Two brothers started playing music around northern Minnesota campfires. Now they’re releasing a third album.

WALKER, MINN.

Few sixth-graders can say their brothers’ band performed for their Minnesota history class, but Annabel Cox can. She sat front row in the auditorium of Walker-Hackensack-Akeley Public School with her classmates studying six guys on stage wearing hats they had just found in the theater costume closet. Annabel introduced her brothers, Jacob and Owen Mahon, and their band Saltydog, self-described as a Northwoods funk jam band.

“If anybody feels compelled to dance, we highly encourage it if you feel the spirit move ya,” Jacob said to the class.

It took only a few minutes. Suddenly they were all doing the “Macarena.” One kid started breakdancing. The teachers were grooving. And it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

Annabel’s assignment to write about a person or place contributing to Minnesota turned into a show-and-tell at the suggestion of her teachers, who are fans of Saltydog with its millennial Grateful Dead sound and songs that go on and on.

Jacob, 26, who sings and plays guitar, and Owen, 25, who sings and plays the drums, went to school in Walker before moving to Duluth where they have established careers as full-time musicians.

“So for them to actually come back to their roots of where it all began … that’s just awesome — and to see the kids vibing with them," said music teacher Courtney Carlson.

The Mahon brothers (pronounced “man”) were barely teenagers when they started booking gigs at small-town bars and art fairs around northern Minnesota in 2012.

Owen was 11 and Jacob was 13.

More than a decade later, they’ve swapped out farmers markets for music festivals, added four band members — Calvin “Calzone” Lund on bass, Sam Deters on guitar, Gavin St. Clair on keys, Bryan “Lefty” Johnson on bongos — and are set to release their third album, “Runnin’ Again,” on Jan. 9 at the Turf Club in St. Paul.

Saltydog is building on the momentum of 2025, which included a monthlong residency in Minneapolis at the Hook & Ladder in March. They also opened for Chicago-based artist Neal Francis at the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua, which the Mahon brothers called a dream years in the making.

After the Big Top show, Saltydog members sat around a campfire with friends when the guitarist for Francis told them: “You guys could literally play anywhere and destroy it.”

Jacob and Owen grew up playing guitars around a YMCA campfire in Longville at Camp Olson.

They lived at Camp Olson as kids for a decade as their parents worked at the camp along the shores of Little Boy Lake. It’s the same place Minnesota rapper Yung Gravy got his name and was also known to perform around the fire.

“We were very ingrained in the kind of campfire culture type thing with a person strumming chords and everyone singing,” Owen said. “We had a lot of campfire jams.”

Jacob added: “It’s a huge part of why we like what we like and hear what we hear.”

They formed the duo Hog Rooster and played a lot of covers, “stuff that would be normal for a bar band to do,” Jacob said.

They would do open mics in Bemidji and stop by the studio of Nijjii Radio north of Detroit Lakes. They played at assisted-living homes, Itasca State Park and annual summertime gatherings in small lake towns — “all over thanks to our parents because we couldn’t drive,” Owen said.

The brothers took some music lessons but mostly learned “from the internet and from our dad’s friends around the campfires,” Jacob said.

Their jam band influence was discovered at the now-defunct music venue Terrapin Station in Nevis, where they were surrounded by a bunch of Deadheads “who were more immersed in the improvisation,” Jacob said.

That’s where he said they learned it was “OK if you play something for 10 minutes.”

Brian Skinness, who owned Terrapin before it closed in 2021, said the brothers captivated seasoned musicians immediately. He vividly recalls the late musician Frank Prout hearing Jacob play guitar for the first time. Prout, who lived in Hackensack, played with Gregory Dee and the Avanties, which opened for the Beatles in 1965 at Met Stadium.

“When he said, ‘You’re scary,’ it’s like passing the torch, man,” Skinness said. “We all just busted out laughing.”

He said the brothers “added so much to our playing [at Terrapin.] ... They would come back from time to time, and we’d always have a jam session. It’s super awesome to see them still moving on and going bigger places.”

The brothers moved to Duluth in 2016 in their final years of high school.

Jacob started performing solo. Owen hadn’t yet graduated or transitioned from bass to drums. In school, he met Lund and within a few years they formed the band New Salty Dog.

Their debut album, “Pecan, Pecon," in 2020 was followed by residencies at Duluth’s Bent Paddle Brewing Co. for years, where they created a following and continued assembling what became the six-piece jam band under the name Saltydog.

“I really want them to blow up. I want them to go nationwide,” Mattson said. “I don’t see any reason why they can’t just go coast to coast.”

Saltydog bandmates play in many other bands in town like Jumpsuit and Woodblind. The brothers often perform as a duo and Saltydog frequently plays with local singer/songwriter “Boss Mama” Colleen Myhre.

“We just became this community,” Myhre said. “I’ve been playing in Duluth for 25 years and I feel like they are bringing so many people together. I mean, I’m 55 years old, and they like to play with me. You know, they’re 20 … and so well loved everywhere.”

Saltydog’s 2026 schedule is already chock full of tour dates.

“They just turn heads. They’re beyond,” said Myhre, who met the Mahons through Skinness when they were just kids and talented beyond their years.

The Mahons say they are content staying in Duluth, too.

“We could probably just tour Minnesota for the rest of our lives and have our work cut out for us,” Jacob said.

Owen added: “And it’s beautiful here. It’s not like a bummer driving around these places.”

They said they like being close to home to see their friends perform and to see their little sister. She FaceTimed them between shows in September to tell them she’s learning the clarinet. They commended her choice.

“I think it’s really cool that they’re my brothers,” she said, adding that she got an A in her history project.

“Hard rock, soft rock, granite,” Jacob said as everyone giggled.

Then a student asked why they were wearing those hats.

“We like to keep things fun and goofy because that’s us,” Owen said. “I’m serious about having fun.”