going, and going. After 40 years in the music business, Joe – the guiding force of the Front Fenders – has probably performed for more people in the region than any other Fargo-Moorhead musician. He and his band rank as area royalty when it comes to celebrating the music they – and their parents — grew up with.
The Front Fenders bring their tuneful good times to audi-ences of every age and in every kind of venue: from college bars and lakeside concerts to weddings, school events and beachside parties at the lakes.
They rock the classics from days gone by … mostly long gone by. “We started out with the hits from the ‘50s and ‘60s – lots of Elvis,” Joe says. “As time has gone along, the oldies have, too. By now we’ve worked our way up to the ‘70s and ‘80s. You can only do Elvis so long.”
Today, the Fenders are still do-ing 100 dates a year, about the same as in their formative days 30 years ago. But the music scene has changed. Six-day bookings in cocktail bars have gone by the way, due to changes in a business that now leans toward singles and duos playing a night or two a week. Instead of crank-ing it up until midnight, they welcome earlier hours that audiences find more appealing. 4 to 8. 5 to 9. “We’re usually done by 10 these days,” he re-ports. “Those late, late jobs just kill us.”
And something new is mak-ing a difference, too. Now Joe’s younger daughter Ella, born back in Fargo while the band was returning from a date in Boca Raton, is the Front Fend-ers’ featured vocalist. The 16-year-old singer-songwriter is making a name for herself, her energy electric and her spir-its high, while the rest of the band plays on.
Joe has been on stage since 1984, when he graduated from Shanley High School. He and his high school buddy, drummer Roger Nichols, landed their first gig with the country group Sweetwater … for awhile. “They fired us af-ter a year and a half. That was fair,” Joe admits. “There’s no other way to say it – we were terrible country musicians.
“I’ve always been a rock ‘n’ roll kid.”
He has been faithful to the music he grew up with ever since. Rounding up several other classmates, he and Roger formed the Runaways, playing in local and lakes country venues for the next 10 years. Then they broke up. “I wanted change things up, and sometimes people don’t like it,” he concedes now. “Some of the guys didn’t think it was the greatest idea.” He notes, however, that within a few years, they found themselves together again.
That was 1996. The Front Fenders stepped on the gas, cooking up music from days before some of them (includ-ing Joe) were even born, and bringing fun to audiences who remembered, and loved, the oldies.
The band took off fast. But why name your hot new group after auto body parts?
“The ‘Front Fenders’ thing was Jake’s idea,” Joe remem-bers, citing Shanley principal Doug Jacobson, who was one of the original members. “He pictured a bunch of ‘50s guys out on the corner under the street lights, leaning again a hot rod and singing doo-wop. I wanted to change the name a couple of years in, when we were moving more into the ‘70s and ‘80s, but we never got around to it.”
The Fenders have always been the opposite of super-serious musical purists. “People want to have fun,” their leader suggests. “They want to see us having fun, too.” For years, Jake and Siver (Dan Siverson), and later Paul Bougie, tickled audi-ences with their repartee, good humor and skits – the Blues Brothers, Ricky Martin, and oodles of Elvis. “You have to keep changing it all the time,” Joe points out. “You can only do so much Elvis.”
As the Fenders’ membership has changed over three decades in the spot-light, their performances have evolved from that kind of showmanship into close collaboration with their audiences. “What do you want to hear?” the musicians ask. The crowd responds with whatever strikes their fancy. “Going by a playlist, like we used to do, gets boring after awhile,” Joe notes. “After all these years, we do know an awful lot of songs. If one of us knows a few of the words, we’ll give it a try. Sometimes it’s a train wreck. Other times it goes so good that you surprise yourself.”
Over 30 years, the band roster has changed and changed again. “If you put all of us together, we could make at least three Front Fenders groups,” Joe says. Counting on his fingers, he comes up with four lead guitarists, at least four bass players, at least three drummers and five female vocalists … “and all but one of them are still speaking to me,” he laughs. Drummer Mike Samek is the only original member who still plays regularly, though others fill in when extra hands are needed.
With about 100 bookings every year, those occasions do come up. Ella joined them three years ago when a vocalist had other duties. She has been at the mic ever since. She balances school with rock ‘n’ roll through the Fargo school district’s Virtual Academy. While Ella is considering a future in the music business, her older sister Abbey, who has also sung with the Fenders on occasion, is a history major at Concordia.
When Joe was his daughters’ age, he says, he had no idea what the future would bring. He graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead with a de-gree in mass communications, but then managed Rent to Own Furniture in Moorhead by day while making a name on the guitar by night. Like the rest of his band, he maintains a daytime “real” job as a tech-nician with Cansun, a seed company breeding sunflow-ers suited to the Canadian climate.
While the Front Fenders book events year-round, the coming months are their busiest time. This summer’s schedule takes them from Linton to Alexandria and Pettibone to Frazee, with plenty of performances (both public and private) in between. Among their most memorable dates, Joe says, are regular jams on the patio at the Hotel Shoreham and Moorhead’s River Arts, where they traditionally headline the last fest of the season.
The Fargo favorites have opened for a long list of national big names, including Three Dog Night, Blue Oyster Cult, Tra-cy Lawrence, the Gin Blossoms, Chubby Checker and Roy Clark. “And once when we played at a bat mitzvah in Minot, we met Bob Dylan’s mother,” he adds with a smile. “She looked just like him.”
After 40 years of music, Joe says he sometimes thinks he may be on bor-rowed time: “Rock ‘n’ roll is a young man’s thing. It takes all your energy. Your voice changes. You don’t have the same energy you did when you were 20, or 30, or 40.
“I always said I’d do this until I was 60,” he goes on, half joking but half serious. “Well, I turned 59 in April, so I guess I have some thinking to do. Male singers can only hang on so long.”
But he’s quick to acknowledge the near future looks good. They’re in demand across the region, and their audiences love them. And while Joe says he never dreamed of being a flat-out star himself, he wants to make sure that daughter Ella gets a head start if she chooses to stay with this career.
As for the Front Fenders, “We’re not exactly the crazy band we used to be, but look at it this way: Most bands that get started last about three months. A lot of them don’t even see their first paying job. Even the ones who hold together don’t usually last more than a few years.
“The hard part is staying with it this long. We’ve made it close to 30 years. And we’re still having fun.”