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Growing up in a musical family in the mid west, it was hard for Catfish Jones to avoid becoming addicted to music. “My dad played in a Thin Lizzy style band in the mid to late seventies, and my mother was raised in a church family where everybody sang and played an instrument”. This exposure from across cultures, and consistent interest in the making of music, was like a primer.  It set the stage for a lifetime of musical enjoyment. 

Born Bradley Eugene in Bartlesville, Oklahoma to Martin and Sonya Hoppock, the family moved to Salina, Kansas when he was only 3. It took some years for the primordial influence of music to form this boy into Catfish Jones. “It must have been like 1999 or 2000 when I stopped fighting the nickname, and finally claimed Catfish as my own moniker”. He received a guitar somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. Though he didn’t play it fervently at first, he did learn the G, C and D chords. Those three chords laid the groundwork at such an impressionable age for his musical blossoming. 

In late 1995, he met his musical partner, Nathan Lennox, and began a friendship that would last a lifetime. “Nate and I didn’t hit it off at first. In fact, the night I met him he offered to drive me the 20 minutes back to town. By the time I was able to round all my stuff up, I couldn’t find him, he was gone”. Undeterred, the two forged a friendship that was based as much on being kids as it was on writing songs. In those formative years, other friends came and went, but for those two, the bond was solid.

In 1997, still playing under their birth names, Lennox and Hoppock formed an acoustic vocal trio with Brad’s younger brother Matthew.  The group, Row 6, played with emerging conventions of internet marketing and indie distribution. The musical core of the group was based around lush vocal harmonies, and acoustic arrangements of popular “alternative” cover songs. “The covers were a great way to get the audiences to identify with us, but we always wanted to do our own music. Realistically though, at that time, our own music wasn’t quite refined”. All three musicians wrote songs for the group, and as a group they began to refine them and meld them into a sound that was greater than any of the individual parts. 

In 1998, Row 6 released their independent debut “Weather” to several hundred dedicated local followers. Over the next year or so they would increase the five-song catalog from weather into over twenty solid and energetic acoustic rock songs. “By that point I was adding the mandolin in to my repertoire, and even a little bit of piano. Even though I didn’t have any official training in either, I noodled on them and was able to expand the breadth of our sound a little”. Both of these instruments, Brad would play on their 2001 full length “almost release” Safe Place To Hide. 

Unfortunately, before the final touches were put on that record, the band split up and all three musicians went separate directions. “The songs were great, and the sound was full, we were just young. As adults it’s easy to look at it and say ‘yeah, that was the right decision’.  But at the time it was tough. We were all struggling with our individual principals, and the staunch refusal to compromise them”. The recording still sits un-released, likely to never see the light of day. 

After the split, Matthew went on to record solo as Manipulator Alligator before becoming an immigration attorney in the Kansas City Area. Nathan stayed in their small town of Salina to raise his son, but continued to play guitar and write songs for himself. Searching for his identity, Brad packed up his car and moved to the musical mecca of New Orleans, Louisiana. Though he was there for barely six months, the experiences garnered there would help him discover who Catfish Jones really was.  “I remember I would go down to the quarter with my axe, I played an oddly shaped Giannini guitar, and sitting down with all the bums and buskers in Jackson square was scary. But after a while it became the place that I wanted to be.”

That trip was relatively short lived. Loneliness in a big city, and the burning to play with his best friend was overwhelming. “I couldn’t stay there. I was working nights at a hotel, and so was Nate here in Kansas, everyday one or the other of us would get in trouble for racking up 6 hour long-distance calls from one hotel to the other”.  By summertime he had packed his stuff back up and drove 16 hours straight to get back home. Upon return, Catfish (as he now had no problem calling himself) played for Nate everything he had learned and wrote. Nathan (jokingly calling himself Mississippi Fuzz) in turn played everything he had written during that same time period. The great reunion was vastly significant, not just for yielding a few new songs, but for generating the impetus for their next phase in music.

By autumn of 2002, Catfish had left his best friend again, this time to work drywall with his father in Lincoln Nebraska. “Drywall is a little funny as a family business, but my grandfather did it, and all his boys did it with him whether they liked it or not”. The second separation of Fish and Fuzz was also short lived. On the outs with his woman, Nathan moved up to Nebraska to lend a hand at drywall, and get the music back on track. There, they built on the foundation of dual acoustic/dual vocal pop songs, often singing while working on the construction sites. 

Playing with the silliness of their respective nicknames, this is when they began to officially play as Fish and Fuzz. “Those old songs were still a little trite, but we were beginning to break conventions we had always held to. We began flirting with the idea of not writing every song about women. We began allowing a little more silliness into our act”. Songs like “First Person Narrative From A Son Of A Bitch” and “Mezz” became staples in the Fish and Fuzz set list. It was also at this time that an edgier sound began to emerge from songs like “Falling Out Of Buildings”. There were some initial recordings of those songs, but they were never polished enough for the duo to deem them releasable. 

By the end of 2003, the pair had decided to concentrate more on music and less on drywall (sorry Martin), and moved back to the birthplace of it all Salina, Kansas. There, along with a group of like-minded individuals, they formed a five-piece bar band dubbed The Normal Reaction.  Taking their hand crafted harmonies, and seven-song catalog; they grew the sound to include 18 original pieces and several covers. Playing mostly in local dives, the band felt like they could experiment with racier themes and rowdier arrangements. “For me, that was a time that I really let myself go into the music. I was playing with a group of my best friends, and living and partying and working. It was a great time, but as I look back at it, not something I would have been able to sustain for any longer than we did”. 

By late 2005, the drive to further The Normal Reaction waned by all members, and eventually the group quietly disbanded before really recording any of the songs. “It’s sad, but that’s how those things go. You know, people move on, and life has a way of being OK with that”. Catfish moved on to the greatest opportunity of his life up to that point. He accepted a position at Acoustic Sounds, an on-line distributor for vinyl records, which was based out of his hometown.  Before the spring of 06, he had gotten Fuzz on as well, and the two were on path to eschew this growing company into a new era. 

During this time, playing music was not at the forefront of either musicians mind. Nathan had recently gotten married, and Catfish was content to play for himself in the living room. He did pair up briefly with a few other people, most notably playing shows with Heather Wessling as a group called Eden Burning. “Heather has an amazing voice. We wrote a few songs together, and played some covers. I think our version of ‘Eli The Barrow Boy’ would have blown The Decemberists minds”.  They recorded a seven-song demo, but before they could push it too hard, Heather moved to Omaha to further her studies in vocal music. 

As that project faded, Fuzz was beginning to get the itch again. An accomplished bass player from his days in Row 6, Nate had an idea to form a power trio with their friend and drummer Jay Quest. Jay had recently started working with the pair at Acoustic Sounds, which allowed the group to practiced twice weekly. Borrowing only one song from previous catalogs (Falling Out Of Buildings), the group began writing in a way they never had before. “These new songs were weird to us. We wrote maybe four or five before we ever wrote any words.  When we did write words, there was an understood emphasis on not writing anything about girls or relationships or that same old stuff”. What they created was an energetic post-disco dance-rock sound. To name this project, they decided to go with something very literal. As they all had one common experience, they decided to call the group Sons Of Truckers. 

Sons of Truckers are still together, playing locally, and preparing to record their first album. In 2009 Catfish helped Jay write some songs to further the formation of his hardcore rock band. Though he had very little experience in heavy music, Catfish leaned on his songwriting roots and his desire to write songs unlike anything he had written previously, to pen eight furious pieces for the project titled King Bruiser. Though he didn’t stay on as a member of that group, he did begin to feel the urge to further his own solo project. “King Bruiser was a learning experience. I took a lot of blues foundation and twisted it to fit the hardcore format. It was a lot of fun, but not really my scene. It did make me want to get out there and make my music, my way. Nothing against the Truckers, but the more people you add to a project, the more one has to compromise their overall vision”.

In 2011, Catfish Jones has released his self-recorded, independent solo debut titled “Etchings”. Featuring 8 songs written from 2004 to 2008. He is working feverishly on an immediate follow-up, which is currently titled “Layers”. “I have so many songs that I just can’t part with. For me the recording process is cathartic. Like when you get something done, even if it’s been around a while, it’s like ‘man it’s good to get that off my chest’. You know, until I record them they just exist on a page in a notebook, or in my own head. This is like a validation. These songs exist”.