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Tenacious Twosome
porterdavis plays for the pretty girls
by Ellen Mallernee
Every few months, porterdavis steers its Honda minivan into the Mellow Mushroom parking lot. Mike Meadows unloads his extended family of percussion instruments while Daniel Barrett lugs his guitar cases inside. Though the band has been on the road for weeks, it’s energized, as though this is the first show porterdavis ever played, in the finest venue. Dan’s curly ‘do falls across his orange sunglasses, and he is one big smile, weaving his way around to talk with the employees he knows. Mike is the shyer of the two, scuffing around, sipping from a pint glass. After a while, the pair set up in a tiny corner of the bar, under a shadow cast by an enormous mushroom. Mike straps a cuff of bells onto an ankle or a tambourine onto a sandal and straddles his cajon—a box drum traditionally used for flamenco music. Dan picks up a guitar and begins to sing; his voice is rich and memorable, and the bar is filled with a warm, rhythmic sensation. Suddenly, the presence of these two young men is staggering. These guys are good. Really good.
The duo, currently residing in Austin, TX, met years ago in Boston, where they were both attending Berklee College of Music. In need of a percussionist for his thriving band, the Daniel Barrett Group, Barrett didn’t hesitate to invite Meadows into the mix. “The musical chemistry was just there from the beginning,” Barrett says. “And once that’s there, you just have to work out the details.” Barrett’s band evolved into porterdavis when he and Meadows began waking at 5am every weekday to play for the rush hour commute down at the Porter and Davis Square subway stations.
Besides invoking their eventual name, porterdavis’ experience in the subway began them tripping along a path of wholehearted allegiance to a vision they shared explicitly. Their grimy subway mornings together were both unifying and overwhelming for the two men. “You see humanity,” Meadows says. “Homeless people would come up and give us their last bit of change.” After just two weeks of playing in the subway, porterdavis had one of its usual club gigs, but this time around the place was packed, and sixty of those people were from the subway.
Of the members of Barrett’s original band, Meadows and Barrett were certainly the most tenacious. “We ended up being the nucleus of the band,” Barrett says, “so we downsized it like some sort of corporation.” Both Meadows and Barrett agree that what’s most vital to their relationship is their musical trust in one another. This trust comes from the intrinsic communication they share, but also from a hearty musical education.
Meadows began playing classical percussion at the age of 12, graduated to a drum set at 16, and by the time he was 18 he was experimenting with ethnic percussion, traveling to Africa twice to study with different tribes.
Meadows’ experience in Africa is reflected not only in the makeup of porterdavis’ music, but also in their attitude towards it. “I want to know that my happy songs were as happy as they could have been, and my sad songs were as sad as they could have been, and my sexy songs were as sexy as they could have been,” Barrett says. “If you put us in Zimbabwe in front of a tribe, would they know it was really a sad song, even if they didn’t know what we were saying?”
Barrett first picked up a guitar after attending an awe-inspiring party in high school. In the center of the room was a half-rate band, wreathed by a cluster of pretty girls. The band played Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” and Barrett had a sudden epiphany. “I started playing the guitar, and I realized there wasn’t much to it,” he says. “And all of a sudden the girl you wanted to talk to is sitting there listening to you play. Once I started playing I delved way deep into it, and for much better reasons than playing Poison songs.”
Though content for the meantime, porterdavis aspires to more than gigs at the Mellow Mushroom. And the band is well on its way, booking shows across the east and west coasts, and crafting an album to follow its EP, which was released earlier this year. The guys are meriting the attention of big wigs like Melissa Ethridge, who they opened for in 2002, and Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul and Mary), among other artists.
“My ideal life is when I get to just buy some good simple food and play in front of as many people as possible,” Barrett says. “It can be a very dark world if I look at what’s really going on. So I know what I love and I try to stay close to the things that make the world really happy for me.”
December 2, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 49
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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