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SoundCheck: Jalopy rediscovers its groove after years gone by

Jalopy from right to left: John Anderson, Jerry Twyford, Brandon Moore and Kelly Brown
Courtesy of Brandon Moore
Jalopy from right to left: John Anderson, Jerry Twyford, Brandon Moore and Kelly Brown

November’s Studio Live will feature the funky grooves of Jalopy. KSMU's Jess Balisle sat down with guitarist and singer Brandon Moore and drummer John Anderson to find out just how this eclectic foursome came to be.

Jess Balisle: Let’s start at the beginning how this happened. Because Jalopy has been around for a bit, right?

Brandon Moore: Yes.

John Anderson: Um…

Balisle: So how did this organization start?

Moore: Well…The name

Anderson: The name Jalopy had been used before.

Moore: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s put it that way.

Anderson: And Brandon and I were both part of that group. And that was, I don’t know how many years ago that was. How many years?

Moore: Annabelle was a baby, so sixteenish, fourteenish…

Balisle: Oh wow.

Anderson: Fourteenish years ago or something?

Moore: Yeah.

Anderson: And it was just, the original Jalopy was just a thrown together little group that just played in town here. We just mostly played other people’s songs, cover songs. It was more of just a bar band. It wasn’t original music.

Moore: It was fun. It got weird. Definitely got weird.

Anderson: We did weird, obscure songs.

Moore: Theme to Caddy Shack, that kind of stuff.

Balisle: Ok, so now, present day.

Anderson: So, fast forward, present day.

Balisle: Because, wasn’t there kind of a hiatus of Jalopy?

Moore: Yeah, we actually didn’t even plan on this. John came into the studio and helped me knock out a couple tunes on my record and it was just like, “What are we doing? Let’s put a band together.” Like, why wouldn’t we? I felt like Steely Dan in the making of Aja where we just got all these different people in. They played parts. “Yeah, that works great, what about this guy? What about this person?”

Anderson: We thought we had, yeah, we had a connection on just kind of writing some music together. And Brandon and I have worked together in the past, in a group, a local group, that traveled and toured all over the U.S. called Barefoot Revolution. So, when we came back together for this one, it was just kind of a natural progression, really, because we had written music together before in the past. And Brandon had just released his solo album. So, we figured we needed to find some people to put a band together with it. You know, to complete the band, after we recorded that first song and we wanted to do some more recording. And we couldn’t really think of people who would commit to a band at that time. So, we went back into the studio and started recording some more music that we had worked on together. Like he said, it was kind of a Steely Dan vibe. We just started calling people that we really liked the way they played and had a bunch of different people starting to come in a record some stuff. And two of those people were Jerry Twyford, who is now the bassist in Jalopy, and then we had Kelly Brown, who has been involved in the music scene in the Ozarks for a number of years, a little bit longer than I have. And he came in a played keys on a couple of songs and after he got done in the recording session with us, he kind of took me aside and he said, “What are you guys doing with this?” And I said, “Well, we’re just going to try to get the music out there and if we could get a band together, we’d like to start performing live, some of the material.” And he said to me basically, “Well, you got a keyboard player if you need one.” So, we were ecstatic because we never even thought about offering…

Moore: Yeah, I was like, “Whaaat!”

Anderson: …him a spot in the band, so to speak, until he showed interest in it because he is such an in-demand musician around here and stuff and so busy all the time, but we didn’t know if he’d be into it to make a commitment to it. But, he has since and so, the band was completed after through those recording sessions.

Tune into Studio Live on Friday, November 12, 2021 to catch Jalopy on KSMU Radio.