King Midas

If King has an affinity for local clubs and bands, it’s partly because he grew up here, in Golden Valley, and lives there now with his wife, Laura, and their two small kids. After attending Cooper High School and the MacPhail Center for Music, for five years he played jazz and rock gigs and did studio work in Los Angeles, learning the industry. But as a sideman, he was increasingly interested in doing more original work. “I was living in LA when Nirvana took off,” he says. “All of a sudden, you saw 300 bands trying to sound like Nirvana instead of trying to make their own stuff.” He and Laura returned to the Twin Cities, and he immediately connected with creative hometown musicians, including the guys with whom he would form Happy Apple. “It was really something how much they stood above a lot of the musicians I’d heard,” King says, “and I thought, ‘Wow, if we could start a creative music scene here, I don’t see how it could be ignored.’”

King’s biggest fan is another local—his dad, Dwayne King. The retired IBM systems engineer attends every one of his son’s shows in the Twin Cities, travels to New York when The Bad Plus plays there (including for its recent Carnegie Hall gig), and has traveled to Europe to see Dave perform there. He even hawks CDs at Happy Apple shows. His dad, however, admits to having doubts at the beginning. “Thinking that Dave could build an audience such as he did with Happy Apple two and three people at a time and then make a living at it was beyond what I ever imagined,” he says. “I never envisioned he could actually create his own style of music.”

Dave grew up listening to his parents’ records—1950s rock, jazz, big band, classical, country. When Dave was three years old, his dad recalls, he would lie on the floor and play Buddy Holly and Hank Snow for hours at a time. His older brother, Patrick, was into seventies rock—yet another inspiration. “The more I heard different things, the more I wanted to hear something that outdid it,” he says. “It didn't matter if it was cool, it didn’t matter what style it was. I was really interested in how mysterious it was to try to get really good at your instrument and still retain that street, rock ’n’ roll kind of thing. From then, it just started working backward. I was like, ‘What about John Coltrane or acoustic jazz or 1960s modal jazz, free jazz?’ ” Finally, in high school, he says, “I started realizing what was coming out of me was a combination of all this stuff. I’m into Devo and Rush and John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin. What does that sound like? And I like them all the same. And I like Stravinsky and Charlie Parker.”

King started playing the piano when he was four. By the time he took formal lessons, at five, he had mastered the basics. “He just sat for hours, sounding things out on the piano,” his father says. “And he began making things up on the piano, which led to the improvisation he does today.”

In the fifth grade, King had to choose an instrument to play in the school band. His dad says he wanted him to play the trumpet, but “he tried out for drums, so that was the end of that.” King taught himself the drums, and almost immediately was able to play along with records. When he was in the seventh grade, he bought his first drum set from a friend for $100. “It had his name on the front of the head,” King says, “so every time I played, it said my name was Marty Jackson.”

Soon he added some beat-up cymbals to his set and started taking lessons. He became obsessed with the drums, and, with friends—some of whom he’d later play with professionally—started rock bands in his basement. When he was thirteen, King recalls, he angered a minister at a church function when his band played Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” In high school, he says, he was kicked out of band class for ad-libbing too much. But that, he adds, was a blessing in disguise. “My friends and I were playing complicated fusion music like Weather Report tunes and trying to imitate Jaco Pastorius.” Meantime, the school’s newly formed jazz band was banging away on John Mellencamp’s “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.”

The memory still breaks him up.