Englewood, Colorado — Dave Barker may be best known as the drummer in the bands Pinhead Circus, Love Me Destroyer, TAUNTAUN and Drag the River. He’s also a pedal steel guitarist for Casey James Prestwood and the Burning Angels. Additionally, he’s the owner of Speedmetal Cycles. It’s a business name that totally encompasses everything about Barker.
He splits his time between music and motorcycles. He says his chopper is his second favorite thing only behind his pedal steel guitar. Don’t forget he’s a drummer, if he was a Descendent, he quests for ALL.
Barker plays in a band, or he’s played in a band, that’s punk, metal, rock and roll or country. Musically, Barker’s influences are diverse and his experience is vast. He’s a musician and a bike builder. Barker is, “Music and Motors.” He gets it from his father, Jim Barker, who wrenched at first light and beat the drums until sunset. He delivers on the heritage to the world in a creative flurry. check him out on the stage and rolling on two wheels through town.
Barker says he began building things and playing music at a young age. he starts at the beginning,
“If it wasn’t a BMX bike I was tearing apart and customizing, it was a go-cart, it didn’t matter, building knives out in the garage. [I was] Always building something.”
Growing up in Wyoming Barker spent a lot of of time running around after his father, Jim Barker, Dave Barker says,
“It’s pretty funny. He ran a mechanics shop too when I was growing up and he had his set of drums in the front of his shop. After he got done working, I was lucky enough to go, I would bug him, ‘I want to go to the shop, I want to hang out,’ I’m sure it was a pain in the ass.”
He remembers being in the shop when his dad finished work and then played drums. Dave Barker says,
“He’d get done, put his headphones on, put the stereo on and he wasn’t a great drummer at all. He just liked to play. He’d always say, ‘I can beat on them you know,’ and he’d sit there and play along to music. I’d do the same thing.”
Dad’s example led Dave Barker to define and redefine his goals, his success and his happiness. Jim Barker was his son’s first and primary influence. Jim Barker was a dirt track racer in the ’70’s and a mechanic on 427 Ford motors at the shop in Sheridan, Wyoming. Son Barker says,
“He raced late models, I grew up around it.”
He’s still an influence and a motivator in Dave’s life today. He shares dad’s caution,
“He deterred me from the cars and got me into music at a very young age. I started playing piano at seven or eight. I hated it, didn’t like it. I might like to get back into it now, but when I was a kid I didn’t want to do that.”
“I wanted to play rock and roll.
I wanted to play drums.”
Dave’s dad is a great example of how to be a musician and a man, he beat the drums because he loved it, a teacher and a man, he wanted his son to have a foundation. Dave Barker shares the beginnings,
“He said ‘take a couple years of piano, learn the basics of music and then you can go take drums.’ I was like ten years old when I started taking drums and playing drums.”
At the turn of the century, in the early 2000s, Barker attended college for music. Along with welding classes, he taught snowboarding at his local mountain, and gave drum lessons on the side. He’s a natural born multitasker. At school, the way things were being taught to him did not fit the way he liked to learn or live his life. He desired freedom, he wanted to do more and do it faster. He expands,
“It wasn’t the welding that wasn’t fun, it was the type of welding. They wanted me to AC weld and be a pipe welder. They wanted this guy to have a career. A standard career, a nine to five, which I don’t conform to that at all. I wouldn’t go to class, I hated it. I was like ‘this is stupid.’ I was like ‘this is not what I like’ there was nothing creative about it.”
Then Dave got the call from Pinhead Circus, a Denver powerhouse punk band. He recalls the history,
“I moved to Denver in ’99 to play music. I was on a full ride scholarship for music and it was like, ‘this is not what I want to do.’ There was nothing else, I was in a welding program and I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this either.’ The classes were small. There were like two of us in some of the classes. I got called to join Pinhead Circus and I packed up and moved.”
Soon after coming to Denver he was offered work at a hot rod shop. Fully disclosing that he was a musician first, he went to work. Barker explains how he balanced his passions,
“I think it was around 2003 or 2004, I weaseled my way into a hot rod shop. I kind of b-s’ed them. I knew I could do it if I was put in the situation where I had to do it. I had gotten the ’49 Ford that’s over there,” [Referring to the car on a lift behind him in his shop.] “I was like ‘I’m gonna chop this thing, I’m gonna do all this custom stuff to it.’ I did that and people were like ‘you’re not too bad at doing that, maybe you should get a job doing that.’”
Music kept Dave busy at night and building cars was his day job. He explains, the scale was tipping, balance was about to recalibrate,
“It was okay and there was the music thing.”
His early disclosure that he was a musician first was catching up to him.
“I told them that when I got hired. They dealt with it for a couple years and then they started to complain about it.”
The day came to choose. he says,
“I got the call to the office to make the decision one day. The guy was really pushing for me to stay at his shop and he was like ‘you can’t do that stuff all your life’ and I’m just thinking ‘you don’t know me at all.’ He was like ‘what do you think?’ and I was like ‘I’ll just pull my truck around and load my tool box and I’ll be on my way.’”
“I’m from Wyoming, I’m supposed to like that stuff,
but I’m from there so I hated it.
I wanted to listen to anything else,
but what everyone else was listening to.”
The question, how do you get from punk rock back to classic country? Dave says,
“Scooter [James] got me into… I was a big skateboarder when I was a kid, I loved skateboarding. We’d go skating and he’d be like ‘check this out’ and he’d put an old Buck Owens tape in. It was either Buck Owens or Judas Priest. It was always like over here or, over here. Slayer and Classic Country, or Jazz. I love Jazz music. So we’d listen to Buck Owens and just stuff like that. He got me interested. I love steel guitar. It was like ‘how could I have hated this my whole life.’”
Dave’s band history is something like this, as Pinhead Circus wound down, he details,
“I was just on the tail end of that whole thing. I loved that band when I was a little kid, high school.”
Love me Destroyer spun up and Barker played on the first record, then TAUNTAUN launched retro metal rock and roll, Dave wanted to conquer the Denver metal scene. Finally, Alternative Country band Drag The River needed a drummer when Paul Rucker left. Jon Snodgrass from Drag the River and Dave met in Fort Collins. Barker goes back in history,
“I met Jon, I think I was playing with AFI at the Starlight with Pinhead Circus. It was like my second show. I was like starstruck. I was a young kid, I go to play with all these cool punk bands. I met Jon. I met this guy with these crazy glasses. I never met some dude like that before. I liked his music, I liked his song writing.”
Later in time and down the road, Barker says,
“I had quit Pinhead Circus,” he got another call and became the drummer in Drag the River.
He played music at night and after Dave quit the hot rod shop he began to build choppers for himself during the day, Speedmetal Cycles was born. Building things was never just a day job — even when building cars was his day job. It was always a passion and hereditary, something he did like his father. Creating Speedmetal cycles and drumming, he was in tune with the family legacy.
“It’s the classic chopper, I like traditional,
I like the first wave of things.
The classic country and the original choppers
that were being built. I like specific eras of things.”
His chopper, his second favorite thing, next to his pedal steel guitar, he says,
“I built it from nothing. The frame is a 1932 Harley VL model. The motor’s a 1947 Knucklehead overhead valve Harley. Most of the other stuff I just made. Gas tank, fenders and all that stuff. I narrowed an original Harley Springer. I think it was an old ’45 Springer. I changed the stem, narrowed it up and lengthened it a little bit. I built what I had in my head, that I wanted to own and ride.”
He doesn’t sketch his designs. He says,
“I dream. I’ll have problems and I find solutions in dreams.”
The experience goes like this for Barker,
“There’s nothing more satisfying than taking something from your head and make it real. Then be able to ride it across the country and back on something you built is pretty satisfying. It’s foot clutch, jockey shift, it’s as dangerous as it gets. The rear brake’s just a stock drum, mechanical drum brakes, it’s not hydraulic, it’s all mechanical.”
“It’s a death trap, it’s loud, violent and fun.
It’s fast, it’s light.”
He’s surrounded by his life’s work with his studio a few steps away. Sitting, surrounded by restoration projects and motorcycle frames, in his shop, Barker lit up talking about his bike, his traditional chopper. There’s a lot of tradition in his life. Most of it is passed down from one generation to the next from his father. “Music and Motors,” these things are parallel in importance, they came natural to Dave Barker and challenged him to excel to greatness congruently in both fields.
Jumping back to piano, to drums, to pedal steel guitar — punk, metal and country. The latest and arguably greatest instrument is the one he ignored early in Sheridan before the internet.
“I’d always ask my dad, ‘how’d you hear about music when you were growing up in Sheridan Wyoming?’ One guy would bring an album by and say ‘check out what I’ve got.’ He’d been to the big city or something. If they liked it, it would spread throughout the town.”
These albums introduced Barker to pedal steel guitar. Despite the early introduction, he only started playing pedal steel once he was in the “big city.” He got his first by pawning other music equipment for a lap steel. He says,
“Mars Lap Steel, six string lap steel, Scooter and I were going to start our little country band. I was like this things impossible to play, this thing’s hard. I don’t even know what we were thinking. So that thing just went in the closet, I’m done with that thing. Then fast forward to Drag the River, I meet Casey. It’s like, oh, that’s what that thing is… now I know what makes that noise. Then just being around it every night, I just fell in love with that instrument. I realized it was myself holding me back from playing it. I gotta try.”
He doesn’t let problems get in his way, he makes a path forward. Barker says,
“I can learn stuff from anyone and I love to — people are cool and everyone is different. I’ve met so many awesome talented people in the motorcycle business. Then to combine it with music and all the great people in music.”
He cites Casey and Scooter for influencing his music tastes, his favorite pedal steel player is? Barker states,
“Ralph Mooney because all the Buck Owens that Scooter got me into. Ralph Mooney playing on it. That sound. I didn’t know what it was, I knew it was a steel guitar, but I didn’t know what a steel guitar versus a pedal steel guitar was or any of that stuff.”
It may have taken some time and inspiration from friends for the pedal steel to make sense to him, but it’s become a major part of who he is as a musician. When it comes to drumming there’s just one person he sites as inspiration — he doesn’t pause a second when asked who his most influential drummer is, it’s his Dad.
“It’s weird. I do the same thing. I’ve got a studio in my shop. He influenced me and he got me into it.” After a pause in conversation, he says, “Jim Barker, he just passed this year. It’s been a tough year. It’s definitely changed my outlook on some things. You know it makes me want to work a little harder. It’s his fault man — Music and Motors.”
People ask Dave, “how do you get to do two things you love?” He answers,
“‘Cause that’s what you do. You can go do stuff, no one’s holding you back, but yourself.”
Editors Note: The title of this piece and other elements have been updated for clarity
Actual_Analog 