By Duncan Scott Davidson

WHEN YOU'RE A parent, being recognized because of your child is no big thing. Maybe you're in the checkout line at the grocery store, or tanking up at the gas station, and you hear, "Say, aren't you Dolly's dad?" Dolly, or Dolores Rose Valentine Davidson – that's my kid, and my being referenced as a satellite to her radiance seems more or less the natural order of things, the way that Earth is the third planet from the sun, as opposed to the sun being that shiny thing a few doors down from Earth.

This may be disillusioning to some parents, but let's face the raw truth of the matter: You're old. The hot rod days of your carefree youth have been put up on blocks under a sheet in a dusty garage, the gaskets all blown out. Sure, someone got a new lease on your life when you came forth with progeny, but it wasn't you, Jack. It isn't even a lease – they own you. And this is good, right, and proper. Let go of the sweaty-palmed hold on the microphone stand of ego, and pass the mic – and the spotlight – on to Junior. You're a backup singer now. You can relax. It's cool. No one cares about what the remnants of your hair look like, or if your belt has been let out a few notches. No one cares about the notches on your belt. You've got a kid. It isn't about you anymore.

While it's one thing being referenced according to the chip off your old block, it's another thing to have that chip recognized by complete strangers. Once, while Robyn Carter was watching her four-year-old son at a Mission District playground, another mother asked his name. When he responded, "Ezra," and went about his business, the mother turned to Robyn and asked, "Is that Ezra from Rock Jack?"

Eat it

Rock Jack – 75 percent of which are members of San Francisco's black-metal meisters Ludicra – are by no means a joke band. Strictly speaking, they're an imaginary band. Not an imaginative band – though their first self-released CD, Belly Bones, gives Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica a run for its money – but an imaginary band, as in "imaginary friend."

Does anyone remember the Malt-O-Meal commercial in which the kid is a little affronted to be fed hot prison gruel by someone he once trusted, so he gets his make-believe buddy to be the royal taste tester? And his father, the gruel spooner, serves Maynard, the imaginary friend, a bowl with the helpful addendum that it's "good stuff, Maynard"? Rock Jack are a similar example of parents blurring the lines of reality. Ezra's dad is Aesop Hantman, the drummer for Ludicra, and before them Hickey, Yogurt, Fuckboyz, and others. So when little Ez came up with a band called Rock Jack, in which all the members were named Jack, the same way his favorite band the Ramones were all Ramones, and a song or two (like "Toilet Master"), and the name of an album (Belly Bones) – Aesop decided to oblige him by forming an actual band. An actual imaginary band: Daddy Jack on the skins, John Jack and Ross Jack on guitar and bass, respectively but not respectfully, and Mommy Jack as press and "oatmeal," according to the liner notes. Oh, yeah, and Ezra Lux (his last name is Latin for light – a rock star waiting to happen, if you ask me) as Rock Jack himself, rocking a busted Fisher-Price kid karaoke machine microphone as a stage prop.

You know, sort of how the Sex Pistols were formed, with Aesop as Malcolm McLaren.

Make it so

So that's how it works. But does it work? I mean, human s'mores are a great idea, until you get two women, a case each of Hershey bars and graham crackers, and two dozen jars of that whipped marshmallow goo all into the same room at the same time – then it's just a sticky mess. It's not always a good idea to turn fantasy into reality. What are the ethics here? Is making your kid's made-up rock band actually rock tantamount to buying him a unicorn?

Look at it from a parent's point of view: If you could buy your kid a unicorn, wouldn't you? Me, I'd probably go for Pegasus – seems a little more fun. But you get the point. It's one thing turning your kid into a little Veruca Salt; it's another becoming sort of a dream enabler. One day Dolly says to me she wants to be a rock climber. I don't know where it came from – probably from watching some Discovery Channel bit at Grandma's on climbing Everest. A few weeks later, we're hanging off the side of a cliff at Point Reyes, about 20 yards from a herd of deer. You do what you can.

Aesop can play drums. And if there's one thing Ezra is into, it's drums. Freshly four, he already has a solid musical foundation, thanks to his tune-savvy folks, but Ezra is clearly his own breed of individual. While raiding Aesop's vinyl will likely yield eyestrain due to unreadable black-metal band logos, Ezra finds Daddy's music "too scary." Mr. Lux goes for something a little less complex, bypassing the stoner operatic for the uncomplicated good times of '80s music, which, for a kid born in 2001, is no small feat of musical archeology. The Ramones are his favorite band, but his favorite song, currently, is "Centerfold," by the J. Geils Band, something he enjoys on one of many '80s compilations.

"He really responds to that synthetic sound," Carter says, guiding the interview session from the cozy couch in her Mission apartment. Rock Jack is climbing on her lap in a yellow, kid-size Bad Brains T-shirt and some navy blue briefs, after-preschool chillin' attire.

"I love the '80s," Ezra tells me. "The '80s had big drums."

I ask him if he likes the Psychedelic Furs, my personal touchstone from the era of my youth, but Ezra is refreshingly unfettered by concepts of musical relevance.

"He only likes the pop hits from the '80s," Carter says.

"What's a pop hit?" he asks.

Poop charts

As far as pop hits go, there aren't too many on Belly Bones, with the possible exception of a cover of Van Halen's "Somebody Get Me a Doctor." But it does have poo. And, as evidenced by the 3,325 plays of "Toilet Master" on Rock Jack's Myspace page (compared to 863 for the non-poo-themed track), plus the ensuing sales of nearly 200 CDs through his Myspace page and at local stores Amoeba Music and Aquarius Records, adults sure love listening to kids sing about poo, maybe even more than kids love to sing about poo. Far beyond sex and death, shit really is the last taboo.

"Toilet Master" consists of free-form scatting, no pun intended, over some sped-up railroad blues, punctuated with HR-like high-pitched squeals. When he does speak English, instead of "Ezra language," Rock Jack takes us on a magical ride down the shit pipe, much like Thomas Pynchon did in the psychedelic jazz-club section of Gravity's Rainbow: "And we went to the toilet, and we went inside, and we went down the drain." Whereas Rugrats tackles the childhood fear of going down the drain in a safe manner that resoundingly tells kids, "No, you can't go down the drain," Ezra isn't afraid to take us into those dark places in our psyche (witness the track "Darth Vader Is Mean"). Of course, the fact that, like most borderline geniuses, he was late in being potty trained probably has something to do with his wondering about where it all goes. When you're young, you don't obfuscate reality with metaphor, and that's one of the things that makes listening to Belly Bones so refreshing. Poop not withstanding, of course.

Dig this

Kids do things you don't expect them to – it's expected. And that's why artists from Lewis Carroll to Michael Jackson ("He has a toy nose," Ezra says) develop infatuations with children and childhood: They want to can some of that magic that just can't be captured, to bottle that awakened energy in order to drip it out with an eyedropper in controlled, careful, artistic amounts. Perhaps this can be done, with varying degrees of success – I'll spare you a detailed comparative analysis of Alice in Wonderland and Thriller.

But there's a little something more to Ezra than "Who can take a rainbow, wrap it in a sigh / Soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie? / The Candy Man can" type crap. He's not all gumdrop rainbows. He's got a good deal of The Gashlycrumb Tinies, as well. When he was two, one of his favorite pastimes was making up screenplays for imaginary horror movies with names like Scaryhead and Everybody Needs Soap, in which a ghost comes through the wall and gets the kid in the bathtub. In trying to remember, for the interview, the name of the movie in which blood spouts out of a stroller, he came up with another plot off the cuff: "There was five skeletons in a circle, and there was dirt in the middle. The skeletons dug a hole in the dirt, and they cut their heads off and put their heads around the hole they dug in the dirt." His name for that masterpiece? Skeleton Surgery, of course.

Superspud

Seems like Ezra's been an interesting kid from the get-go. Before he was two, he had memorized the names of his toy cars. Hundreds of them. His parents needed only to pick up a particular car and he'd say, "Pontiac GTO" or "Roaring Thunder," or whatever was stamped into the bottom. By two, he knew the letters of the alphabet on sight, and at four, he's exceedingly word-oriented. His drawings, hanging in Carter's foyer, are covered with pictures with written descriptions: A superhero vegetable (Ezra's a vegetarian) named Potatoman is push-pinned into the wall next to a monster named Svaness, coined after the street. Looking at Ezra surrounded by his pictures, we can keep Jean-Michel Basquiat on the list of artists tapping – or aping – what comes naturally to kids.

Along with his impressive if somewhat savantlike abilities, Ezra had some trying tendencies in his, um, "youth." He was exceptionally hard to wean, and by the time he got off the nipple, he was old enough to walk up and ask for "boobie" for lunch. And, while he's no supercerebral, boy-in-the-bubble, Bobby Fisher brainiac, he's a physically cautious child. "I had my birthday party at Dolores Park," he says. "But I couldn't climb on the structures because I'm too small and they're too high."

"You could," his mom reminds him. "You just didn't."

"I didn't climb up because it has too much stairs and it's too steep."

Perhaps his advanced imagination and verbal skills have squeezed his climbing-up-to-the-twisty-slide, physically "at home in the world" abilities to the side a bit. Or maybe his gory movie plots have trained him to more readily visualize what happens to kids who fall off "structures." In any case, as Carter says, "He's not a physical risk-taker."

Oh, and there was the somewhat reluctant potty-training, which caused a rift in one of his imaginary bands, the Happy Family. According to Carter, they broke up because "everyone peed and pooed all over the floor, and Ezra told them to stop, but they didn't. He said that he was the only one who could do that."

Taskmaster

Apparently, like Mick Jagger and his petulant musical offspring, such as Anton Newcombe of the Brain Jonestown Massacre, Ezra can be rather difficult as a bandleader. "I had some imaginary bands, but they broke up, so I made a new one," he says, somewhat remorselessly, of the inception of Rock Jack. How many imaginary bands? "Too many ... like a thousand."

There was the aforementioned incontinent Happy Family (sitting there in Queens, eating refried beans, I suppose). Then there were Iron Potato, the Third of June, and God Butter, who got fired because "they didn't play well. They couldn't follow directions." Finally, there was the Deevils, who broke up because the guitar player died.

"He had Munchausen's," Carter says of the deceased picker.

"C'mon now," I counter. "Munchausen's? That's your interpretation."

"He had surgery for no reason," Ezra says. He told the doctor to perform surgery and not sew him up. OK, then ... Munchausen's syndrome it is.

All this raises the question: What will become of Rock Jack? The songs, his mother assures me, are all extemporaneous. Aesop, John Cobbett, and Ross Sewage recorded the musical tracks, and Ezra picked out the songs he liked and free-formed along. They can't be repeated – no matter how badly you want to hear "Toilet Master" live at the Bottom of the Hill.

Besides, Ezra has no plans to play live until he's at least five, and then it's only a maybe. "It'll be a kids' show – and a grown-up show," he tells me, then turns to Carter. "Mommy, I want you to be in my band. You can play the keyboard."

Mommy protests that she doesn't know how to play the keyboard, but Ezra's not having it. There will be a new imaginary band, with Mommy on the keys, if he has anything to say about it. In the meantime, Rock Jack is fielding label offers to release a 7-inch. Until then, you'd better get to Amoeba or Aquarius for one of the last few copies of Belly Bones, as they're almost sold out. Or get your fix at www.myspace.com/rockjack. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to spot him at the playground.

When questioned about the recognition at the sandbox, Ezra asked his mom, "I'm a little bit famous, aren't I?"

Rock Jack side gig Ludicra play with Turks and Stormcrow Sat/6, 10 p.m., El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. $7. (415) 282-3325.