Biography

David Jacobs-Strain is a virtuosic slide guitar player and a storyteller with a passionate one man show that is both humorous and deeply lyrical. A bridge between today’s indie folk troubadours and the delta guitar slingers of the 1930′s, David plays with precision and sings with emotional abandon. He’s a six-foot-two Jewish blues singer from Oregon, a Stanford drop-out in a trucker hat, and a Left Coast poet; one part Leo Kotke, one part Ken Kesey, and one part Robert Johnson. Is it Delta Blues? Gangsta Grass? Geekabilly? Secular Humanist Gospel? It’s a sound big enough to land David at the Newport Folk Festival —as a teenager— and later at MerleFest, the Strawberry Music Festival, the Montreal International Jazz Fest, and on tour with artists as diverse as Lucinda Williams, Etta James, Bob Weir, and Boz Scaggs (for three summer tours).

David’s new record “Live From The Left Coast” features harmonica legend Bob Beach. “Rainbow Junkies” could be a lost Jimmie Page tune, “Hurricane Railroad” grooves like a young David Lindley, while “Dirt And Wildflowers” is a quirky but sexy revelation (like the Moldy Peaches meet Towns Van Zandt). The cascading harmonics and retro tinted lyrics of “Halfway To The Coast” and “Pescadero Beach” evoke the damaged but wild Northwest: heartbroken but beautiful, melodic and spare.

David also appears with his amplified string band The Crunk Mountain Boys. It’s not just a funky name: John is a drummer with a tambourine instead of a hi hat, Zak plays the standup bass behind his head like Hendrix, and Blake bangs on as much of the Hammond B-3 as he can haul up the stairs. They all sing as if their souls and their supper depend on it. You could compare them to Avett Brothers with a slide guitar player and a west coast twang (though the Avett’s do have better suits!). One fan described The Crunk Mountain Boys as the “Black Fleet Foxes”, but they probably sound more like acoustic Little Feat…. with more plaid and less cocaine…

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article by Dan Ouelette
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Bending notes with a slide guitar elicits the most invigorating, emotional sounds in popular music. Witness today’s slide explorations in songs by such contemporary guitarists as Chris Whitley, Jack White and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. Add to that list David Jacobs-Strain, the twentysomething singer-songwriter who brilliantly brings the rich roots of slide guitar to the millennials generation with his eclectic styling that melds the blues, folk, rock and indie pop into a tasty Americana brew inflected with pockets of funk and reggae. “There’s a primal sound to the slide,” he says, “I like how I get the slide to sneak around in my songs, showing up in unexpected places, from mellow tunes to hard rock.” In addition to his compelling instrumental prowess, Jacobs-Strain also proves himself a literate lyricist, as evidenced on his latest album, Live From the Left Coast, a duo date with harmonica ace Bob Beach.

While Jacobs-Strain can’t exactly put his finger on what style to call his singular music, he has jokingly named it “gangsta-grass” and “one-man arena rock,” while also hazarding the term about himself as a “magical realist of the Delta blues.” But he largely steers away from the “blues” label—otherwise, he says, “people would be disappointed if they came to one of my shows, even if the blues does form one component of my music. I’m tired and not interested in the clichés that pass for blues today where so often the songwriting is poor and the crowds are sedated by machismo and cheap beer.” Indeed, Jacobs-Strain’s music breaks from today’s blues mainstream by being more playful, hauntingly beautiful and self-revealing.

Jacobs-Strain is well-versed in the slide guitar tradition in roots music, country blues and folk, stretching back to Delta blues fathers such as Robert Johnson, Son House and Charley Patton and later to next generation sliders such as Mississippi Fred McDowell with Taj Mahal continuing the practice today. But he feels an equal affinity for the likes of Whitley, Ray LaMontagne, Steven Stills, and Steve Earle. “That’s the kind of music I’m creating,” he says. “And I’m inspired by people like Taj Mahal and the Stones, who have a playful sensuality in their music as well as a sense of nuance.”

Today calling himself a “homeless musician” who has moved among such geographic locales as Northern California, Nashville and Portland, Ore., the 27-year-old Jacobs-Strain was born in New Haven, Conn., and moved to Eugene, Ore., with his parents when he was young. “Eugene was such a hip town musically,” he says. “As a little kid I got to hear a lot of great musicians, such as Peter Rowan at this folk festival five blocks from my house and when I was 10, Taj Mahal at the Woodsman of the World Hall. I remember how he took his left hand off his guitar and told a story—one guy, one guitar and it sounded huge and soulful.”

Jacobs-Strain got as many Taj records as he could find on vinyl, dubbed them onto cassettes and took them with him when his family went on road-trip vacations to Utah. “It was all there—soul and the blues, rock and reggae all together, which led me to track down his influences,” says Jacobs-Strain.

As a teenager, as his prowess as a guitarist began to develop, he started to explore more slide players like McDowell and set out to develop his own voice. “I didn’t want to imitate,” he says, and adds, “Then I started working on lyrics. I didn’t want to be thought of as some kind of a blues prodigy. I hated that. I knew that audiences perceived me as a good guitarist, but I also wanted to move people.”

The songs started coming faster the more he played, and while still a teenager, he began to record his own albums, including 1998’s Skin & Bones, an album of blues covers he made when he was 15. Soon he was busking, making enough money to buy a National steel guitar, and a few years later after being mentored by blues ace Otis Taylor recorded Stuck on the Way Back (2001) and Ocean or a Teardrop (2004). Jacobs-Strain recorded a live album (Santa Fee Bootleg), then 2008’s Liar’s Day, an album with the Joe Walsh rhythm team of bassist Kenny Passarelli and drummer Joe Vitale. The buzz Jacobs-Strain generated earned him a spot opening for Boz Scaggs on a lengthy tour in 2008. The latest studio recording for Jacobs-Strain came in 2010 with Terraplane Angel, produced by Ray Kennedy at Room & Board in Nashville.

Jacobs-Strain’s latest album, Live From the Left Coast, captures him collaborating in an organic way with Beach. It was recorded at the Rolling and Tumbling temporary juke joint in Eugene in 2010. It features him sliding on Traugott six-string, Pogreba resonator and Yamaha 12-string. “I had made three studio albums with a full band,” the guitarist says. “But I also play solo or duo live a lot. It’s quite a unique thing that people requested I document on a record. I asked Bob and told him we would do it with old mikes and tubes in the amplifiers. I wanted to make the sound aggressive, but also wanted to give the record a jazz feel, to sound real.”

Naturally Jacobs-Strain pays homage to his heroes by covering Mahal’s “Big Legged Mamas” in a bouncy blues setting, a rare Steven Stills song “Treetop Flyer” that “became a hit at my high school and took me awhile to be able to understand that person in the song,” and Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen” in an usual arrangement that features him playing high slide notes that are almost a holler. “That’s the first or second song I ever learned on the slide,” he says. “His version was taut, but I wanted to give it a little extra intensity and sexual tension. I illustrate that with the guitar—the insisting, the threatening, the demanding, the begging that you hear from what turns out to be an unreliable narrator.”

But the best tracks on the disc come from Jacobs-Strain’s own pen. From Liar’s Day is a fresh version of “Rainbow Junkies” that opens with slide moans then accelerates with a midsection of buoyant guitar virtuosity. It was a tune about a woman that remained unfinished until guitarist Martin Simpson unlocked it for him by suggesting he play it in open C tuning. That’s followed by the shivering travelogue of “Pescadero Beach” on the Northern California coast between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and the hot and spicy “Hurricane Railroad,” that spontaneously combusted with shimmering slide while on the road with Scaggs. “I like playing this on the 12-string with Bob because we trade riffs and really stretch it out,” he says. “It’s a fun piece that makes the guitar sound like a whole band.”

The second half of the album features the blues rocker “Looking for a Home,” an Appalachian type tune written on an old Gibson owned by Ray Kennedy during the Terraplane Angel sessions; the balladic “Halfway to the Coast,” composed with the dark silhouette of the fog in mind while living in the San Francisco Bay Area; the anti-war song “Ocean or a Teardrop” (he says, “It’s not a protest, but more of a lament”); the lyrical beauty “Dirt and Wildflowers” (“It’s a cross between the freak folk of Moldy Peaches and John Prine”); and the speed kicker “Neon Star” that has “an old brown shoe groove going down the Interstate—kind of like a John Lennon rockabilly song, only funkier.”

Live From the Left Coast closes with another Jacobs-Strain tune, “Play It Again,” that’s generally played as an encore. “Bob had never heard the song before,” the guitarist says, “but I just told him key of B-flat and sure enough he followed me. We kept looking at each other and just hanging on for the ride. That’s what was so great about this show versus being with a full band. The guitar can go anywhere and Bob will be there.”

That spirit pervades the entirety of Live From the Left Coast that succeeds both on Jacobs-Strain’s marvelous stride guitar playing as well as the depth of his songwriting emotion. There’s a loose and edgy feel for the music. “This album is not a ProTools perfect or pitch perfect,” he says. “That’s not what we were going for. Instead of being careful, we let the music get grittier.” With a wide grin, Jacobs-Strain adds, “We didn’t play it safe. And that I’m happy with.”