By Matt Skoufalos
As a teenager picking out his first few chords on an old guitar to the sound of the radio, David Jordan finally believed that music could be fun. In school, he’d played clarinet and saxophone, but that was work, not recreation. Plunking along to the death throes of hair metal and the nursery cries of grunge was finally “something I was interested in,” Jordan said; “something my friends think is cool.” In the days when the M in MTV still stood for “music,” videos by bands like Guns N’ Roses and Pearl Jam offered some of the only clues for aspiring rockers like him to get a handle on how some of his favorite songs were performed.
“It was really hard to figure out,” Jordan said. “What is that guitar that you always see Slash play? Those two guys in Pearl Jam have totally different guitars. What are those? I was trying to figure that out.”
Mom and Dad were less impressed at the notion of shelling out for an upgrade to the hand-me-down instrument their boy was starting on. They believed their duties had been discharged in covering the cost of school instruments, and the electric guitar was little more than a toy. So Jordan marshaled the money he’d saved up from a summer of painting decks, and headed down to the shops in his Cleveland hometown. His budget was somewhere between a little and not much, but the clerks recognized his interest level, and set him up with a black Gibson Les Paul knockoff manufactured by Hohner.
“At the time you could get a cheap Strat for ninety-nine bucks,” Jordan said. “This thing cost me like $300. They said, ‘It’s not quite a beginner instrument, but by the time you outgrow it, you’ll be ready for something else.’ I played the heck out of it for four years, and by the time I could have had it fixed, it would have cost more than it was worth.”
With four more years of chops under his belt, Jordan was no longer the novice who’d started out on the Hohner. One night when he went into the buy-sell-trade shop, the owner was hot to show him its latest acquisition: a single-cutaway Yamaha Weddington Classic. It looked like a Les Paul, and played like a Paul Reed Smith; overengineered for the typical Yamaha customer, the line was only manufactured from 1990 to 1995. But Jordan’s friend knew the instrument could punch above its weight class, especially at the $500 price tag for which he had it on the rack.
“He said, ‘You have to buy this guitar,’” Jordan remembered. “I said, ‘I will find a way.’ I still have it. It’s my number-one favorite go-to.”
Beyond learning his instrument, Jordan was also getting more comfortable as a singer. In the time when popular music was celebrating stripped-down arrangements of songs by bands that were known for electrified performances, “guys with acoustic guitars who can manage a passable Alice in Chains harmony” were everywhere at open mic nights and coffeehouses, Jordan said.
“We would just go in and play a song, and we kind of did that until college,” he said. “Along the way, as I ran across people, it would just come up that I played or that I sing, and I would get in and out of different bands. It was always different stuff, but to me, it was always more fun to plug into an amp and crank it way up.”
In college, Jordan played in a few bands that gigged frequently; after school, he moved to Atlanta, and kept up the pace. Inevitably, his performing career “just kind of fell by the wayside because of life transitions.”
“You run into that tension of trying to find people who hit the sweet spot,” Jordan said. “You’re always going to have folks who are more interested in playing shows, and then you have the folks who want to write and record, and for them doing the shows is a distraction.”
Jordan’s interest in music indirectly led him into his career in medical physics. He’d originally planned to pursue an engineering career that could allow him to focus on the construction of sound equipment — just as the whole of the music industry began pivoting from analog to digital infrastructure. Even after switching to nuclear physics, “it was always in my head,” Jordan said.
“I’d be sitting in these classes, they’d be talking about linear and non-linear systems, and the problem I’d be thinking about is, ‘How do you digitize the vacuum tube?’ ” he said.
These days, Jordan’s dance card is full, with roles including Chief Medical Physicist of Radiation Safety and Senior Staff Scientist of Radiology at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Chief Diagnostic Medical Physicist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, and professor of radiology at Case Western Reserve University. In addition to those, his children, 8 and 6, keep him busy enough to put music “on hold until it makes sense.”
“It’s not as regular a thing as it used to be for me, but it’s still there,” Jordan said.
He does still have moments and memories from the road as good as any teenaged rocker could hope to be telling as an adult, including one evening at a live-band karaoke bar in Atlanta, in which he busted out a rendition of Skid Row’s “18 and Life,” accompanied by the band’s bassist and songwriter, Rachel Bolan.
“We do the song; he says, ‘Hey man, that was pretty good!’ ”Jordan said. “Two weeks later, I’m at the same bar, and he comes over and says, ‘Did you sign up [to sing]?’ ” Bolan then introduced him to Skid Row drummer Dave Gara, and the three of them took the stage together with the house guitarist for an encore performance.
“So, for two songs, I was a quarter, and then a half, of Skid Row,” Jordan laughed.
