No one played like Jesse Ed Davis. As frontman, sideman, guitarist, pianist, producer, bandleader, and more, the multi-talented musician recorded or appeared with more than one hundred major artists, including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Taj Mahal, the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Emmylou Harris, Leon Russell, Harry Nilsson, Leonard Cohen, Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker, Cher, Gene Clark, Arlo Guthrie, and too many others to list here. In addition to making three solo albums during the early 1970s, he became one of the most sought-after guitarists in Hollywood, contributing to over one hundred major releases, including eight top-ten albums, seven top-ten singles, and dozens more top-twenty and top-forty records. “My discography would be as long as my arm, probably,” he said. That was an understatement.
By age twenty-five, Jesse was already beloved among guitar players by virtue of his work with Taj Mahal. Covering guitar, piano, organ, horn arrangements, and even handwritten album notes, Jesse was such an instrumental force that Taj sometimes called their group the Davis Band. It was specifically Jesse’s scorching slide guitar on Taj Mahal’s version of “Statesboro Blues” that inspired Duane Allman to adopt the technique, long before the latter became widely regarded as the greatest bottleneck slide player in the world with the Allman Brothers Band.
That’s Jesse’s spirited electric guitar solo on Jackson Browne’s first top-ten hit “Doctor My Eyes.” Those are Jesse’s seductive acoustic guitar licks on Rod Stewart’s sultry number-one hit “Tonight’s the Night.” In 1973, Mick Jagger had Jesse waiting in Los Angeles with his bags packed, ready to fill Keith Richards’s spot on a Rolling Stones tour, before Keith escaped a twenty-five-count drug bust in the nick of time. “Jesse’s music? Those are my roots,” testifies guitarist Elliot Easton, whose group the Cars topped the music charts for a decade. In a rare interview, Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green adds, “I tell you who I like a lot and that’s Jesse Ed Davis.” “Indian Ed’ll lay more guitar on you than any of them blues guitar people you can name,” taunted cosmic cowboy Gram Parsons. “Indian Ed is the cream of the crop; he’s better than Clapton and Hendrix put together.”
Such accolades and endorsements alone merit serious attention, but then his story merits a book. Jesse Edwin Davis III was born in Oklahoma in 1944 to a family that was practically nobility in its community. Like a million other kids from his generation, he dreamed of becoming a rock and roll star after seeing Elvis Presley. When attempts at college and military service failed, he split for California and soon found himself playing with the biggest rock stars in the world. Before long, however, Jesse was swept into a rising tide of debilitating drug addiction. Ten years later, he began orchestrating a comeback after joining forces with a powerful poet he sang about long before they ever met, only for their formidable partnership to end prematurely. Everything moved too fast, with a strange collage of characters and subjects—including Johnny Cash, the Beatles, Little Richard, Andy Warhol, Bob Hope, Gary Busey, the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Kiowa Six, the Stanford Seven, John Lennon’s assassin, and an Aquarian cult— marking his days and nights. And if this inspires skepticism, these are only the greatest hits.
To be fair, Jesse sometimes undermined his own credibility. He was prone to self-mythologizing. Did he really play on the Monkees’ hit “Last Train to Clarksville”? “Oh no,” laughs the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith. “I’ve heard it was everyone from Jesse Ed to Charles Manson.” Jesse didn’t need to embellish his résumé. The reality was far more impressive. But then, Jesse didn’t move to California for the fact; he went there for the fiction.
Jesse Ed Davis wasn’t your average rock star. Though he performed poorly as an English major at university, he loved reading. He displayed an impressive vocabulary and impeccable penmanship. His knowledge was intimidating. “Have a good day and learn things,” he recited daily. To date, he’s the only musician I’ve heard refer to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from the stage. Other favorites included his Kiowa cousin N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain, Dashiell Hammett detective novels, roguish Hollywood star Errol Flynn’s autobiography, and Ross Russell’s magisterial biography of Charlie Parker. Jesse was especially intrigued by Parker’s redheaded Jewish trumpeter Red Rodney, who, in terms of his ethnicity, seemed dissonant in a music world where he was known as “Albino Red.” He became hooked on heroin, not unlike Jesse himself.
To Jesse, the meaning of life was simple: eat good food, play good music, and have fun. His song “Every Night Is Saturday Night” wasn’t just a party tune; it was a serious personal philosophy, though it sometimes became reckless. “I made too much money too soon, and too young,” he once observed. Jesse was a quintessential Virgo: hardworking, but equally hard on those around him. He subjected himself and others to abrupt pivots between wanting to feel as intensely as possible and not wanting to feel at all. “There’s just a darkness in me,” he confessed to friends when they tried to help. “Being an artist,” he said, “you have to feel deeply. You have to feel more deeply than your average person. You have to feel more deeply to even want to be an artist.”
Jesse was indeed an artist, but he was also a man of many contradictions. He knew his talent, but he was insecure. He was an innovator who championed tradition; he loved Christmas and simple pleasures like beaches and amusement parks. He could talk on the phone for hours, but then disappear for days. He went out of his way to help friends, but he also hustled them. He produced a large network of musicians, but he compartmentalized his life. He was proud of who he was, but his omnipresent mirrored sunglasses made it seem like he wanted to hide or disguise himself. He was physically imposing, but his humor was disarming—his smile was a song unto itself.