Slower and Saner: On Pipes, Rock-Stardom, and Jody Davis “Don’t mind the naked black guy in the hallway,” Jody Davis says, as we make our way through a dark passage to the back of the Newsboys’ tour bus in Saginaw, Michigan. “I get that all the time in my line of work,” I reply, which is not-untrue of sports writing. The Newsboys are a CCM pop juggernaut, having launched in Australia, but garnering critical and commercial success stateside in the 1990s. Jody Davis is their lead guitar player. The black guy, in this case, is Michael Tait, formerly of DC Talk and now the lead singer. Outside there are several thousand sweaty evangelicals in lawn chairs waiting to scream for four middle-aged men. The oddness of the scene hasn’t escaped Davis. Rather, it is just part of the job. It’s odd, spending time with middle-aged rock stars. The tour bus seems like an appropriate locale for people in their twenties, not so much men with families in their forties. But the thin, dark-bearded Davis turns to pipe-making to help wile away some of the long hours on the road. “I started playing guitar because I loved music, and with pipes it was the same thing,” Davis explains. “In the years before eBay I was big into antiquing on the road. Wherever we had a tour stop I’d find antique stores and estate sales. I started learning about the estate market and antique pipes. I fell in love with the different shapes and wood.” Like most of us, Davis was drawn to the aesthetics, culture, and pace of pipe smoking. “When I first started smoking we had this C.S. Lewis book club in Nashville called ‘Inklings,’ where we’d smoke pipes and discuss books and theology. Lighting and smoking a pipe helps you to relax and wind down. It helps me to do my reading, and have consistent quiet-times of study. I think it has a tendency to help people who are a little ADD—it’s essentially relaxing but it also keeps the mind engaged.” Sometime in the mid-90s Davis bought his first pipe kit and whittled out his first pipe. He then started chasing down higher-quality briar and stem material, and made a pipe that caught the attention of a buyer for a high-end pipe shop in Nashville called “Uptown.” “He said, ‘Man, this is pretty good’” Davis recalls. “He created a lot of hype for my pipes which I then had to live up to.” Davis sought guidance and inspiration from the Danish pipe-masters, who at the time had a corner on the world’s high-end pipe market.
Davis explains that the creativity involved in pipe-making is different than the kind that is required for collaborative efforts like songwriting, recording and touring. “I’m basically an introvert,” he explains, “which is strange for this line of work [rock-star]. I live for the solitary day in the shop. It’s all your own. It’s fun to see something through entirely from start to finish.” However, human nature being what it is, there are many of the same dramas and pressures in both industries. “Everyone’s a critic,” he says with a smile. “In the pipe community there are lots of chat rooms and lots of dramas.” As a result, Davis keeps his online presence to a minimum, as a way of protecting the joy of pipe smoking, but also as a means of managing both worlds—music and pipes. We spend a moment bemoaning the fact that the Internet has changed, well, everything in both of Davis’s industries. “Kids used to buy entire records,” he says. “Musicians used to be able to trace their musical influences through bands from the past. Now a kid says, ‘I like The Killers, so I’ll make a band that sounds like The Killers.” Everyone, it seems, is looking for the next 99 cent download hit, rather than the cohesive, coherent album.
