MojoBrothers

L-R: Troy Bland, Kevin Saab, Joe Ledbetter, & Bill Ledbetter

MojoBrothers started in the living room of a house I lived in on Birmingham’s Southside in 2005. This group was a product of a weekly acoustic jam I hosted each week called the Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, named after my favorite Charles Mingus tune, and loosely based on an acoustic music gathering I would sometimes attend when I lived in Huntsville called, The Wednesday Night Beer Googlers. On any given Wednesday, anywhere from 2 to 6 or 7 pickers would show up, most of them guitar players. It was always a great time but I soon grew weary of trying to get so many people on the same wavelength and the jams kind of lost their appeal when it got too popular and too dense. I called an official end to the Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting and started focusing on trying to get a smaller, more focused group of musicians together on a regular basis and start putting together enough music to book some gigs.

My next door neighbor, Peter Wilm, had a great voice and did a lot of the singing and played a stripped-down drum set, consisting of a snare, a ride, and a tom. We did a lot of cool stuff like The Doors, Blind Faith, Tom Waits, and Hank Williams covers. Troy Bland brought his incredible delta-blues meets Tom Waits vibe, and my brother Joe was the ever-solid groove on bass. We started getting a real cool eccentric set of music down, including a reggae version of Sweet Home Alabama, and a Jazzy version of Manic Depression, both of which came about through spontaneous improvisational dabbling. Troy wound up getting real sick and was down for about six months and Peter lost interest.

We all breathed a big sigh of relief when Troy gradually started getting well and was able to play again. One day he showed up and was playing with and IV in his arm! Troy’s neighbor invited us to play his Halloween bash that year, which we did as a trio without a drummer. The gig was a huge success and Troy’s cousin, Roy asked us to play a Christmas/Holiday Open House bash at his business, Architectural Heritage at Pepper Place. We decided to find another drummer for this gig and I found coworker, Kevin Saab.

Kevin and I worked at the same company on different floors, and I knew who he was, had heard he played drums, but we’d never met. One day a few weeks before this gig, I walked in his office, shook his hand, and introduced myself. We became instant friends, and an hour or so later, had setup a night for him to jam with us. He was a perfect fit all the way around, and we wound up having a blast at the Pepper Place Open House gig. Until Kevin came along we struggled with a name, sometimes calling ourselves Trout Mask, which was an inside tipping of the hat to Captain Beefheart’s off-the-wall album, Trout Mask Replica. Kevin dubbed us MojoBrothers and it stuck.

A few weeks later we played at Kevin’s house for a huge New Year’s Eve jam/party and made some new fans and friends. We all had a lot going on and never really aspired to play regular gigs, but we managed to get booked for Do Dah Day in May, 2007. Not only was it an honor to play Birmingham’s longest running festival, but a magical day we’ll all remember. I think we had as much fun rehearsing for this gig as we did playing it. We played a few more gigs after that. One really fun gig we played was the Tristates 100 in August, 2008 in Dothan. It was a 100 mile Bike Ride my sister Melinda was participating in to benefit Children’s Hospital and cancer research. We also had a blast playing an acoustic gig at Java & Jams, a cool coffee shop downtown.

As time progressed, we all kind of lost interested in booking gigs and decided we’d rather just get together and have fun playing and focusing on writing and recording original material. We still get together from time-to-time and it’s always a lot of fun.