Josh Davis on vinyl prospecting, surviving bad reviews and seeing the light that turned him into DJ Shadow
Article by Dan Eldridge
A week before our phone interview, I met Davis at a 10 a.m. Resonance photo shoot in Seattle's W Hotel.
By the time 10:15 rolled around, Davis was nowhere in sight. The photographer fiddled with her equipment. Sitting around a long conference table, Davis' tour manager, his British label rep, a PR person from the hotel and the Resonance crew made small talk. A few of us took refills of complimentary coffee. Someone asked if the plastic fruit was real.
"Josh is just downstairs wolfing down some cornflakes," his tour manager told us, as if he could sense the tension.
When Davis finally walked in, he wore a gray crewneck sweatshirt--a little baggy, the kind you might take a nap in--and a gray baseball cap and blue jeans. There was nothing bad-ass about him.
Here was a 30-year-old man who, six years earlier, had put truckloads of overconfident hip-hop DJs and beat junkies in their places by proving that real skills required hard work, not just posturing. If anyone had earned the right to a little posturing, it was him. But with DJ Shadow, whose moniker is a sly reference to his dislike of the limelight, there isn't any practiced rudeness or gimmie-gimmie temper-tantrums. "These DJs are all guys who've spent years and years, literally, in their bedrooms scratching and mixing beats," says Doug Pray, director of the 2002 documentary Scratch, which charts the history and culture of the scratch DJ. "There's something about that process that makes them a bit more introverted. They just aren't that comfortable with the spotlight. Even the physical act of putting lights on them makes some of them squeamish."
But, for all of Davis' discomfort, the press seems to love him. I ask him if he reads his own record reviews and magazine profiles.
"I think like most artists, it's like a moth to a flame kind of mentality," Davis replies. "You know you shouldn't, but you do. Sometimes you just can't resist."
Has he ever gotten any negative press?
"Oh yeah," he says. "The very first record review that ever came out was a total dis. I was crushed. I couldn't function for the rest of the day."
It's hard to imagine Davis being crippled by emotion, this man who has built his career on professionalism and maturity. His story, after all, a sort of rags-to-riches tale for the lower-middle class set.
"Growing up in Davis [California]," he says, " we were always the last people to get anything cool. I was raised by a divorced mother. She was a teacher; she taught second and third grade. We didn't have a VCR until about '87. We never had cable, we didn't have a microwave. We never had any cool stuff."
These days, of course, getting his hands on cool stuff has become something of a defining mission for DJ Shadow. One of the most memorable scenes in the DJ documentary Scratch was a deep-focus shot of Davis sitting in the basement storage space of his favorite used record store with mountains of vinyl towering toward the ceiling and swallowing him on all sides. "This is my nirvana," he says, wandering among the makeshift stacks and grabbing a 45 here and a 12-inch there. Not surprisingly, his debut album inspired a new breed of used record-store crate diggers who wondered if they, too, could make magic out of "a big pile of broken dreams," as Davis calls his favorite record store's collection in Scratch.
"DJ Shadow is definitely the king of digging," says Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli DJ Cut Chemist, in another scene. "It's like he's got spidey sense or something." Later, I email Cut Chemist to ask him more. "When [Shadow and I] hang out," he writes back, "we either buy, trade or talk about records. It never gets old for either one of us."
"I dig all the time," Davis says, back at his hotel room in L.A. "But I just don't dig for what everybody else is digging for. I collect different things all the time, because as a collector, you need things to collect. And if the resources totally dry up, then you either stop collecting or you go on to another genre that interests you. And if I ever run out of things that interest me, I'll just stop collecting. But so far that hasn't happened."
During a recent live performance, Davis announced to the spellbound audience that he is now promoting a new style of DJing, where the beats are not only in time, but in tune. "You think it can't be done," Shadow told the crowd, "but it's possible."
And what if some day Davis decides he's given the turntables their final spin as DJ Shadow?
"Actually," he says, laughing, "I came up with this scheme recently. I think, when I'm in my fifties, what I'll probably do is, like, you know how in sports collectibles they have these people who give stuff their official grade of approval? Like an official signature? I think I can do that for records, just give it an official grade. The official Josh Davis Seal that this record is VG plus-plus."
Not exactly a rock-star retirement plan, but for DJ Shadow it sounds perfect.
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