Pop Band Jump in the Water Prepares to Finally Take the Plunge

These two guitarists from the band Jump in the Water look as relaxed as ever, here in Steve Moos’ Glendale living room. It’s just him and longtime friend and collaborator Kent Forsyth, strumming and picking their acoustic guitars on a couple of soft couches.

They are taking a break from rehearsing for what will be their first concert tour, playing material from their debut album after nearly two decades of flirting with careers in pop music.

“The band has never played live,” Moos says. “It was never a project that was supposed to go this route. This was something we were pretty much doing for ourselves. That it’s gone this way is kind of funny.”

It’s not that Moos and Forsyth hadn’t tried before to win a recording contract and recognition for the music they had been making since meeting as teen-agers, when they had agreed at once on the cosmic importance of the Rolling Stones. But nothing concrete had ever materialized for them.

This new wave of interest in the band, which also includes Louisiana-based bassist-keyboardist David Starns, had actually begun with Forsyth’s barber. She had been given a Jump in the Water demo tape and later passed it on to another friend, who happened to be a record company executive. After that, other executives at other labels heard it, and suddenly there was interest in these guys, finally leading to Jump in the Water’s signing to MCA Records in nearby Universal City.

That was two years ago. By then, of course, Forsyth and Moos had been playing for a long time, including a few years during the late 1970s as a punk act called the Jungle Band. So “we were past the frustration part,” says Moos, who also works as a high school music teacher.

“Right,” agrees Forsyth, a real estate agent. “We were just playing to play.”

And what they are doing today, aside from an interview, is more of the same: relearning the material recorded last year for the just-released “Jump in the Water” album. The 11 songs offer a smooth roots-flavored rock sound, played on a variety of string instruments and heavy with the sort of pop hooks that had inspired a younger Moos as he listened to the now-defunct KPPC-FM and its play list of Ellington and Sinatra and Beethoven and the Who.

Despite the duo’s earlier days playing a harder-edged electric rock sound, it’s largely an acoustic-based music that uplifts the album’s sometimes grim life stories.

“I think there’s a certain magic that acoustic guitars have,” Moos says, picking one up. “They just fill up a room.”

Moos adds: “One sound that I like almost more than any other sound is the electric guitar blended into the acoustic guitar. I don’t think there’s any tune that’s all acoustic that we do. If there’s a Jump in the Water sound, it’s partly how we blend the electric and acoustic.”

The new album was produced by Jim Cregan, who spent much of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as lead guitarist for Rod Stewart. He has helped Jump in the Water to a sound that is undeniably commercial, with its emphasis on smooth pop melodies emerging naturally from the music.

“We never wanted to make music that wasn’t commercial,” Moos says. “A hook is great.”

One of the tracks, “It’s Not for You,” was co-written with guitarist-producer Pete Anderson and rocker Chris Isaak, who at that time was experimenting with other writers before his own “Wicked Game” album finally captured the attention of listeners. Before that collaboration, Moos had written a song for the film “The Five Heartbeats” and the title song for “The Long Hot Summer,” a TV movie starring Cybill Shepherd and Don Johnson.

Even so, Moos says, these scattered successes had only brought him to “the very fringes” of the music community. “But I wasn’t in the club. We’re still not.”

But during all these subsequent years waiting for some recognition from the music industry, Forsyth and Moos kept meeting in living rooms to play for themselves, or at the occasional showcase for an interested record company. And there was always a local biker bar ready to let Moos come in and play some raw blues and rock.

“I always thought it was the greatest work in the world to go on Friday and Saturday night to a club where there’s a bunch of motorcycles outside and play rock ‘n’ roll,” he says.

They could be traveling soon, actually leaving town on a tour that will put Moos and Forsyth at the head of a planned nine-member group of musicians and backup singers. So far, though, this new pop music career has remained relatively convenient to Moos’ living room. Even their new album was recorded mostly in Burbank.

At this point, Moos jokes, “if the mileage isn’t right, we’re not interested.”