all photos: Kimberly Cadena
I knew heading into this interview that John Davis of Title Tracks had been around the DC music scene for a long time, (I knew of Q and Not U as one of the premier late 90s DC bands, and was a big fan of the indie-pop direction shift he took with Laura Burhenn in Georgie James) but I had no idea that he was actually responsible for my introduction to hardcore, twenty years earlier.
It came out after we decided to take a stroll around his Silver Spring neighborhood in aftermath of the second massive snowstorm in as many days. The streets were mostly clear and it was warm, but cars and houses were buried under the historic drifts and we had the roads mostly to ourselves (and Kimberly, bravely trying to stay ahead of us to take photos without falling on the ice). We started talking about his roots, and after he mentioned that he went to Churchill High School I said that it had a reputation for being a haven for harDCore kids.
"Really? Well, maybe right when I was there."
"Well there were a couple bands that came out of that school in the mid-90s, some even got record deals," I said. "Remember that band Corm?"
He got a funny look on his face at that. In general John's understatement and near-shyness might seem standoffish at first encounter, until you realize that it's a function of paying intense attention to everything being said. "Well yeah I was in that band."
"What? No way, I saw them at the Richard Montgomery HS Battle of the Bands when I was like, 15. It was the first actual hardcore I'd ever heard."
"Was that the show where the guitarist was wearing a tux? He had just come from some formal occasion...maybe it was prom?...and he decided to leave it on."
"Holy crap I remember that. That was awesome! It completely changed my impression of what music was and who could make it. The idea that a bunch of kids were that dead serious about this insane emotionally complex music...I can't believe it..." We trundled on in silence for a little while as I marveled at the coincidence, shoes creaking on the hard packed snow.
We passed Parkway on the right, one of the oldest and best jewish delis in the area. Still in reminiscence mode I remarked how much the MD suburbs had changed--so many mom-and-pop operations replaced by chains, so much unique local culture run off or moved into the city.
"There used to be a lot of great punk houses out here," John recalled. "There was one called Pirate House where a bunch of people lived, where I saw Chisel and a band called When It Rains It Pours, and a very early version of the Make Up. They might not even have had a name yet...or they might have been called 'Transistor Queen.' And there was a place called the Embassy. There were places like that which were slightly infamous at the time."
I tried to snap myself out of good old days reveries with an actual question. "Speaking of Chisel, I feel like Title Tracks gets into the same breakneck speed mod-pop-punk territory as Ted Leo. Are you guys working together on cornering a specific DC sound?"
He laughed quietly. "I put out a split single of Chisel's once, and Q and Not U toured with Ted for a while. So he's an old friend. But I don't really associate that style with DC. I might think of New York, LA, San Francisco, but mostly because of bands that aren't around any more. Like the Exploding Hearts from Portland. But I just think of it as an everywhere thing now. In terms of DC though I feel like there's always been a musical freedom here. Fugazi could play an oboe onstage, or have a second drummer if they felt like it. Not being afraid to do what you want, that's the big DC influence on me."
"Well one thing that bands used to be afraid to do, at least around the time when QANU was ending, was be poppy. I felt at the time that Georgie James was one of the first nationally recognized bands of this decade to represent a less serious side of DC. It surprised a lot of folks when a member of this Dischord band started making this happy, breezy music..."
"Right. There was an indie pop scene, but it didn't crossover that much into the punk world. Besides the bands like Tsunami or Unrest from the early 90s...yeah there wasn't a lot of stuff around that sounded like...whatever Georgie James sounded like."
At this mention of the duo, whose split-up is often the subject of much speculation, we stopped walking at the end of a cul de sac and looked into the valley of Rock Creek Park, knee deep in a drift. The sun warmed us and reflected brutally off bare branches and unbroken white ground. John slipped on some Ray Bans. I decided to go there a little bit.
"Title Tracks is yet another departure from the expectations people had about what kind of songwriter you are. Is that because you wrote and recorded so much of the music for the new album alone?"
He puffed some steam breath and considered the question before answering, as he always did. "It could be. A lot of the songs come from while Georgie James was still together. By a certain point we were writing everything separately anyway, and so when we broke up I wanted to record them. When we played my songs live we always had a tendency to speed them up, sometimes beyond the point of where they should be played. So when I started writing even more new songs, I just naturally went in that direction. But yeah, you could say that these are wholly my songs for the first time."
"Is it intimidating, or freeing to be the sole proprietor of the store?"
"A little of both." He smiled, perhaps knowing where that line of questioning was going, and so starts walking again. "But I'm not committed to being the only songwriter. After this tour I'd be into working on music together with the other guys in the band. We'll just see what happens."
The tour they're departing on is massive, winding through most of the US [and stopping in DC Wednesday at the Black Cat], so we talk logistics as we hike back up the hill towards his house. They're switching bass players halfway through, and playing a wild variety of rooms--smaller venues with Pretty and Nice and then a week with Ted Leo in bigger spots. The last monster tour he's been on with a full band was with Q and Not U, in the dawning days of the internet and indie rock's saturation with business models. I asked him about the differences between touring now versus ten years earlier.
"The world of indie is definitely more fueled by things like publicists now. At the time, even though we knew a few publicists, we just put the record out. It quietly got a few mediocre-to-bad reviews but by the time we toured six months later when Chris was out of school, it was starting to filter out there a little bit and people had heard of us. But with every band I'm in the publicity thing starts to seem more normal. But I'm fine with it, at least the interview parts. I love talking about music... and myself [laughs]. I remember at the start I would say things like 'Do we really need to send the album to 300 people, this is so wasteful.' And with Saddle Creek I'm sure the number was much higher. But even if half of them just sold it immediately, you're throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks. It's a mainstream, corporate concept, that major labels used to do all the time. We've sort of switched places. They used to sign all these weird bands just to see what would happen, and maybe one would be successful..."
"Like the Flaming Lips maybe?"
"Sure. But for every one of those they'd spend millions on a bunch of bands that didn't work out in the process, hoping to recoup it on the next Nirvana. Meanwhile they put out records by Eugenius and the Raincoats and Mudhoney. Now it's rare to find any indie-style bands on major labels. There was that period were when you were ready for the big time you'd step up to a major label, but now if you're ready to step up you sign to Matador, or Subpop like Beach House. There's always going to be an element of speculation in the music business."
"But now the workers control the means of speculation as well as production..."
"There is much more of an element of Going For It nationally or internationally now, rather than trying to make it work in your scene. You can instantly be like 'We're huge on the West Coast.' Or 'If we go to Chicago or Austin we'll play to 500 people but at home we'll play to 50.' There isn't so much a coherent scene around here right now, at least not for me. Nationally speaking people don't know much about DC, which might have something to do with Dischord, and a lot of other older labels, not being into speculation, not putting out new records so they can protect their back catalog. But that doesn't mean it isn't out there. I could just be missing it, and that's OK."
Back inside, in front of the proverbial roaring fire of his elegantly poised and tasteful record collection, I mentioned that some of the new songs use the ska guitar rhythm, or rather the punk-mod ska-ripoff upbeat guitar rhythm that the Police and the Jam sometimes employed. I asked him if ska was due for a comeback, or at least a reconsideration. It's the first question he seemed genuinely embarrassed by, either for himself or for me for having asked it.
"I was just talking about this last night. The Post review said something like 'He explores reggae' in one of the songs. And I'm like whoa that was totally not what I was trying to do. There was another song that didn't make the record that people would say had a reggae feel to it and I would be like 'No way what are you talking about?' So I don't intend to be part of it. The upbeat on some songs is supposed to be...let me see if I can find a song that does it." He rifled through the stacks of albums, organized alphabetically by era, put on some late 60s girl group. "You know how soul songs have that guitar riff on the evens?" He mimed the sound of a trebly guitar stroking upward sharply, more Motown than Kingston. "Maybe my problem is that I'm playing it too fast. It winds up making people thinking of reggae. But I do love bands that mix soul and ska and reggae into the mix if they do it well. Rock-and-roll and soul to me are totally entwined. It's hard to integrate them sometimes when writing songs, and I'm not that experienced at it, but I'm trying. Whenever someone says they hear a soul influence on one of the songs I get surprised and pleased."
This lead us to dissecting the British mods and mod culture as a whole. Is it possible to be in a mod band without the checkers and the targets and the parkas?
"If there is a mod subculture in DC I'm not really aware of it. I care a lot about that kind of music, both the second and the first wave stuff. From the early Who and Small Faces to Elvis Costello or the Secret Affair or any number of smaller bands from the late 70s that influence what I'm trying to do. Especially Elvis Costello. I admire anyone who's that restless musically, who is willing to try moving from a classical to a country to another pop record. We used to have an expression in Q and Not U for bands who we'd see and enjoy but then the second or third time you saw or toured with them you'd realize--they're just polishing their turd. What they do is fine, but they were just doing it over and over again. The risk of not doing that is that you're going to make records that people aren't going to like. People love Bowie for that, for instance, but they forget about all the missteps in between Thin White Duke and Ziggy Stardust that everyone cringed about at the time. Not that my music has changed as much as theirs, but every record I've ever been a part of has tried something new. This is where I'm at now, so that's what I'm going to express. And every time we tried something new in QANU or as Georgie James or now we get a bunch of contempt for being different: 'His old stuff was better, this sucks, and so on.' You just have to keep going without worrying about how it was going to be received, though I can't help but pay attention to the complaints. I have no problem with criticism, I just don't want to be misunderstood. If I'm going to be criticized I'd like it to be useful, just saying 'this sucks' is useless."
He grimaced, probably running through the bitter comments die-hard fans make at artists when they change something about their style. The soul side played sedately, mixing with the melting icicle drips and traffic sounds.
"But no, I've never ridden a scooter. I had two bike accidents within a month of each other so I stay off anything with two wheels now!"
As Kimberly and I finished our tea and gathered winter gear to take off he dug through a drawer under the record player, coming out with a copy of Corm's rereleased singles collection for me. I was delighted, all I had was their first 7'' which came out right before I left DC for college and 10 years of wandering. As we shook hands a last question popped into my head.
"Would you ever consider moving out of DC?"
"No." His broad smile indicated he'd probably never even thought about it, despite the small town infighting, the haters, the crumbling infrastructure for medium-sized bands and the seven foot pile of frozen water dominating his parking lot. "I like it here." It's a good thing too. I'm not sure what we'd do without him.
Want more:
Follow Title Tracks on Myspace/Facebook etc, read John's blog, get the record out now on Dischord, and stop by Black Cat tomorrow (Wednesday) for the belated album release party
God loves a cheerful giver.
Well done.
Great interview and wonderful shots - Peter and Kimberly make everything better. Ska is way overdue for a revival by the way. Perfect mix of the need to dance while still being able to complain about bitter times. Always part of the musical equation in a crap economy in the US or UK.
Great pics, except for the inclusion of the dork in the earmuffs.
John Ska is still very very alive and well. Have you come to any of the Aggrolites shows when they've blown through? Unfortunately the ignorant associate Ska with skinheads and Skinheads with racism which is why it will never have a bigger following.
There is still a Mod subculture in DC but it's small. It's propped up by the one in Baltimore which is quite large. I love the way the Baltimore mod girls dress.
This was really great. Great pics and great content. What a fantastic guy. Nice job.
Oh, and if there's a ska revival though I'll murder someone. Probably Michael. (Unless it's actual good old school ska and not the crap we had in the 90's. That'd be okay.)
Great interview, Peter. I just want to give John a hug in that last picture. And I love his new home - congrats! (But for the record publicists are people, not things.
Nice shots, Kimberly. Love the light.