Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 4 No. 4 | Winter 1984 (Seattle) /// Issue 2 of 24 /// Master# 50 of 73

BOY AND H IS DOG the Incredible John Davis by Penny Allen ortunately, there are still some Candides who insist upon telling their truths these days, even in the notoriously corrupt world of musical entertainment. “If you can keep your calm in this noisy business,” says the Incredible John Davis, “and if you can get over being scared of looking silly, then you can follow many rhythms going on at once.” When John himself learned how to do just that, he became a one-man band and invented boom chuck. sette has a different purpose and effect, each one a different possible approach to boom chuck. “There’s room for lots more kinds of boom chuck besides what I do,” says John Davis. “It’s just a language we speak here in Portland.” Appropriately, Generic Boom Chuck starts with a personal, vulnerable selfintroduction by the artist called “Over Qualified.” It’s the folky Davis, earnest and wistful. “Space Ship,” a kind of hopeful fantasy (written before E.T.) about a space ship that comes but doesn’t take the hero away, is good dramatic storytelling with elaborate space ship sound effects worked into the song. “Rock Star,” on the other hand, is pure social commentary about the craziness of media-created image and stardom, told with cynical disillusionment. The song screams for an MTV visual and it seems John Larue at KPTV agrees, as that’s the song Incredible John performs in Larue’s show on Portland music featuring Davis, Billy Rancher, and the Confi- dentials. “Dance Class” is the cassette’s best dance tune with the bonus of a wry, memorable lyric: “Shake your bean Gildersteen/shut your eyes and dance/You too Rosencrantz/Get off your ass — Dance Class.” “Belushi” opens with the sound of bullets flying past your head, the sound you hear when o.d.ing on cocaine, followed by a classic two-minute guitar wail boom chuck style. The cut’s all guts, pure, domineering, hard to listen to. Still, “Belushi” is neces- “Boom chuck may sound like a silly word,” says Davis, “but no sillier than jazz or rock and roll. Boom chuck is your heart beat . . . squeeze, relax, squeeze, relax. It’s not just the down beat . . . boom, boom, boom . . . there’s also the up beat . . . boom, chuck, boom, chuck. It’s bouncy, it’s binary, it’s like walking down the street,” says Incredible John. With a floating bouncy rhythm something like reggae or ska, harking back to Portland’s Kingsmen doing “Louie, Louie,” boom chuck's got a tracer element to it. You can always identify it, which is why both Incredible John and pal Billy Rancher think alike about boom chuck. Says Billy Rancher: “For Johnny and me, boom chuck means getting back to basics, simplifying. The idea of boom chuck is already of local importance. I do think people will refer to this period as the boom chuck scene when they write about Portland music in the '80s. Boom Chuck Records is the name of our record company, so the industry will recognize it that way too.” For awhile John Davis even published a one- sheet newspaper called Boom Chuck News, which was entertainingly idiosyncratic and always wildly promotional of boom chuck. Thinking he ought to lay out some of the possibilities for the sound he named, John Davis has now written, performed, professionally recorded, mixed and released a cassette called Generic Boom Chuck, available at most record and cassette outlets, as well as at Portland’s Saturday Market from John himself. i(|k|ow the ■^■technology makes it possible for a one-man band to have a full sound. It’s like pushing an abacus through some electronic chips. Rawness and technology meet in the modern one-man band.” Listening to John’s full sound, you can’t help but take great delight immediately in the whole one-man band idea. There’s no over-dubbing on the songs, no laying down instrument tracks one by one and making a sound later. Davis is playing all the instruments himself at once. Lead guitar in his hands, harmonica strapped around his neck, his right foot on synthesizer, playing a kind of combination bass drum and bass guitar (the boom), left foot on a cut-off high hat cymbal (the chuck), voice on top, Davis’ songs are recorded live . . . whole, all of a piece. On one song, “Ruby Rhubarb,” John even miraculously gets his giant dog Ruby to bark on cue! Live! The song’s a winner, a happy rollicking celebration of personal technology, a virtuoso one-boy band and his dog. If “Ruby Rhubarb” makes you laugh and bounce around, jumping up and down, each of the other cuts on the six-cut, one-side-only cas- ‘Speak, Ruby, Speak!” Clinton St. Quarterly || Above, Incredible John prepares to sell his cassette, Generic Boom Chuck, at Portland’s Saturday Market.

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