Back in the late 1980's Jacob's Trouble emerged onto the scene with Door Into Summer, and it featured one of the coolest covers I'd seen in a long time. I snapped it up; and because it was produced by Terry Taylor I was expecting something great. What I got was something full of jingle jangle music - that to my metal hardened ears wasn't my cup of tea. However, there were some killer songs - and over the years as I matured, the album would get better - but Jacob's Trouble would remain one of those bands I liked but didn't play a lot. However, they were a band that set the foundations for others to build upon - and it can be said that without Jacob's Trouble a lot of the Christian pop out there wouldn't have happened. I'm not saying they're the Velvet Underground of religious music - but they influenced more than one or two people. Besides, any band that can site Cheap Trick and The Monkees as influences can't be all bad. And, they even sampled Monty Python - how's that for cool? Who said Christians don't have a sense of humour?

A couple of years ago I crossed paths with Jerry Davison, and I was a little nervous - mainly because I'd been something of a dick reviewing some of the band's stuff. On the plus side, it did get me to complete my JT collection, and I'd found that I'd missed some really good stuff.

A while back Jerry and I discussed doing an interview to talk about the band, and try and answer those "where are they now" questions, and set the record straight once and for all on one of Christian music's nearly great question marks. What you are about to read is the result. Does it answer all the big questions? No. Does it answer some of the smaller ones? I think so.

So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Jerry Davison. This is a long one, so sit back and let's take you on a journey back in time ...

Jacob's Trouble Reviews

Jerry, thanks for taking the time to finally get together and put to bed some of the great unanswered questions regarding your old band.

<Jerry> You're quite welcome. I am frankly a little surprised that anyone would even have questions, so I am at your disposal.

What have you been up to over the last little while? Here's a chance to bring people up to speed on what you've been up to.

<Jerry> I moved to Las Vegas in 2002 to help start a church here. My wife and I quit our jobs, sold our house, moved our whole family across the country for no better reason than we believed God told us to. And there is no better reason, by the way.

Since that time I have come on staff as the Media Arts Director where I do all the video production, oversee the graphic design and publications, and supervise our resident web geeks. It's great fun and very rewarding knowing that people all over the world hear about Jesus just because I show up to work everyday.

I also play the drums in the praise band, along with my 16 year old son, Erik, who is quite a good drummer himself. He is picking up guitar pretty fast, too. He and a buddy are already talking of starting a band and they are starting to record some stuff on my equipment.

I wrote and recorded a handful of stuff after I moved here but for the past few years, video production has been the primary outlet for my creative urges. You can find what little I've done on various web sites like Garageband.com and such.

Looking back on Jacob's Trouble, does it strike you as odd that you guys lasted five years? Exactly the same length as the mission of the original USS Enterprise, but two years longer than the series?

<Jerry> And we didn't even have a grouchy medial officer to yell at us every episode! I actually expected JT to last longer. I felt like we had barely got going good when we split. But it was all for the better. We had made such a mess of finances and management decisions that we had to split while we were still friends or we would have killed each other, divorced our wives, and lived out the remainder of our lives in bitterness and squalor. Or we might have made another great record and gotten signed by a real record label and gone on to enjoy much success. As it is, I am much happier making music for my own enjoyment and worship than for the Christian music machine.

Speaking of the guys, do you keep up with any of the guys, or has time marched on and you've simply gone your own ways?

<Jerry> Well, up until about a year ago I would have said (and often did say) that I still kept in touch with everyone and we were all good friends. But last year something happened to cause some resentment and anger between some of us. Put it this way, I still talk to Steve and Mark regularly. Mark and I send each other Monkees and Beatles bootlegs back and forth over email. He is also on staff at a church, so we have a lot in common.

When Daniel Amos released their opus (not the penguin) Motor Cycle, were you surprised at how much it sounded like the work you and Terry Taylor had collaborated on years earlier on the Knock, Breathe, Shine album?

<Jerry> No, not at all. It just sounded to me like Terry revisiting some of the influences that helped create classics like Horrendous Disc and Vox Humana. I could flatter myself and think that maybe his time working with us reawakened a love for that side of his music but I think that is unlikely. Terry's influence on me was profound. I doubt we had any influence on him at all.

Did you know that Jacob's Trouble packed a career into the same time it would take a band like Journey to record a single album?

<Jerry> I never thought of it that way. I have often thought you could fit our career easily between U2 albums, though.

If you were to choose a Monkee to work with who would it be and why? If the answer isn't Michael Nesmith I'll have to smack you upside the head.

<Jerry> I have a strict policy of not wanting to meet my idols. Terry Taylor would be the lone exception. I don't want my carefully crafted image of them to be destroyed because I met them the day they had a fight with their wife or their dog bit a neighbor or their car needed a new transmission.

But for the sake of answering your question I would have to say my first choice would be Micky Dolenz. I have always loved his voice and sense of humor.

Interestingly, Mark Blackburn recently met Peter Tork. He told me he went to see him at a club in Atlanta and met him after the show. He had him sign a guitar or something and thanked him for the influence the Monkees had on him. I think he even gave him a copy of our Door Into Summer CD and told him we were a Christian band. Tork looks at him and says, "You do know I am a Satanist, don't you?" What a jerk! Just goes to show you, you should never try to meet your heroes, lest they become villains...

Hmmm, I wonder if Peter was just trying to be funny by spoofing "The Devil and Peter Tork."

In listening to some of your stuff I was struck by the similarity between your music and The Rutles. How big an influence were these guys on your music?

<Jerry> A bit, I admit. I stumbled onto the "All You Need Is Cash" TV special in '78 just flipping channels. I thought it was genius! I ran out and bought the album. I have it on CD now. I listen to songs like "I Must Be In Love" and think, how ironic that at times they even surpassed the band they were spoofing.

For the first couple of albums you guys were ticking along as the proverbial power trio. Then you enlist not only a drummer who can drum, but also another guitar player. If it was simply to flesh out the live act great, bring 'em on the road, but cutting an income of roughly nothing three ways must have been hard. But five ways?

<Jerry> Our main reason for adding the guys was to flesh out the live sound to come closer to what people were hearing on the records. When we first started we were a bit rougher, louder, and more manic, like the early Who. But Frontline (our record label) wanted Terry to capitalize on the Beatles aspect. They were looking for a hook to market us. So Door Into Summer ended up sounding nothing like us! There were all these layered acoustic guitars, keyboards and breathy background vocals on the CD. Live we sounded more like the Sex Pistols. But since more people were familiar with the band through the CDs than through our live shows at the time, we had to adjust who we were to fit the records, rather than the other way around.

Speaking of singing drummers, what were you thinking? I can pick off on one hand singing drummers: Karen Carpenter, Levon Helm, Gil Moore, Ringo, Micky Dolenz (I'm stretching it a bit here), and that guy from The Romantics. Everyone knows that drummers rank just below bass players in a band's pecking order. By writing and singing were you hoping to gain respect for drummers everywhere? That's Neal Peart's job (except for the singing).

<Jerry> I never really saw myself as a drummer. I always thought of myself as the singer/songwriter of the band. I only drummed because that's the instrument I play. Now, had there been a strong songwriter and singer I would have deferred and become the drummer. But in JT I had the best voice and the most song ideas so it defaulted to me. Mark didn't even wanna sing at first. We had to force him!

Mark Heard was an interesting choice for a producer. By the early 90's his sound had morphed from rock to organic folk rock. Listening to albums like Second Hand, and Dry Bones Dance, and some of his work with Randy Stonehill it seems like an odd match. It seemed like you were really on to something with Terry behind the knobs (yeah, that could be a reference to the three of you) and that with the artistic success of Knock, Breathe, Shine the third time would have been the charm. What was up with that?

<Jerry> (sigh) This is probably my biggest regret in the whole JT saga. We loved working with Terry but we kept getting fan mail to him in our mailbox. Many of the fans and press felt we were another Swirling Eddies, just another side project for Terry, that it was all him. We felt strongly that, no matter how much we liked Terry and wanted to work with him, we needed to break away and show people that we were an actual band independent from Terry.

At first we were trying to get Mitch Easter (of Let's Active and REM fame). He was actually interested but the scheduling wasn't working out. So someone suggested Mark heard and we immediately said "Yeah!"

That was a mistake. Mark heard was a great guy and the complete opposite from Terry as a producer. He tried to capture the band as "live" sounding as possible, with the fewest overdubs, etc. But he hated Christian music and was all excited because he was about to go work with Pete Buck from REM. I don't think he ever took our record seriously. We were just something to do between projects. When we first heard the final mix of the record we were like, "This is it? It's gonna go out to stores like that?"

The other thing that shot us in the foot was our own stubborn insistence to record in Atlanta. Frontline owned two recording studios where we had recorded our first two records. Because they owned them we could afford to stay a month and record. When we insisted on staying in Atlanta so we could be near our families, we could only afford two weeks. So between not enough time and not enough attention from the producer, I have always felt that record was a letdown. It haunts me to this day wondering what it might have sounded like with Terry behind the wheel. Ironically, it's our most popular record. Go figure. Probably because it was the one most aggressively marketed by our label.

Pat Terry! How did you get him? Oh man oh man - to have been there while he was playing for you guys on "Days That Passed Me By". The guy is brilliant. One day, one day he'll receive his due. Probably right before Jacob's Trouble gets a Dove Lifetime Achievement Award in the "Celebrate the Mullet" category.

<Jerry> Yeah, that was cool meeting him. I remember being in high school listening to my Pet Terry Group tapes. I even sang one of his songs in church when I was a teenager, "Home Sweet Home."

Mullets. Was there ever any confusion between you and Billy Ray?

<Jerry> Me personally, no. But, no lie, there was between Steve Atwell and Billy Ray. We had gone to GMA week in Nashville and we were driving down the street and Steve wasn't with us. We saw this guy with this glorious chestnut brown mullet flapping in the breeze as he ambled down the street. We pulled up beside him and told him to get in, thinking it was Steve. He turned around and it was Billy Ray Cyrus. No lie. That was awesome.

Is there any truth to the rumour that you had to cut your hair because you made a bet that Hulk Hogan would retain his championship belt over The Ultimate Warrior at Wrestlmania VI?

<Jerry> None at all. It was Rowdy Roddy Piper.

The eponymous release was such a departure for the band, and I'm sure it was something you wanted to try as a band, but it seemed like with the departure of Mark, you guys lost a key element to what defined your sound. How weird is it looking back on all that's passed by over the years and having elements of your life frozen in time?

<Jerry> It only seems weird from the outside. That record was much closer to what we had sounded like as a live band all along. Keith Johnston had even recorded all these cool layered guitar parts on many songs on Let the Truth Run Wild! There was a lot of tension between Mark Blackburn and the band over the musical direction at that time. He and Mark Heard mixed the record and we lost a lot of Keith’s guitar parts somewhere in the process.” That's another reason why that record sounds so lame to me. I know what it was supposed to sound like. It would have bridged the two sounds nicely.

Remember that the whole 60's Monkees/Beatles thing was just one aspect of our influences that Frontline chose to exploit so they could market us. We had been sneaking in U2, Cheap Trick, XTC, and INXS stuff all along. It just got downplayed in favor of "that 60's vibe."

Randall Waller - to most people who have even heard of the guy, he's just the guy who plays in Shania's live band. But to us old timers, he's fondly remembered as the guy who released Midnight Fire in the early 80's (produced by the late great John Linn). How did you guys hook up?

<Jerry> We had asked Frontline to let us produce our next record ourselves. Just get us a really good engineer and let us do this thing our way, please. Randall Waller was a friend of one of the guys at Frontline and he was a compromise between us and the label. They weren't ready to turn us loose in the studio quite yet so they said Randall was a great engineer (he was!) and that he would co-produce. I loved working with him! He was great and gave us a lot of freedom. He was basically there to help us get what we wanted and keep us from doing anything too stupid.

The self-titled record sounded so different from the rest, partly because of the trouble we had getting our sound recorded and mixed properly on the prior record, but also because it was a reaction to being free to finally do it our way. Things had been getting tense between Mark and the rest of the band for a while. Mark wanted to keep the jangly-guitar sixties vibe but we wanted to branch out and have a fuller more contemporary sound. Finally, we just asked him to go. It wasn't fun. It wasn't pretty. We didn't speak for a few years after that. But between not having to argue with Mark every time we plugged in a Les Paul and cranked it through a Marshall stack and Randall letting us make the music we wanted, we just went crazy.

Does it surprise you that people still remember the band?

<Jerry> Yes. We sold so few records I wonder where all these fans came from.

Did you have control over your album cover art? How did you guys ever approve the cover for Knock Breathe Shine?

<Jerry> Totally out of our control. We hate it too. We had an artist in Athens, Ga named Tom Sawyer design our shirts for that tour and they were so cool, I wish we had known him when we were designing the cover! That's one of his designs on the cover of Digging Up Bones.

What happened after the release of the self titled album in 93? You had been on the treadmill pretty much non stop for 5 years flogging the band, building your base - and then it just came to a stop?

<Jerry> The week before our album was released, our label filed for bankruptcy and the entire staff walked out. There was no one to promote our record. We had just poured our guts out on what we thought was our magnum opus and it just sat there. People liked it when they could actually find it but without airplay or distribution it just died. It was heartbreaking.

On top of that, our manager at that time was killing us with these ridiculous tours that would have us in Alabama one day and Ontario the next. We didn't have a tour bus, we had a 1972 Dodge Travco RV that was held together MacGyver-style with chewing gum and duct tape. Steve Atwell spent more time under the bus fixing it than he did playing bass. Plus this manager was taking larger deposits than we had agreed to and pocketing them to buy a house. I just felt God saying, "Stop or you'll lose your family." I went to the band and said I can't do this. They said, "Well, we aren't doing it without you." So we called our manager the next day and told him cancel the few dates we had booked, we're done. He started screaming, "You can't do this! I already spent the money! I bought a house!" Our accountant started digging and found some unethical practices and threatened to sue him. It was all pretty ugly. So he calls all the promoters and tells them if they want their deposits back to call us and get them. And he gives them our home phone numbers! Can you believe it? We had concert promoters calling our homes wanting to know where there money was. It was insane.

Diggin' Up Bones was your answer to 77's Stick and Stones, and R.E.M's Dead Letter Office. Both of those albums were among those bands best selling albums. Were you hoping for a bigger reaction?

<Jerry> It wasn't our answer to anything except the label's question, "So can we have one more album to fulfill your contract?" We had all these demos and live tapes stored up so we just threw it together to get out from under our contract. We were already pretty much disbanded by then.

All things being equal and given the change to go back and do it over again what would you do differently?

<Jerry> The only thing I think I would change is that I would take greater care to keep ourselves focused on following God and not the industry or a label or a manager. I think when we had this pure hearted fire to just chase God and encourage other people to do the same, we were good. It's when we started trying to play the music industry game that we blew it.

What ever happened to Sideways 8?

<Jerry> It never took off. We recorded some okay songs but we all had families and day jobs and just couldn't get it off the ground. It was fun writing and collaborating but we never played live anywhere even one time. It was all studio stuff.

I think God knew he was about to move me to Vegas. It would have been tougher to hear from Him in a loud rock band.

What do you think Jacob's Troubles legacy is to Christian Music?

<Jerry> I honestly don't think we have one. I can't see that we mattered to Christian music at all. To our fans, yes and I am still proud of that connection. But to Christian music as a genre or industry or whatever? No.

Do you ever have the desire to buy an old police cruiser and put the band back together and go on the road? After all, you'd really be on a mission from God.

<Jerry> Funny you should ask. We had actually gone so far as to schedule a reunion concert last year. There was even talk of maybe doing another record. Then, suddenly, it fell apart. Nothing ever materialized. And it went down in such a way that I could hear that door slam shut and lock tight. Our relationships suffered because of that. Some of us don't speak to one another anymore because of it. It's sad.

What's your favourite Monty Python movie and why?

<Jerry> The Holy Grail. Word for word, frame for frame, packed with comedy genius. There has never been another like it.

Do you miss doing professional interviews? I did refrain from introducing bodily functions, or discussing the current state of CCM. That should count for something.

<Jerry> The only thing I miss from being a professional is the camaraderie of being in a band of brothers. It's one of the things that most drew me to play music, the idea of the band. It's why I loved the Monkees so much. Sure, in real life, they hate each others' guts, but on the TV show, they had such a well-crafted illusion of friendship. Something it seemed the Beatles had genuinely, at least until that Yoko chick showed up.

You ever think of writing a book about the history of the band and your experiences with the Christian music industry just as it was about to become big business?

<Jerry> I have already started writing my experience down but more as catharsis for me. What did I learn about myself? What did I learn about God? I doubt many people would ever actually want to read it. It's just for me and my family really.

Any parting shots? Words of advice to your fans who still remember you and the band?

<Jerry> Call Killen Music Group in Nashville and tell them to put our stuff on iTunes. I could use the cash.

Jevon the Tall
banopernalia.com
February 2008