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PHOTO BY BRETT MOUNTAIN

Gretchen Gonzales
Davidson plays electric
guitar and performs back-
ing vocals.

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continued from page 28

was also introduced to music from the
Motown, Stax and Chess labels as well
as contemporary rock. He played bass
in “different punk bands that no one
remembers,” worked with the Detroit
groups December’s Children and Ash
Can Van Gogh and also backed singer-
songwriter Mary McGuire. Another
band, Spiral Dance, had an album on
the College Music Journal charts during
the early ’90s.
But, Davidson notes, “I could never
really operate as the odd man in a band.
That’s why I started doing acoustic
music; I could travel on my own sched-
ule and didn’t have to rely on other
people. I could go where I wanted, when
I wanted.
“I wanted to live an existence that
was a little closer to the bone — just
traveling around, living on the road.
I didn’t want to live that life of sort of
quiet desperation ... that I saw a lot in
Bloomfield Hills. To me, music offered
a way to live that life that I wanted. It’s
a way to be out on the road, to connect
with people.”
He followed that path to Wiseman,
Alaska, which Davidson called home for
a time during the early- and mid-’90s —
though his touring schedule kept him
away most of the time. That’s where he
began to write songs in earnest, how-
ever. “It’s this tiny little half-abandoned
goldmining camp,” he remembers, “and I
would play guitar for people, all sorts of
old folks songs and country songs. And
I thought, ‘Maybe I could try to do this.’
I was out of college by then and didn’t
have any plan, so I started writing songs
more seriously.”
Davidson has been releasing albums
since the early 2000s, starting as a co-
owner of the now defunct Times Beach
Records label in Royal Oak. He toured
hard — including a trek aptly dubbed
the Six Year Tour — and also took a
seven-year break at one point before
returning to active duty with Silvertooth
in 2012, followed by 2015’s Drawnigh
and now Crows. During the interim, he
crept a bit more into his father’s world
and is now active in the family charita-
ble foundation, as well as serving as an

archivist for the Pistons as the team pre-
pares to shutter the Palace of Auburn
Hills, which his father built, and move
downtown to Little Caesars Arena.
“I slept on the floor of that place,”
says Davidson, who worked as a Palace
stagehand during his teens and 20s. “I
carried gear for all the bands. I rolled up
cables after concerts that had all kinds
of, um, concert liquids on them.
“Time moves on, of course. Nothing
is forever. My father died. Chuck Daly
died. Jack McCloskey just passed. You’d
think at some point there’s going to be
none of us left, or very few of us left and
the Palace will be long gone. I’m just
happy they asked me to stay involved. I
couldn’t be more grateful for that.”
The country-flavored Crows — pro-
duced by friend and Detroit music icon
Warren Defever ( from His Name Is
Alive) — displays Davidson’s most thor-
ough immersion yet into Jewish theol-
ogy. He acknowledges a direct influence
from his Chasidic studies, including the
Australian-Israeli philosopher Martin
Buber and German intellectual Rabbi
Samson Raphael Hirsch. “A lot of it is
thinking about relationships — how do I
have a relationship with another human
being or an object, that kind of thing,”
Davidson explains, citing a song such as
“Coyote” that pulls directly from Genesis
stories such as Cain and Abel.
“The thing I got from going to Hillel
and growing up Jewish was always
very philosophically inclined if not reli-
giously inclined,” says Davidson, who
does “Jewish learning with my kids on
a daily basis” at home. “The thing that
was appealing to me was the philoso-
phy and the dialogue. Jews love to ask
questions and challenge things, and
that was always appealing to me.” And
that, of course, dovetails easily into his
songwriting.
“Since the first record I’ve drawn
heavily from the Bible in terms of imag-
ery,” Davidson says. “I try to code it in
a way it’s maybe not so obvious. I don’t
hit somebody over the head. I’m not a
born-again evangelical guy singing in a
church, after all. I’m an armchair Jewish
philosopher.” •

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July 27 • 2017

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