John Davis is just 34 years old, yet he has been booking and putting on concerts in Bend for 20 years.

“I started when I was a sophomore in high school,” he said in a recent interview. “I had my parents sign the contract.”

That show happened at Westside Church, and soon after, Davis started renting out the Domino Room on Greenwood Avenue and having both local and touring punk, rock, emo and metal bands play there.

Over the next several years, he established a concert promotion company (now called 1988 Entertainment) and branched out into Ashland, Eugene, Portland and Seattle, as well as other local venues such as Silver Moon Brewing, the Tower Theatre and Volcanic Theatre Pub. (Somewhere along the line, he took a break and toured with his own pop-punk band, Capture the Flag, for four years.)

Over the past half-dozen years, he said, Davis got “pretty serious” about trying to buy a venue he could call home. After a number of disheartening close calls, stressful negotiations and one global pandemic that shut down the live music industry, he took over the booking and management of Volcanic Theatre Pub late last year, and then bought the business from founder and longtime owner Derek Sitter early this year.

The acquisition preserves Volcanic as a concert venue and ensures one of Bend’s busiest live-music spots will stay that way for the foreseeable future. It also gives Davis more resources and more flexibility to be able to book more shows and provide a better experience for both artists and customers.

“The biggest thing is, you know, we’re paying our own rent now. We’re not paying everyone else’s rent,” Davis said. “It doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you’re doing 10 to 15 shows every month, it adds up to quite a bit of money, and that just means we have to make more to make money on the show.”

In addition to helping the bottom line, owning Volcanic gives Davis income from food and alcohol sales that he doesn’t always get at other venues. More money allows him to pay for more staff, to book bigger names and to hire people he knows and trusts to put on a high-quality production.

“We really can now dial this in and focus on creating exactly what we want with the people we want,” he said.

Owning the venue also allows Davis to have more control over his calendar — in the past, he constantly competed with other promoters for dates — and to give artists 100% of revenue from their merchandise sales. (Many venues take a cut of those sales.)

“We’re still going to do things at other places, but now we’re not necessarily dependent on all these other factors that are beyond our control,” Davis said. “That’s just a huge, huge thing for us.”

As for the actual music, Davis said he is building on what Sitter built at Volcanic, and he is committed to honoring what people love about the venue. At the same time, he is booking shows that he wants to book — which means the calendar often has a punk show, a bluegrass show, a film and a DJ night all sitting comfortably alongside one another in a given week.

“I’ve always kind of been proud that we’re super eclectic, right? We don’t just book one style of music. We’ll book Judy Collins at the Tower and a dubstep night at Midtown and an intimate country show somewhere else,” Davis said. “There isn’t a set vision of what Volcanic is going to be, exactly. But I think based on what I book and how I book stuff, it’s going to be very eclectic, and I wouldn’t want that to change, because I think that’s the point of a venue: To be a conduit of music.”

He continued: “Our job is to provide music to everyone in town, not just one group,” he said. “There’s a market in Central Oregon for — not everything — but a little bit of most things, and that’s what I want to continue to do.”

Volcanic Theatre Pub (70 SW Century Drive, Bend) has another week of great live music lined up, including:

Thursday: Moontricks (Canadian electro-folk)

Saturday: Not.Greenday (Green Day tribute)

Sunday: Dustbowl Revival (SoCal roots orchestra)

Tuesday: Jesse Daniel (old-school country)

Get the details on these shows and more at volcanictheatre.com.