Buying Into the Dream

Mark Davis is either an unsung hero who bought himself and a small network of listeners a musical treasure, or a fool who dug himself into a pit of debt just to make a record that hardly anybody has heard.

After years of knocking on music-industry doors without getting the answer he wanted, Davis resolved two years ago, in a trough of dejection over his prospects, to finance his own CD. He pulled out his credit cards and charged the production expenses to create the aurally complex, fine-sounding “You Came Screaming.”

Now Davis, 32, is living with the consequences.

“I’m under the weight of my payments, and it wears on me,” he said.

How heavy a weight might that be? “I don’t know if I want to say. It’s not even close” to being paid off.

So Davis keeps a full-time day job in customer service for an L.A. company when he would rather be writing songs, lives under the roofs of family members and friends to save on rent, and hopes that a thus-far indifferent music business will get excited about the album he went in hock to make.

But if Davis’ life these days is shot through with worry about debt, it is also warmed by the knowledge that he has beautifully realized his high artistic aims.

“You Came Screaming,” the first CD in a career that started on the Safari Sam’s scene in Huntington Beach more than 10 years ago, is one of the finest albums ever made by an Orange County rock musician.

Though hardly anybody knows it, Davis’ record also stands as one of the best releases, anywhere, of 1995. (Davis and his band play Sunday at the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica.)

Chatting over a sandwich recently at a Stanton eatery, Davis looked the part of a pop-rock troubadour. His hair fell unkempt past his shoulders, his tall, lean frame was wrapped in a plain, dark sports jacket, his muzzle and chin sprouted a light, stubbly beard.

John Lennon is his key inspiration and role model. A couple of years ago, Davis took a picture of Lennon and drew a cartoon balloon containing two words that distilled the songwriting advice he felt Lennon would give him if he were only here to give it: “Be brave.”

You can hear a touch of Lennon in Davis’ singing, along with traces of another highly emotional, reedy-voiced singer: the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn.

Among contemporary singer-songwriters, Davis resembles Peter Case, Peter Himmelman and the Waterboys’ Mike Scott in his strong ear for melody and his determination to grapple with large, morally charged themes and spiritual concerns.

Davis, the second of seven children, said his first memories are of family gatherings around a piano, singing songs such as “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” His father, Wally Davis, who died in November 1994 just as “You Came Screaming” was being completed, played the saxophone but made his mark in Orange County as a high-profile, activist attorney pushing for Latino rights (Mark’s background is Mexican on his father’s side, German on his mother’s.)

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By the age of 11, Davis and a younger brother, Luke, were writing songs on the instrument at hand, one of those programmed organs that clicks out a rhythm while you play a tune on the keys.

Davis remembers putting songs together in his head on his walks home from junior high in Villa Park, using the cadence of his footfalls for a beat. Wanting to get the music out of his head and into the open, he taught himself to play the guitar that his older sister, Anja, had taken up and then set aside.

By today’s MTV-kid standards, Davis’ indoctrination into rock ‘n’ roll came extremely late. He didn’t hear the Beatles until a friend introduced him to their records as a junior at Villa Park High School. Until then, Davis had been an Electric Light Orchestra fan without being aware that E.L.O. was in large part a Beatles knockoff. The Beatles’ songs had a familiar ring to him, though: “I knew a lot of them from driving in the car with my dad, playing Muzak stations.”

Davis started his first band, Breakaway, during his senior year of high school, teaming with friends from St. Norbert’s Catholic Church in Orange, his social hub during high school and college. Moving on to Cal State Fullerton, he formed Clockwork, which began to play in local clubs and get nibbles from record companies.

He got his degree in public relations and communications. Davis said he regrets majoring in something he thought would be practical; he wishes he had gone where his natural interests led, toward philosophy and literature.

In 1988, he moved to Los Angeles and began playing as a solo act. He won good reviews as part of a briefly celebrated singer-songwriter movement dubbed “Nu Folk.” In the early ‘90s, he formed the Inklings, which featured classy guitarist Duane Jarvis and looked like a strong candidate for a record contract.

But no deal came. The band fell apart, and Davis, by mid-1994, was fed up with second-guessing himself over which songs he should record and how he should record them to seduce the label executives.

“I just got super depressed. I was at work one day; I don’t know what happened, but a lightbulb switched on. I called my friend Joe Hines,” the old high-school buddy who had introduced him to the Beatles. Davis told him: “ ‘I want to make a record. Can I move into your house?’ I knew I had to cut my expenses somehow.”

Davis settled in with Hines in Tustin, and later with Davis’ sister, Marisa, in Midway City, as he cobbled together “You Came Screaming.”

The 10 songs trace Davis’ struggle to be his own man and to protect and pursue his own vision (“A Different Tune”), his confrontations with corrupting desires (“Blind”), despair (“Devotion”) and, most movingly, his insistence on a life of high idealism and aspiration, despite the heavy costs that must be paid (“As Big as Love,” “Andromadine,” “Hollow” and “Reminder”).

“I hope the record is uplifting in a sense,” Davis said, acknowledging that it is a serious journey through internal struggle that offers no easy, feel-good answers.

“To me, to come to terms with pain, to be able to say ‘Living on this planet hurts’ is a release,” he said. “A lot of things [in modern life] are set up to ignore that. [The album] isn’t a down thing. It’s me saying, ‘This is really hard.’ It’s a relief [for listeners] to know that somebody else feels that way.”

Davis’ struggles in the music business became no easier with the album’s release last May. He was pinning his hopes on KSCA-FM, the Los Angeles adult-album-alternative station that is the key local outlet for his type of pop-rock.

“They said they liked it; they thought it was a good record, but they said there wasn’t any one song they could get behind,” Davis recalled. “It bothers me because it fits in with what they play, and it’s a local thing. At least give it a chance. I was kind of counting on that, at least to get a local thing going [on a higher-profile level] than it is now.”

Davis said a handful of similar stations have been playing his record in places such as Michigan and New Mexico. He has developed some regular gigs in San Francisco, where he plays acoustic shows every six weeks or so.

In Southern California, he has played a fairly regular round of acoustic shows, along with rare full-band appearances such as the one this Sunday.

Davis was buoyed by a monthlong trip to Europe in February, in which earnings from the 11 shows he played nearly offset the cost of his working vacation. The trip gave him a taste of the life he would like to lead: “I was hanging out with people and playing music--the perfect existence.”

Back home, Davis has to confront his album-related debt, which one close friend said came to about $10,000, and the fact that, after nearly eight years of concerted effort, he is still waiting for his big break.

He looks at his old friends and sees: “They’re all married, with set jobs, having kids and here I am giving up my apartment, moving in with family, spending a bunch of money I don’t have, and in a lot of ways being less secure,” Davis said, assessing the past two years.

For anyone who thinks Davis made a fool’s bargain by trading solvency for a record album, we’ll end with his strongest possible response, the one he makes in the lyrics to “Hollow”:

You call it make-believe,

What you call rust, I call silver.

I’m just a fool to you,

You call my stream a frozen river . . .

But I am captured by a star

I know that I must follow.

If mine is make-believe,

It licks your real world hollow.

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Mark Davis and his band play Sunday at 10 p.m. at the Alligator Lounge, 3321 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. $4. (310) 449-1844.

“You Came Screaming” is available at Tower and Borders stores, or by calling at (213) 662-1166.