American rock band, formed in Los Angeles, California, United States, in 1971 by Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes after they had left Spirit.
The band was named after a Chuck Berry song, Jo Jo Gunne.
They released their eponymous debut album in 1972 and had a top 10 hit song Run Run Run in the UK.
Following the first album, Mark Andes left the band after a falling out with his brother Matt and Ferguson and was replaced by Jimmie Randall. Randall introduced a brighter bass sound and helped increase the band's overall volume.
Matt Andes left after Jumpin' the Gunne, and he was briefly replaced by Starr Donaldson in 1974.
A replacement was soon found in John Staehely who had played on Feedback, the Spirit album that followed Ferguson and Andes's departure.
Staehely's overdriven guitar was a significant change from Matt Andes's Ry Cooder style slide guitar.
They released three further albums before disbanding in 1974.
After the band broke up, Ferguson recorded several solo albums, which yielded the hit singles Thunder Island and Shakedown Cruise.
He then scored TV shows and several movies.
Mark Andes joined Firefall and then Heart.
Smith went on to have a career as a session drummer, and played with Spirit in the 1980s, and Boston from 1994 to 2000.
The original line-up temporarily got back together around 1992. In a July 1995 interview in Vintage Guitar Magazine, Mark Andes recalls: Curly Smith called me up and noted that it was the twentieth anniversary of when that band had formed; Steve Lukather took us into the studio and we recorded a lot of new material, but it didn't go anywhere.
They began recording again in 2005 in Santa Barbara at Jay Ferguson's studio. The 2005 recordings were eventually put out as an album, Big Chain, on Blue Hand Records. The music was co-produced by the band and engineered by Ferguson.