RIDING THE MUSIC WAVE Vol. 8: Jon Davis and Greg Glazner of Clap the Houses Dark
Jon Davis
For many years before there was a band called Clap the Houses Dark, Greg Glazner and I had been discussing music. As we prepared to write together, we dug in and engaged in a series of deep listening sessions—to guitar players, bass players, drummers, composers who were pushing various envelopes, but especially to anyone who spoke over a rock backing. When we entered Greg’s home studio, we had all of those words, all that music in our heads. Listening back to this sample of the many tracks we considered, I can hear approaches to effects, words, riffs, solos, chord voicings, and progressions that entered the band’s vernacular and were transformed. We were experimenting, and these were some of the chemicals we combined in the Clap the Houses Dark test tube. Greg’s the pro here, so I’m just going to touch on a few highlights for me. Wilco had a run of albums that were pushing boundaries—the lyrics, written by Jeff Tweedy, a literate rocker who also produced a decent book of poetry, are beyond most rock lyrics. The song structures are complex, and, of course, Nels Cline was bringing a different approach to lead guitar from his years of playing in experimental ensembles. Tom Waits, represented here by “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” was an influence on my lyric writing, his intricately detailed writing but especially his humorous takes on serious people. But I’m equally interested in Marc Ribot’s guitar playing on Waits’s songs, the way he often provides a discordant counterpoint to a song’s melody—though not so much on “Jockey,” where he’s channeling his Cuban influences. David Byrne’s “Once in a Lifetime” is an ambitious model for anyone trying to speak words over a surging rhythm section. Byrne’s delivery is composed and inventive, honed by practice yet it feels spontaneous. The guitar playing of Wilco’s Nels Cline on “Ashes,” mirrors the ensemble playing in Television, where Tom Verlaine (a lifelong student of poetry) and Richard Lloyd violate punk’s restrictions on lead guitar to play complex lyrical fills and solos. Steve Reich and Pat Metheny (also) work repetition and variation to beautiful and hypnotic effect in their collaboration. The voice and solo guitar over the nervous looped guitar figure on Clap the Houses Dark’s “Over the Transom” ride a similar track.
Greg Glazner
A half-formed question had driven me for decades, one that our band, Clap the Houses Dark, was finally able to grapple with in a focused recording: “Could the words of a song do the work of poetry, while also pulling their weight in challenging rock compositions? Could it all work together in a unified effect? There was so much to learn! The bands on the playlist exist as clusters of influence to me. Wilco is probably the ultimate band on this list, because the lyrics are so fine, poetic and smart, coupled with subtle combo playing by the whole band, and that fabulous Nels Cline solo, soaring and expressive. Both Nels Cline and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco talk about the impact of the band Television on their music. As you say, Jon, Television was punk enough to hang in the CBGB punk scene, and yet they refused punk musical limitations. In complex compositions and with sophisticated diatonic playing, they still maintained a rock edge, something incredibly hard to do. The other band in the CBGB scene that deeply impacted our approach is Talking Heads. “Once in a Lifetime” is an incredible success as a (mostly) spoken song. The Reich/Metheny minimalist piece (which would be clustered with the music of King Crimson if we were doing a longer playlist!) is a direct influence on two songs on our album, “Afterwards” (not included here) and “Over the Transom.” That looped lick I play on guitar is what “Over the Transom” started with, nothing else. We’d been listening to Reich. “Transom” has elements of all of the bands mentioned so far, as well as lots of others. In a broader sense, and not necessarily as a direct influence on our band’s songs, I’ve always felt that guitar playing was more formative of my poetry than song lyrics—the tones and textures of notes against a chord progression, the climbing and releases, the timbres. Jeff Beck’s gorgeous “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” (written by his friend Stevie Wonder) has one of my favorite solos of all time, combining jazz sophistication with rock immediacy and intensity. This was strikingly new music in 1975. And Joni Mitchell’s “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” also has jazz sophistication, along with superb poetic lyrics. Her best music has it all, language, performance, rich music, a good companion piece to the Beck. Oxbow loops us back to Television in a way, fifty years later. The band has classical music sophistication, and lyrics that are more poetic than most bands’, yet the group maintains a heavy rock edge. Our song “Number Them Clouds” owes a lot to the bands on the playlist, especially Television, Oxbow, and Wilco.
About Clap the Houses Dark
The poetry and rock band Clap the Houses Dark released their first album to streaming services in November 2024. The album features Glazner on guitar and sung and spoken vocals, Davis on spoken vocals, poet Tommy Archuleta on drums, Jon Lucero on bass, and sound engineer Jon Trujillo on drums. Mikey Chavez provided additional drums.
Jon Davis is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021) and Fearless Now & Nameless, forthcoming in April from Grid. Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught creative writing and literature for thirty years, twenty-eight of them at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2013, he founded the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA.
Greg Glazner’s collections of poetry are Walking Two Landscapes (State Street Press), From the Iron Chair (W.W. Norton), Singularity (W.W. Norton), and Cellar Testament (William Paterson University Press). His awards include The Walt Whitman Award, The Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, and an NEA Fellowship. A lifelong guitarist, he wrote the libretto for composer Garrett Shatzer’s At the Blinds and performed the electric guitar part in concerts. His Santa Fe bands included The Kinetics, The Bluehounds, The Benders, and Zeno’s Run; his California bands included The Big Night and The Responders. Glazner was a professor of Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe until 2009; he taught at UC Davis until 2023.