Rising Stars: Meet Joel Davis of Boulder

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joel Davis.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

I grew up in Miami, transferred to CU from University of Florida in 1986 and have been mostly in Colorado and primarily in the Boulder area ever since. After graduating from CU in December ’88, I embarked on a path of “let’s see where this goes,” ski-bumming in Vail for a couple of seasons and beach-bumming in San Diego before returning to Boulder in 1990.

I’ve been actively involved at KGNU Community Radio (kgnu.org) mainly as a DJ since 1990 and since 2002 have  hosted a weekly show, TerraSonic (https://kgnu.org/shows/terrasonic/) at noon on Saturdays. Landing at KGNU in my mid-20’s didn’t just get me on the radio; it’s where I started to become “me,” and has really set the course for my adult life. It led me to Sounds True, where I traveled around the country recording conferences before launching their sacred world music label. That turned into a 20+ year career in the music biz (mostly running/owning record labels, as well as artist management, writing about music, presenting concerts and managing tours), and then podcast production, which I still do (pod.link/creativedistillation).

During the pandemic summer of 2020, when my own ebike was pretty much my only source of fun, I serendipitously ran into someone on Instagram with an ebike rental business in St. George, UT. It seemed like a great idea and a fun and safe way for people to get together during a time of “social distancing” (remember that?!), and I reached out to the guy to see if we could talk.

We had a 90-minute Zoom the following day during which I decided to go for it. I was somehow able to acquire four ebikes (all the brand I wanted) from different sellers on Craigs List — at a time when ebikes were very hard to come by. Scoring them felt like a message from the universe to keep going.

At the time, I was working out of the office of a software development company called DOJO4, at 17th & Pearl in downtown Boulder. Since few people were coming to work those days, they were kind and generous enough to let me park a container I had rented in the alley out back. Now, I had a place to store those bikes and from which I could launch my tours.

I wasn’t the first ebike tour company in Boulder and thus had to differentiate from the others. I also wanted to offer a tour that delivered a more offbeat experience, to reflect that part of Boulder as well as myself. I’m not a big “tour” person when I travel, and wanted to do something that would appeal to others who feel the same. I also aim to offer a more personal experience. I have a guy who works on the bikes, handles most of the rentals and leads the occasional tour, but otherwise, JD’s Joyrides is just me, JD, Chief Joyrider, answering the phone, guiding the rides, and doing just about everything else related to the business.

On the side of the DOJO4 building is a mural by Denver artist Max Coleman (@oakbloak) portraying a Florida manatee and the bold message to “Defend the Defenseless.” Everyday, I’d see people stop to admire and photograph that manatee, and that’s what gave me the idea that a mural tour would be a great way to see Boulder.

I reached out to Leah Brenner Clack, founder and director of Streetwise Arts (streetwisearts.org), a non-profit that’s been putting on an annual mural festival in Boulder since 2019, to invite her for an ebike ride while I shared my idea. It sounded good to her, and I was off and running (and Leah and Streetwise have been great friends ever since). I had to move quickly in order to offer tours for the 2020 Streetwise festival. The time from that initial “light bulb” moment that I should start the business to setting out on my first tour, was just four weeks.

Now it’s five years later. Sadly, DOJO4 closed a couple of years ago, which required me to move. But I love my new location, a little bike shack in east Boulder that’s an easy half mile to the Boulder Creek Path. I still do mural tours though my most popular offering is the Boulder Joyride, a two-hour cruise covering many of Boulder’s highlights: CU, the Teahouse, Boulder Canyon, Chautauqua Park, The Flatirons. I recently added the Boulder Hidden Trails Tour, based on a route I ride just for the fun of riding in Boulder. It’s proving to be a big hit.

My “ulterior motive” behind JD’s Joyrides is no secret: to get people on these amazing ebikes in this beautiful town with typically gorgeous weather and 300+ miles of bike paths and trails, and (re)discover the joy of simply riding a bike. Yes, we’re going to see some cool things on these tours, but it’s really about the literal and metaphorical moving experience in between the stops.

“It’s not just a tour. It’s a joyride.”

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

I’m pleased to report that it’s been a mostly smooth ride thus far <knocks on wood>. Probably the biggest challenge for me was finding my way out of the music business.

As a music lover, I enjoyed (and was quite good at) building relationships with artists and collaborating with them in the process of releasing a record. I did not particularly enjoy or excel at the marketing and selling part, though that’s the label’s primary job, and eventually decided I (not to mention the musicians) was better off presenting artists (i.e., playing them on the radio or at a DJ gig) than representing them. At some point around 2016, I hit a wall and, fortunately, was able to hand things off and pretty much simply step away from the record label.

In my early 40’s, at the nadir of my run in the music biz, I felt trapped. I thought that at my age, there was no way out and I’d be stuck doing what I was doing for the rest of my working life. Fortunately, a trusted elder pointed out to me that I was completely wrong in that thinking. That one observation changed my perspective on everything, and got the ball rolling on me pretty much redesigning my life — a renovation that is still underway.

I shed a business for which I no longer had a passion, tried my hand at a startup, escaped a long and unhappy marriage from which I felt there was no escape, and finally got active in creating the life I want. If there’s one takeaway from my story, it’s this: it’s never too late to take the first step towards fomenting change or adding something new to/subtracting old from your life.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

I’m fortunate in that most of the work I’ve done has been part of or at least aligned with my artistic/creative expression.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been into music and wanted to be a radio DJ. When I returned to Boulder in 1990 after a couple years of ski-bumming in Vail, I had an “in” at KBCO Radio and, when I met with them, was told to go get some experience and come back. I heard somewhere that you could take a class at KGNU and then get on the air, and dropped in to sign up. I can’t really overstate how profoundly that one simple action has affected the course of my life ever since.

I started volunteering in the station’s voluminous music library (CD and LP) and discovered a universe of music I didn’t know existed: underground, non-commercial, intentionally non-mainstream, spanning all genres, styles and eras. It was like finding what I’d been looking for my whole life without knowing I’d been looking for it; I was in heaven. Within a couple of weeks I knew I had found my home and lost all interest in commercial radio. I did my first radio show one Friday morning in November 1990 from 3am-530am, and held that slot on a weekly basis for eight months.

I eventually moved into more sleep-friendly time slots, and did a number of shows on a regular or fill-in basis, mainly eclectic freeform mix-type shows like the Afternoon Sound Alternative and Sleepless Nights. I also did a bi-weekly Friday night Jazz & Beyond show for nearly 10 years.

In 2002, I started doing TerraSonic, “your magic carpet ride around the world of music” (aka a mix show of “global tropical funksoul beats”) on CU’s Radio 1190. I moved it over to KGNU in about 2007 and have done it every Saturday at noon since then. Outside of the people I care about, pretty much all animals, and JD’s Joyrides, that little one-hour show is the love of my life.

 

The path that began in my mid-20’s at KGNU led me to a 20-year career in the music industry, mostly running labels specializing in world and “yoga” music. That involved a lot of travel which allowed me to see much of the US and took me to destinations in Europe and Morocco (where I had the thrill of producing three live recordings from five trips to the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music). After nearly eight years at Sounds True, I followed the music path to another label where I was more of a manager than a curator. Working in music was fun at first but eventually led to diminishing returns and dissatisfaction and, as related above, after 15 years I was able to get out.

At DOJO4, reinvigorated by the energy of finding a new path, I met a software developer together we launched a human-curated streaming music service called Conduit (mixcloud.com/conduitmusicco), but it took only a year to learn that we were not going to be able to compete with Spotify, etc. and we shut it down. That left me with podcast production and my wedding officiant biz (did I mention that I’ve been a “Poetic Justice of the Peace” for about 20 years and have performed over 100 weddings? joeldavis.net). I enjoyed the work, but needed more of it.

After Conduit closed, I decided that I needed to find a way to make a living simply being me. That my next move, whatever that ended up being, had to be something that I could approach as an artistic endeavor. The business itself would be a personal expression. Then 2020 came, the pandemic hit, and in August of that year, JD’s Joyrides was born.

The five years since have been incredibly fulfilling, and I’m grateful to do something outdoors, (mostly) away from a desk, that brings a couple hours of joy to peoples’ lives. Whether it’s guiding a joyride; producing a podcast; performing a wedding ceremony; or, through the radio, turning you on to the music you didn’t know you love, I’m able to make a direct and personal connection with all types of people from all over. That’s what life and art are all about for me.

Oh, and that KGNU radio class I took 35 years ago and that led to just about everything that followed? I teach it now. If you’re radio curious, come check it out (kgnu.org). Who knows where it might take you?

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?

I’m known among my friends as a (self-proclaimed) music snob, and many find it fascinating if not shocking that I grew up on a steady diet of Jimmy Buffet, an artist who very much shaped my world view in my formative years. One of my favorite lines by him describes me quite well: “I’m growing older, but not up.”

I was born in Lubbock, TX, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force at the time. But my family’s roots are in Miami and that’s where I was raised. I’m extremely fortunate that I was (am) surrounded by a loving family so not subjected to the home stress that affects so many.

I did pretty typical 70’s kid stuff: playing outside all day with friends until the street lights came on; riding bikes (baseball cards in the spokes) around with no particular goal or destination (except for maybe a Slurpee); listening to pop music on the AM radio; voraciously devouring comic books, magazines and books; getting up to manually change the channel or adjust the antenna on the TV set.

I was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid who loved music and was always making mixtapes (on actual cassette tapes!) and turning friends on to new sounds. I spent a lot of time on the beach in high school.

I did well enough to get by in school but was definitely a “don’t let your schooling interfere with your education” type of student.

When I was young (still single digits), my mom would enroll me in art classes and other creative pursuits. I wasn’t the best at it but I enjoyed it. My parents divorced when I was 10 and my sister and I lived with my dad, an engineer. He was a great dad and loving father, but was more inclined to sign me up for Little League (which I also enjoyed though I was terrible) than a drawing class, and I diverted from the “art path” for most of my teens and early 20’s.

In my mid-20’s, I sublet a room from a fellow KGNU volunteer. One of my new housemates was a sculptor in the MFA program at CU. He invited me to play on the art school softball team (I was better at softball than at Little League) where, surrounded by artists, I couldn’t help but rediscover art myself, and was excited to have it back in my life. It’s been central to my existence ever since.

I’m not sure where to insert this but I can’t leave it out, so will drop it right here: at age 37, I started playing ice hockey and for 15 years was known as Joelie the Goalie, playing 2-5 times per week. I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of fun things in my life, and playing hockey ranks right up there with the most fun of them.

Though I may have been a mediocre (at best) beer league goalie, being at the rink was more fun than just about everything. It connected me with a community with whom I shared a strong camaraderie, got me in touch with my body, and showed me that I could do something I never thought I’d be able to do (I watched a lot of hockey wishing I could play, never thinking that I actually could). Maybe it was hockey that first planted the seeds of change in my life. I’d still be playing now too, but after countless minor injuries and two rotator cuff surgeries, I had to walk away once I started JD’s Joyrides, as I simply can’t afford to get hurt anymore (don’t ask me about last year’s scooter crash and RC surgery #3…).

Though I’ve been in Colorado for over two-thirds of my life, I’m still very much a beach bum at heart and while I don’t miss Florida at all, I miss the ocean all the time. Fortunately, there are a lot of beaches reachable from DIA and for everything else, nothing beats Colorado.

As I approach the end of my 50’s, I feel incredibly blessed that I can look back — at the highs and the lows, at my life’s seemingly random path, at the failures as well as the successes — and find myself happier and healthier than I’ve been since I was a kid. The work and the living are not done, and the world feels like it’s falling apart by the minute, but from where I stand right now, I’m pleased with where I am and look forward to what lies ahead.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jdsjoyrides.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jdsjoyrides/
• Other: https://www.mixcloud.com/TheVibrarian/

 

Image Credits
Niko Laurita
Joel Davis