Rock and Roll Fantasy

It’s a balmy July Tuesday on the Sunset Strip, and while rock may not be dead, Tower Records is, the Sunset Virgin Megastore is, and Book Soup no longer stays open till midnight. Instead, there’s more than a faint whiff of eau du party’s over. The action at the Whisky, the Roxy, the Key Club, the Cat Club ... it’s all still there, and every now and again, some guy and his guitar come along to prove that there’s a pulse beating subtly. A few straggling burnouts pace up and down between Doheny and Holloway, asking for change, mingling with visiting kids from the Midwest wondering where the hell Slash is hanging. Hell, they’ll settle for Faster Pussycat’s Taime Downe, if he’ll pose for a cell phone snapshot. ➤

Inside the Viper Room, though, tonight Downe’s actually doing a pretty good job at his gig spinning records, earning his keep by throwing on slabs of hard-rocking UFO and AC/DC and Thin Lizzy songs, all played at dizzying volume, while the bands who are performing that night set up and haul off their gear, the endless parade of beat-up amps and drums hoisted into dusty pickup trucks.

Daniel Davies crosses the road from where the SST Superstore used to do business, the corner of Larrabee and Sunset. He’s easy to recognize, even though he’s wearing glasses; a 28-year-old lean stringbean with dark, curly hair, long legs crossing the street in quick, loping strides. His band, the power-trio Year Long Disaster, won’t be taking the stage at the Viper Room for another couple of hours, but Davies radiates calm. The group has been steadily gigging all over the world these days, and while tonight he might get to sleep in his own bed, the band played just the night before out of state.

Sitting in the van’s passenger seat, he plays a new song over the stereo; an as-yet-unreleased cover the group did for an upcoming Iron Maiden tribute disc that British magazine Kerrang! is producing as a freebie for the following month. Year Long Disaster, which formed four years ago, will be sharing space on the disc with far more famous bands, such as Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold, and Dream Theater. Davies slightly nods his head in time to the crunching beat of their version of the Maiden chestnut “Running Free.”

“We’ll be doing a cover of a Rose Tattoo song tonight,” he says. “Matt’s going to join us again for that.” He’s talking about Matt Maiellaro, co-creator of the popular animated Adult Swim program Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as well as an accomplished guitarist. Maiellaro had discovered Year Long Disaster when an assistant had played the group’s debut album in the office, and before long found himself animating the band in a video for the group’s song “Leda Atomica,” and even later jumping on stage at another Viper Room jam to play the tune with them. (Maiellaro wasn’t the only guest that night: Billy Duffy of the Cult leaped onstage to play as well.)

Little fazes Daniel these days, not after a gloriously misspent youth, dabbling with every hard drug he could find. Now, a promising future beckons. Year Long Disaster has just finished opening for Velvet Revolver in Europe for that band’s final tour with former singer Scott Weiland. In a day, YLD are hitting the road for several arena shows with the Foo Fighters. (An impressed Dave Grohl, seeing them win over audiences, will swiftly extend the invitation for them to play another week’s worth of concerts.) Then comes another tour of Europe on the festival circuit. Then they go out with Motörhead in the States, and ... oh, yeah, there’s a second Year Long Disaster album to record for early 2009.

When the group finally walks onstage at the Viper Room, it’s a casual crowd that greets them: a small coterie of friends, well-wishers, and record company folk. Word still isn’t quite out on them yet, and for now Year Long Disaster is a minor player on the scene. But this doesn’t stop Davies and company from roaring through their set like a bullet train. Drummer Brad Hargreaves and bassist Rich Mullins lock into a thoroughly seductive groove, over which Davies plays his chugging rhythms and squealing leads, singing in a high voice reminiscent of Robert Plant and Jeff Buckley; the sound is neither retro nor futuristic, but, like the best songs of Jack White, the tunes are hard rock that is both of its time and timeless. Onstage, Davies is a cocky kid, strutting and grinning at his own look-what-I-just-did! Fender Strat prowess. The find-’em and fuck-’em track that leads off the group’s self-titled debut album, “Per Qualche Dollaro In Piu” (“For a Few Dollars More”), sees him swaggering like some bad-ass lothario of the wild, wild, West. The crowd laps it all up and howls for more.

Near the end of the set, Mullins quietly starts to play a five-beat bass line, all one note, which slowly turns into something seductive and sinuous; Ravel’s Bolero filtered through a stoner-rocker’s sensibility. Again, a few whoops from the audience, cheering the arrival of “Swan on Black Lake,” the familiar closing number. Most of the set thus far has been straight-forward rockers, but this isn’t like those. Davies approaches the microphone but never sings directly into it, using the full-blown power of his voice to rocket the lyrics over the crowd without amplification: “A break in routine/ May cause you to crack/ Under pressure received.” The words are sung with tenderness, but performed in full scream. But when he arrives at the chorus, young Daniel Davies – a ringer for young Howard Stern, actually, in Private Parts – is completely transformed. Every ounce of him is completely enraptured in his words, the tale seemingly of addiction, control, and, ultimately, surrender: “A break in your self-defense won’t change things/ Cause it’s you I deserve.” He breathes deeply, the last words before the band simply erupts into a thunderous coda: “And I’ll follow ... and I’ll fade.”

Sweat pours off of the trio as they rage, and it’s apparent to all that here’s a formidable new talent to be reckoned with. Daniel, son of Dave Davies – guitarist for the Kinks and creator of the first and arguably most primal heavy-metal riffs ever – has arrived.

The Kinks, of course, were one of the only so-called British Invasion bands, along with the Rolling Stones, to survive the ’60s and maintain successful careers into the next decade. Dave Davies, rumored to have taken a razorblade to his amplifier cone to create a fuzz-tone hitherto unknown to (axe)man, created the riffs to “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” and overnight birthed a thousand garage bands. The Kinks were also notable, if not infamous, for the incredible animosity that bred, and occasionally overflowed, between Ray and Dave Davies, brothers but rarely friends.

Daniel Davies doesn’t speak much about the Kinks. He claims he’s not in contact with Uncle Ray and that side of the family, but he does proffer this tidbit about his dad: When Daniel was 13, he went through a drumming phase – an extension of his constant misplaced aggression, he admits. But he was fairly serious about playing the drums until his dad steered him away: “You don’t wanna be a drummer,” he said. “They get the least amount of girls and they don’t make any money.” Next thing you know, there’s a brand new guitar for young Daniel to play.

Davies and Rich Mullins are sitting in the office at their shared home in Studio City. It’s around midnight on a Monday in August, and neither one of them is drinking anything stronger than water. Mullins sits at the desk next to the computer while Davies bends his legs in his chair so that his shoulders are touching his knees.

You get the sense that Mullins is the business head of the band and the one who spends the most energy keeping the train on the rails. Both he and drummer Hargreaves are around 10 years older than Davies, and there’s an interesting codependency that slowly reveals itself. Davies relies on them for judgment and direction, and the rhythm section needs a frontman with charisma to spare.

Despite Daniel’s reliance on him, Mullins was almost doomed to a junkie’s life, crushed with disappointment over the failure of his former bands. The memories come from someplace dark in both of them, and sometimes as they reveal them they have difficulty forming the thoughts into words. A grimace darkens their faces at the recollection of something particularly painful, which soon clears at the onset of a moment of repose or sadness at the thought of a severed relationship. Former addicts have their moments of pride, but it’s always tinged with shame and sadness.

West Virginia native Mullins helped form Karma to Burn in 1997, a trio that would release three albums of acclaimed heavy rock – hampered commercially, somewhat, by the lack of a lead singer and, naturally, lyrics – before joining the similar-sounding Speedealer. Mullins was a user of hard drugs throughout his life, and his substance abuse problem soon came to a head. Mullins admits he stole from his fellow bandmates and had to hide his copious heroin use behind their backs. Then, on a San Francisco night in 2001, in a haze, Mullins abandoned Speedealer’s van, and thieves broke in and stole some of band’s belongings. “The guys thought that I had set it up, that I had either stolen the stuff myself and pawned the two guitars or had someone else do it, so that I could get drugs,” he explains.

Mullins was kicked out of the band the next day, Speedealer itself calling it quits soon after. “They left me there on the street with no money. I had a calling card with two minutes left on it. I called the friend I’d stayed with in the Bay Area, and with the remaining time left I called a girl in Belgium that I knew, and with some persuading she got me a flight there.” He would spend the next two years in Europe, bumming around Amsterdam, mostly, never really expecting to come home again or a life without drugs. It would be a few years before he felt the urge to return to the States, admittedly just “going where the wind blows.” A chance meeting with Davies the very day he landed at LAX would change his life.

The “broken-home kid” himself was born in London, but spent his later childhood growing up a withdrawn Los Angeles teenager. His parents would separate, and he would later live with his godfather: horror-movie auteur John Carpenter.

“I was always so angry, man,” Davies quietly recalls, working out why he fell into using drugs. “I was just, I wanted to feel different. I dunno. It was exciting to me. Anything I’m not supposed to do, I’m going to do instantly.”

He was the only lad in his English neighborhood with a baseball bat, he says, thanks to his American-born mother, and it became a favorite plaything in those violent frenzies which would often grip him. (He says his folks always seemed to wonder why all of his toys had gaping holes or large dents in them.) “My dad’s studio was my bedroom, which was soundproofed,” he continues. “My bedroom door was like five inches thick, with all this insulating fabric on the wall. I got a knife and just cut the whole room apart one time.”

As with so many other junior alcoholics, it would start for Davies with his parents’ liquor cabinet, stealing bottles and stashing them in his bedroom. From then on, it seemed that a life doing drugs was the only thing he devoutly wished. “I remember playing Pictionary,” he grins. “I must have been 12 years old, and the word I had to draw was ‘high.’ I had once seen a picture of John Lennon with a spoon and heroin or coke, and I drew a picture of that, and all the kids were like, ‘What is that?’ and I said ‘It’s a nose, with drugs ... get high!’ And I got in so much trouble!” he laughs. “All the parents, everyone was like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with this kid?’ And I was like, ‘It just seemed cool! You know, rock and roll!’ I guess I was a little young for things like that, but I wanted to be different from everybody.”

His rock-star father would write letters to his school, explaining to the principal that “Daniel shouldn’t have homework, as he spends all day there. He should not have to work, he should be able to play.” But this didn’t have the desired effect, and Davies was placed in a series of high schools, where his English accent made him feel even more like a freak.

“I was never able to have any close friends because I was always going to a different school because of whatever was going on in my life. I went to six high schools, everywhere from Los Angeles to the Valley, to up north in Marin County ... different places where everyone was already friends with everybody since they were six years old or whatever. Everyone was really mean and teases you because you’re English, and you’re just like fuck, fuck these people. I’m not here for your fucking entertainment.”

He scowls. “I hate when American people do English accents. It’s the most obnoxious fucking thing in the world. ‘Say that word, it sounds funny!’” (Even a careful ear would be hard-pressed to discern any English accent in Davies’s speaking voice today.)

For work, he got jobs from his godfather on a couple of his movie sets, and Davies would graduate high school, but not until his godparents issued ultimatums. They felt powerless to affect their godson’s substance abuse problems; by his late teens, Davies had started smoking crack cocaine. He recalls his godmother saying to him that she wished he would crash into a tree so he would “wake up.” At 20 he was living in a Hollywood apartment near Vine and Melrose without power, owing months of back rent, using candles for light.

Mullins and Davies first met when Mullins saw him buying some booze at the Pavilions market across the street from where Davies was living, and asked him if he knew where to score. They first saw each other as perfect drug buddies, but after bonding with music, they recognized a shared hunger for something beyond the next fix.

“It didn’t really make sense to me when I later discovered that his dad was pretty famous,” shrugs Mullins, “and he was living like he was. I would have expected him to be pretty wealthy, but he was poorer than me, and I’d been a drug addict for a long time. I got help here and there, but I got to the point where no one was going to help me because I was just going to spend it and snort it.”

But Mullins also recognized in Davies a talented guitar player. “He knows stuff you can’t teach,” he enthuses. “He’s got a rhythmic skill that’s ingrained.”

The duo eventually found a place to stay with Davies Sr., but after seeing their state and failure to improve, the family finally gave up. “My mom was like, you guys should try to go to rehab,” says Daniel. “I was like, I don’t know ... but then one night I would burp and this liquid would come out of my mouth, and I just couldn’t drink any more, and instead of feeling good, I just felt really bad. This wasn’t working for me anymore. I had 76 cents, and I threw everything I had into this little hatchback. I had to reason with Rich that we needed to go because we couldn’t do anything, anymore. We weren’t in a band, we weren’t practicing, no anything. It was pretty pathetic. My dad was like, ‘You guys have got to get out of here, I’m going to back to England. You can’t stay here.’ So there we were with no money and nowhere to live. It was a choice between being homeless and rehab, and since rehab looked like a place to live, we made that decision.”

Brad Hargreaves calls in from the road. He often shuttles between the Bay Area and L.A. like the in-demand working musician he is. The Marin County-born drummer has been a member of the San Francisco alternative rock band Third Eye Blind (“Semi-Charmed Life,” “Jumper,” etc.) since 1995, and August sees him heading into the studio to lay down tracks for Stephan Jenkins and crew.

Hargreaves says that he’s played far more with Year Long Disaster than the other group in the past two years. “I guess that Year Long is still the ‘mistress’ at this time,” he admits. “It’s a bit of a problem in that both are working very hard right now.”

Post-rehab and sober, Davies and Mullins found a drummer and played a gig at the Scene, a bar in Glendale, which is where they also first saw Hargreaves in one of his side projects. It wasn’t long before Hargreaves had fallen into the Year Long Disaster fold.

“Third Eye Blind had performed as the Kinks on a show called American Dreams,” marvels Hargreaves, “and six months later I’m there in Glendale. I was intrigued by the fact that I had just played Kinks songs on TV, and now I was opening up, so to speak, for Daniel Davies! That was interesting, but more than anything, when I saw them play, my jaw dropped.”

With a band in place, soon they were signing a deal with Orange County-based label Volcom Entertainment, and released their first album. Then Mullins decided to put his young frontman to the test. “Daniel hadn’t been out of Los Angeles since he was in high school, and my feeling is that you have to play all the little shitholes across the country in order to find out if you’re worth your salt. You can sit here and suspect that you might have something cool, but you have to see what happens when you’re in, say, Baltimore.”

Thus far, Davies has responded to and blossomed with his friend’s encouragement, and agrees that the others provided a level and place of comfort for him to succeed. “What I wanted was to get in a band with guys that kind of know more than me, so they can push me. I knew that I had something going on, but I didn’t really have any direction ... . I never really had any direction throughout my life. So I was like, I need a band with some guys who know what’s going on, and if I know that they’re the best at what they do, then I think I’ll be able to do whatever I want.”

The acid test will occur in the months ahead, when time will tell if Year Long Disaster can bring solid hard rock back to a mainstream that seems to be smitten with ’tween poppers like the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus. Some are willing to bet that Davies has that same special something, like a Kurt Cobain, a Josh Homme, or a Jack White. One of those guys who bridge the gap between an easily distracted pop audience and diehard fans of rock and roll.

But for now, they’re still a little old power trio from L.A., bonded by a mutual respect. Recalls Mullins of the bad old days, “There was a night when we listened to Percy by the Kinks [the soundtrack to the 1971 cult flick about a man undergoing a penis transplant]. [Daniel] put it on for me, and it just sounded so organic. That was strange, because when you’re really high all the time like I was, and especially if it’s crack, you’re not really listening, and you can’t really focus on anything for more than 15 seconds ... you don’t want to do anything. But that was kind of the start of making music again.”

It’s a Friday night at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, four nights after our interview. His tour ended, Dave Grohl stands near the front of the stage, seemingly unaccosted by most of this half-capacity crowd, and swigs a beer. Or two.

At least he makes one expected drummer in the House. Brad Hargreaves is absent, and Year Long Disaster will play without him tonight, using a substitute. Hargreaves’s commitment to two bands may be causing some conflict. The sub is fine, but but it’s not as if YLD is flying at full strength with him behind the kit.

Benefiting from his time on the Foo Fighters’ massive stage, Davies has started to work the crowd more than ever before; he encourages a clap-along, settling into a larger-than-life aura like someone to the manor born. Dave’s kid no more, no longer that youngster tearing up dad’s studio, but tearing into willing audiences. Uncle Ray may have sung about being “Tired of Waiting for You,” but his nephew’s not holding back any longer. The crowd cheers. Drinks. Smiles.

The party may not be over just yet.