Clay Tarver first came on the radar in the late ’80s as the co-founding guitarist for Boston’s Bullet LaVolta, a band that mashed up punk grit with hard rock muscle and a little post-punk weirdness. The band burned bright, fast, and called it quits by 1991.
Not long after, Tarver hooked up with Matt Sweeney, James Lo, and Scott Marshall in New York to form Chavez, releasing two beloved albums, Gone Glimmering (1995) and Ride the Fader (1996).
“Back then, lesser scribes tagged the Manhattan-based quartet with thinky adjectives -- knotty, algebraic, angular, etc. Not all of those were exactly off base. Still, whatever braininess Chavez employed was tempered by their passion for the visceral moves of Cheap Trick, The Pretty Things, and Aerosmith’s Rocks.”
The band may have dug “difficult” sounds, but Chavez pursued transcendent hooks.
That said, Tarver didn’t just stick to music. He co-wrote the thriller Joy Ride with J.J. Abrams in 2001 and came up with MTV’s “Jimmy the Cabdriver” bits in the ’90s.
They went quiet for a while, but never really broke up—2006’s Matador compilation Better Days Will Haunt You pulled it all together and gave them a brief second wind.
After Chavez went on indefinite hiatus, Tarver pivoted into TV full-time, landing as a writer and co-showrunner on HBO’s Silicon Valley—and even snagging a Writers Guild Award for the episode “Sand Hill Shuffle.”
If you want to check out Tarver’s journalism chops, be sure to check out his New York Times profile of Jason Everman - one of grunge’s unsung heroes.
More recently, Tarver co-wrote and directed the Hulu comedy Vacation Friends, which became one of the platform’s most-watched originals.
We had the opportunity to discuss this with him and more.
This is our conversation with Clay Tarver.
