While so many artists his age are recreating their cherished golden oldies to make fans feel
young again, David J offers pure musical medicine in intimate shows.
The 69-year old bassist from Bauhaus and Love And Rockets skips the obligatory hits, but his freewheeling acoustic set is a clinic on aging gracefully and staying human by making art in an absurd, inhumane world.
Speaking from his home in Encinitas, J explains how his latest old-but-new album, “Tracks From The Attic Revisited,” was a chain of happy accidents that led to an unexpected
partnership with his younger self.
“I’m just playing a couple of songs from the new record, which was preceded by a three-album set of lo-fi demos, just me with an acoustic guitar or a little piano, putting song ideas down. Independent Project Records put it out, and it did quite well. And then they had me pick ten tracks, but fully realized with a band and full production and the works. And I loved that idea.”
After Pall Jenkins’s eclectic DJ mix, peppered with post-punk chestnuts, a dapper and
affable J took up an acoustic guitar at the Casbah on Tuesday to open with an attic-track, “If Muzak Be The Junk Food Of Love,” a wry meditation on the pitfalls of romance that needed little revision for the 21st century.
“I wrote that song in the 80’s. Muzak was everywhere. The reference is from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The protagonist, he’s infatuated with this woman who’s unobtainable. So he wants the court musicians to play on, so that he becomes sickened by the music, and his infatuation will die. So what I’m saying is, in the modern dating scene, they’re really sick of it and they want to be done with it. It’s a bit complicated, but that was in my head.”
After five decades rocking festival arenas with a litany of legendary bands, David J was clearly energized by just playing his own songs in a room not unlike the Northampton clubs he played at 16.
“Yeah, it’s very stripped down. It’s just me and a great guitar player, John Courage. I’m picking up local musicians here and there, which keeps it very alive, because they bring their individuality. And some gigs, I’m just doing solo. It’s a good exercise to really strip the song down to its core.”
A restless hunger to flip every script is how David keeps himself and his audience hooked.
“Definitely, it’s exciting and stimulating to me. I like being out of my depth. I like teetering on the precipice, and I did that, certainly, when I was with Theater Bizarre Orchestra, a 13-piece jazz band. It was terrifying, but also very exhilarating, especially performing live. You’ve really got to hit your mark because everything is so structured.”
Alongside deep solo cuts and blistering protest songs like “The Rape Of The Rose Garden” and “Ice Too Cold To Thaw,” J played a few old favorites at the Casbah, but without their epic wall of psychedelic excess, his subdued renditions of Love And Rockets classics like “Rainbird” and “Dog End Of A Day Gone By” unfolded as hauntingly personal poetry.
Fans of Bauhaus likely went home crestfallen, but the lyricist of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
did take a cheeky poke at the gloomy subculture he godfathered in “Goth Girls In Southern
California,” and mused more profoundly upon mortality and loss with a hardboiled cover of
Tom Waits’ murder ballad “Dead And Lovely.” “Quelle Tristesse” was an earnest ode to a
departed friend, Pat Fish of The Jazz Butcher, whose playful, anarchic wit still resonates in
J’s solo work.
“Pat was a great songwriter and he had an influence on me, for sure. It was a two-way street, but he definitely rubbed off when I was in the Jazz Butcher, and producing them. And he was also a real wordsmith, Pat. Very clever in his lyrics.”
Hanging out after the show to chat affably with fans until the venue chucked us out, David J seems to hold back growing old because he never stops growing, grinding on new music with a bevy of collaborators, writing plays, painting and DJing (he spun in Osaka last month).
“I just have these sparks of inspiration, and I follow them if I can. And quite often, there’s a crossover from one form of expression to another. I do an album and it has a theme, and the theme is too big to be contained. So it spills over into visual artwork and conceptual
things. It’s just really like letting the muse have her way with me.”
David J’s troubadour tour has moved on to mostly sold out shows back east, but if you missed him, he’s sure to return soon. “I love the Casbah. When I was in that locale, it became a bit of a second home, and Tim Mays is a good friend of mine,” he said, referring to the venue’s owner.
Just don’t expect him to do the same thing twice.
