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Former Superdrag frontman John Davis' message has changed, but his songs remain the same

by Mike Gibson

John Davis never feeds his black tabby, Olivia, a kitty biscuit without affording the same treatment to Louie, her heftier counterpart, even if it means tracking the wayward male feline into forbidden corners of the house.

"Here's Louie, in here on the bed, where he's not supposed to be," Davis' voice echoes through sparely appointed halls as he tosses the suddenly alert Louie a treat to a chorus of happy mewing. Fair is fair, after all.

The former singer of Knoxville's Superdrag has dwelt in this neat home on the outskirts of Nashville with his wife, Wendy, and two spoiled kitties for more than a year now; John notes that the couple have done much of the standard new-house renovation themselves, scraping and repainting and preparing bare floors for carpet.

"I thought maybe Louie and Olivia had something to add to the conversation, but all they really wanted is treats," Davis says with a doting chuckle, returning biscuits to cupboard. The whole milieu is decidedly domestic, a far cry from what fans might once have expected from the irrepressible and sometimes hard-living frontman of one of the longest-running and most successful rock 'n' roll acts in Knoxville history.

Indeed, Davis has that stay-at-home look about him now; the Brit-rock affectations of a few years ago—the hairstyle, big sideburns and mod clothes—have been replaced by careless tresses, sweats, and a five o'clock shadow. And his house is fraught with the sort of cultural asymmetries inherent to a rocker-turned-homebody—musty old LPs and battle-tested guitars sharing space with kitchen sets, new drapes and mahogany dining room furniture.

But most shocking to anyone who only knew the old John Davis is the book shelf in the living room, where tomes from the likes of Legs McNeil and Hunter S. Thompson stand, perhaps uneasily, opposite the entire Left Behind Christian fiction series, assorted inspirational tomes and several Bibles.

"I was raised in church; I was baptized as a kid," Davis says of the faith that now defines him. "It was part of who I was. Then I spent a long time trying to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

"A lot of the songs I wrote in Superdrag were a product of that negativity, of my being confused and cynical and hopeless. The title of the last Superdrag record (2002's Last Call for Vitriol) kind of sums it up for me. It was kind of prescient. The whole album sounds like someone who's fed up with their life. That's the last record I'll do that's written and performed in that state of mind."

Whether Superdrag will ever record again remains an open question. The band played what were billed as possibly its last shows this past summer, and the prospects for a reunion look dim, at least for the foreseeable future. Says drummer Don Coffey, "Where John wants to be today doesn't have a lot to do with the band he was in for 10 years."

But even as the din fades from those final concerts, Davis has found a new muse, and a new musical idiom to express it. His acquaintance with Nashville producer R.S. Field led to studio session work in Music City in the summer of '03, and those sessions led inevitably to Davis penning his own new original songs.

Recorded on a demo featuring Field and several of the players Davis met during his time in the studio, the nine songs are at once everything you would expect and nothing you would expect from the man who for a decade fronted an indie-rock favorite. Gone (mostly) are the loud guitars and lyrical angst that characterized Superdrag's lovelorn power pop, replaced by softer, piano-heavy arrangements and messages of redemption.

Still present, however, are the urgently sweet and compelling melodies that for 10 years were the yearning heart of Superdrag on songs such as "Seniorita," "Sucked Out," and "Expanding My Mind." The results shouldn't be surprising to anyone familiar with the Davis oeuvre; based on the demo, one large independent label has already offered him a new recording contract. (As of mid-December, details of the offer were still under wraps.)

"The way the circumstances have aligned, I now have this opportunity to do this other music, music that serves God," Davis says. "The prospect of getting a clean slate—a 'do over'—is exciting to me."

John Davis knew from an early age that his calling lay in the music business. "Even as a kid, all I wanted was to one day sign a record contract and make a record," he says. "It was naive, of course, but that was all I wanted, with no thought to the complications. It was my dream."

"We always knew he had the bug," says his mother, Judy Davis, an educational supervisor for Covenant Health. Wendy and John have come to Knoxville for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and the family members have paused for a restorative at a corporate coffee house between shopping forays on Kingston Pike.

"He could bang out a tune on the piano at five or six," continues Davis, a winsome blond woman with a ready smile. "He would do Elvis Presley imitations, holding the note at the end and waving his hand in the air."

Young John gallivanted endlessly around the family home in Farmington, she remembers, brandishing plastic Mickey Mouse guitars, indispensable props that were broken and purchased anew by the score. At age five, he stole the show at a cousin's piano recital when he sat down at the keys unannounced and played a song as fluidly as the older children who were scheduled to perform.

"The other parents asked me, 'Is he in the recital?'," says Judy. "I said, 'No, he just does that.' After that, I immediately sought out lessons with the best teacher I could find."

Piano led inevitably to guitar; John received a Peavey electric as a present on his 11th birthday. His musical obsessions were given full vent, as he whiled away evenings after school learning rock songs by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

"When I picked up guitar, my ear was already pretty well tuned into notes," he says. "I could hear a note and visualize it in my mind and find it. I could think of a note and hear it. I guess it's what they call perfect pitch—as long as perfect pitch doesn't mean you always sing in key."

He joined with other neighborhood kids in rock bands like the Friendship Company and the Broken String Band throughout middle and high school. They rarely played for an audience, other than perhaps a few flustered pigeons at Carl Cowan Park off Northshore, where unguarded electrical outlets proved to be an open invitation to guerilla rock 'n' rollers.

But though listeners were scarce, Davis found that he had an instinct for playing almost any musical instrument he could put his hands on. And more importantly, he learned the rudiments of writing a song.

"My first efforts at writing were pretty dismal, nothing I'd be proud of today," Davis laughs. "The thing about it that had any merit was that maybe I showed the ability to write melodies and put them together with chord changes without rewriting 'Blue Suede Shoes.'"

A skateboarding enthusiast and a low-B student at Farragut High School, Davis listened to and dissected new music voraciously, graduating from his early love of the Beatles and Zeppelin to an obsession with '80s post-punk like the melodic alternative blooze of Dinosaur Jr., or the crunchy pop-punk of the Descendents.

"I had an idea of this imaginary band in my head, the way I thought it should sound," he says. "It was sort of Beatles melodies with this kind of Dinosaur Jr. guitar. Then I heard Teenage Fanclub (an alternative power-pop outfit from Scotland) and that was pretty much it. That's what I wanted, but I was never able to find anyone who wanted to do the same thing."

His first chance to play in a "real" rock band would come at age 18, when Brandon Fisher, a fellow former Farragut High School student a few years his senior, invited him to play drums in a four-piece punk-rock outfit called the Used. Davis remembers that the Used played real, paying gigs at local college clubs, and had even recorded a demo—"all these things that to me just seemed like the coolest things ever."A longtime family friend, Fisher says Davis was by that time a jaw-dropping all-around musician. "The thing that impressed me most was John's ability to listen to pretty much any song, then sit down and play it perfectly on a variety of instruments. You could even hand him instruments he had never played before, and within 15 minutes, he would be playing something you could use in a song."

What followed was quick, convoluted, but typical of most local music scenes, where the incestuous cross-pollination of band members is generally the rule rather than the exception. Within a year, the Used changed line-ups no less than three times; Davis quit, and joined the local trio Punchwagon with drummer Coffey, also a former Used member; and, finally, the Used reassembled as a new entity that would be called Superdrag, an outfit which featured Davis as singer, guitarist and principal songwriter.

It was Coffey who was first to recognize the larger potential of John's precocious songwriting. While on the outs from both the Used and Punchwagon, the duo began working together on Davis's original music in a White Avenue basement in Fort Sanders that was then the home of Fisher and Used leader Tom Pappas.

"John had a sense of melody that most kids of 17 or 18 just don't have," Coffey says. "He understood how parts of songs fit together; he would make up a backing vocal part for someone else's song, and it would be better than anything else in the song.

"It was a no-brainer that he had a gift that few people had. I knew he would end up doing something if he worked at it. It was just a matter of time."The Coffey/Davis partnership would prove to be the backbone of Superdrag for the entirety of the band's existence, an enduring simpatico that saw them through 10 years of hard touring, music industry politics, membership upheavals and interpersonal crises.

"There is no Superdrag without John," says Coffey, who now works as a producer and studio manager at the local 613 Studio. "I told him early on that it's his band, and I'll do it as long as he wants to. We were always on the same page musically. I loved his songs, and that's all I needed."

Once they heard John's perfect melodies and smooth, honeyed lead vocals echoing from the walls of their own basement, Pappas and Fisher readily signed on, even though it meant deferring to their younger bandmate as frontman and writer. "We heard those songs, and we wanted to play them," Fisher says. "We would still be humming the melodies well after rehearsal had ended."

Propelled by Davis' infallible sense of song, the band had an inexorable momentum that was only increased by frequent performances at Fort Sanders parties and local rock clubs like the Mercury Theatre on Market Square. They won the University of Tennessee's annual Battle of the Bands competition, released their first song "Bloody Hell" on the local music compilation Volume '94. On a lark, John sent a handful of four-track recordings to an address on the back of a Darla Records seven-inch single he had purchased at a local record store. "There was an insert that said 'Send us a tape of your groop,' spelled with two Os, and it intrigued me," Davis says. "I sent four or five songs, never really expecting to hear anything from it."

Within a week, James Agren at Darla had contacted the band asking for more songs. When Davis sent six more tracks, he told the band he was interested in releasing singles on Darla, a tiny but well-distributed indie label he ran out of his San Francisco apartment.

Ecstatic, the band agreed to visit Agren and play a show; they piled equipment and luggage into an old minivan and set out for California.

They performed twice during the course of the week-long trip, one of the gigs taking place before an audience of five at the Eagles Coffee Shop in Los Angeles. "They paid us with a pack of cigarettes," Davis recalls. "Which was really unfair, because I was the only one who smoked.

"We went all the way across the country to play two shows, because we were ignorant and we didn't know any better. But at the same time, we were pretty determined to make our way as a rock band."

Their determination impressed Agren, who went on to release two singles, including "HHT" b/w "Nothing Good is Real", and the infectious "Seniorita" b/w "Cuts and Scars." Davis now describes those early sides, the jackets to which featured visual nods to old Beatles records, as "sort of a Kinko's-and-Polaroid Rubber Soul imitation," he laughs, "with the Scotch tape still showing."

Thanks in part to Agren's lobbying, "Seniorita" was included on a College Music Journal compilation, and received favorable reviews in CMJ and other indie rock publications. Before long, Superdrag had real record company representatives sniffing at their feet; first larger independents like Mammoth and Restless, then major labels like Warner Brothers, Elektra, and MCA. After months of showcases and coy negotiations with various industry suits, the band finally received an offer from Elektra in spring of '95, a two-album guarantee that also gave the label first option in releasing three additional records.

"We were excited, because Elektra was the label that put out the Stooges and the MC5," Davis says. "That was all stuff that was done 25 or 30 years ago, but that's the way we were because we were such nerds about records. 'Man, this is the label that put out (the Stooges') Funhouse.'

"In a lot of ways, we couldn't have been more wrong. But we knew nothing at the time, except how to write songs and play and tour in a van. I was totally naive. I thought if I could make a record, all my desires in life would be fulfilled."

Life on a major label was fun, for a while. Their contract called for the first album, Regretfully Yours, to be produced by Elektra on a modest budget, then licensed for release to the indie Sub Pop. With the record mostly finished, Davis submitted some additional songs he and Coffee had four-tracked in the kitchen of the home the band shared in the Fourth and Gill neighborhood.

One of the songs, a bouncy pop number entitled "Sucked Out" in which Davis belts out the memorable catch phrase (Who sucked out the feel-ing?/Who sucked out the feel-ing?) at the top of his lungs in each chorus, stirred A&R man Josh Deutsch enough that Regretfully was reslated as a full-blown Elektra release, complete with a video budget and more dollars for touring.

The song was a hit on the Billboard modern rock charts, while the video was in heavy rotation as a so-called MTV "buzz clip" for some 10 weeks. With the band touring constantly, Regretfully sold more than 100,000 copies in less than a year, enough to warrant a more serious promotional effort for their follow-up release.

There were dark moments, too, however, some of them portending the upheavals that would eventually spell the end of the band. Toward the last of the Regretfully Yours touring schedule, a week of particularly egregious debauchery culminated with a show in Knoxville at which Davis performed in a state approaching delirium, his voice cracking and his behavior visibly discomfiting other members of the band.

And the new songs John was writing reflected a growing disillusionment with his lot, and with the music industry in general. Songs like "Bankrupt Vibrations" (about the vacuities of modern radio rock) and "Shuck and Jive" (which expressed dissatisfaction with Elektra) came off as thinly veiled pot-shots at the A&R men, record execs, and radio programmers on whom the band was dependent.

"There were several moments in the songs where we pretty much lambasted the label or the industry," Davis says. "I was being honest and I thought they'd be big enough to suck it up."

Perhaps the band had some latent sense that the ride wouldn't last forever; they entered sessions for their second Elektra record, Head Trip in Every Key, with huge ambitions, a vision that had little to do with producing chart-conscious rewrites of their lone hit single.

"We wanted to push our abilities and make this a quantum leap ahead of our first album," Davis says. "We wanted to make a studio album. I remember not even caring if we could reproduce all of the songs on stage."

Says Coffey, "We had the sense that 'We'll never get to do this again, so let's make something we'll be proud of.'"

And Head Trip was just that, an exquisitely-wrought mosaic of an album replete with textural diversity, exotic instrumentation, and the occasional Acid-soaked lyrical foray. One song, "The Art of Dying", featured passages taken directly from the Tibetan Book of the Dead—another of Davis's music-geek tributes, inspired by the Beatles' song "Tomorrow Never Knows", which also quotes from the ancient tome.

But in the eyes of Elektra's A&R department, the record was a non-starter. Despite spending nearly a half million dollars on its production, the label pulled most of the promotional funds, including the video budget. Touring for Head Trip came to an end after less than six months.

"The people at Elektra seemed sort of baffled by what they heard," Davis says. "I don't think they got the picture of what we were trying to do. I don't think any of those people listened to the records we listened to or loved the music they loved. They wanted to hear "Sucked Out, Part II," and that wasn't going to happen."

On Dec. 11 of 1998, Davis's paternal grandfather died from a heart attack in the middle of an afternoon of yard work. He was John's namesake, and arguably his biggest supporter and fan; the elder Davis had even given his grandson his first four-track recorder as a high school graduation present. A septuagenarian, he was surely the oldest person who ever attended a Superdrag show, which he did on several occasions. "His death blind-sided me," Davis says, "crushed me into oblivion."

Already at loggerheads with Elektra over the direction and marketability of his songs, Davis began writing a new album, the thrust of which was as a tribute to his departed granddad. "From that point forward, the record was an elegy for him," Davis says. "It was a rock 'n' roll sympathy card. I knew what I wanted to do and I wasn't going to change it. I didn't give a damn about what anybody else felt about it."

With the unveiling of haunted, deeply personal songs like "Ambulance Driver" and "Unprepared," and "Some Kind of Tragedy", the rift between Elektra and Superdrag grew wider. "It was a protracted pissing match," Davis says. "I wrote 40 songs, and they didn't like any of them. The relationship became completely non-productive."

At long last, Deutsch hinted that Elektra might be willing to release the band from its remaining options. Coffey finally asked for and received their release at the end of 1999, under terms that proved more than equitable.

"If I had been John, I would have felt the way he did," says Coffey, who acted as chief liaison between Davis and the label. "And if I had worked for Elektra, I probably would have felt the way they did. They could have said some things better than they did, but in a way I can agree with them. If you're not going to play ball, find another game. No knock on anyone, it was just a difference of opinion."

"Looking back, it was a stroke of luck that we had what we had; that we were signed to a major label; that we had a hit," Davis says. "I didn't have that perspective back then. But I'm not going to bitch and moan.

"When I think about the second record, the experience and pleasure of getting to make it, and now to have it for all time, that far outweighs any negative parts. I don't remember the bad stuff now; what I remember is going to Radio City Music Hall and hearing a 20-piece orchestra play a song I wrote on my couch. We almost lost our minds making Headtrip, but it was well worth it. I still look at it as a personal high-water mark, sonically and creatively."

In releasing Superdrag, Elektra allowed the band to keep an album's worth of songs that had already been recorded at the label's expense, and gave them a small severance that enabled them to buy some much-needed recording equipment.

Upon their departure, the band immediately connected with old friend Greg Glover, head of the small independent label Arena Rock Recording Company out of New York City. They finished recording, and released their third record, In the Valley of Dying Stars in October of 2000 on Arena Rock.

But the struggles with Elektra had taken a toll; bassist Pappas left the band to pursue his own music in spring of '99, to be replaced by Nashville resident Sam Powers. Weary of touring and on the verge of an engagement to his long-time girlfriend, Fisher followed suit in 2000 after the recording for Stars had finished. His eventual replacement would be former V-roys guitarist Mic Harrison, who remained with the band until the final performances of 2003.

There is no simple answer to the question of why Superdrag called it quits in 2003. Coffey, arguably Davis's first real champion as well as his most enduring musical partner, admits he wasn't always sure himself. "When the rumors started flying, people would ask me about Superdrag, and I couldn't really tell them," says Coffey. "I wanted to know what was going on myself.

"There was no single common denominator, other than that being in a full-time band is a hard life. You have your family to take care of on one hand, and then you have this other family that you're in business with on the other. For John, there was an immense amount of unhappiness around the time of that last record."

Davis traces the beginning of the end to late 2001, as touring concluded for In the Valley of Dying Stars. His appetite for the profligacies of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle—heavy drinking, in particular—had reached a dangerous peak.

"John never really liked drinking that much," Coffey remembers. "Then in those last few years after we left Elektra, that's when he seemed to develop a problem. He would get scared and worried about the band, his own problems, whatever, and that's when he started pushing it. It became like a challenge to see 'How much can I do? What can I get away with?'"

Davis recalls that his routine upon arriving in a new city on the Valley tour was to write a set list—"the one thing I had to be lucid to do"—then buy a bottle of whiskey at the nearest liquor store and finish it off it in the van in the hours leading up to the show.

When it came time to record the Arena Rock follow-up Last Call for Vitriol, Davis says the over-indulgences of road life continued at full-throttle. "When you record a new record, it usually pays to scale down the booze a notch or two," Davis says. "During Vitriol, if anything, we stepped it up. It got to the point where I wasn't really eating or sleeping, just drinking and working 16 or 17 hours in the studio."

Then came what can only be described as John Davis's own Road to Damscus, a conversion that took place Nov. 11, 2001, on Interstate 40 on the way to West Knoxville. En route to a suit fitting in anticipation of his impending nuptials, Davis was suddenly overcome by a sensation he likens to "getting hit by a cannonball." Shaken, he parked on the shoulder and began praying.

"I knew at that moment the Lord was dealing with me like He never had before," Davis says. "Before I had a chance to think about what I was doing, I started to pray, asking God to tell me something. I kept saying it over and over."

Within the space of those few moments on the side of I-40, quivering in the booming wake of westbound tractor trailers, Davis chose to re-embrace his back-slidden Christian faith. In doing so, he also put aside the hard drinking and other destructive behaviors that were so much a part of life as an itinerant touring rocker.

"I didn't hear a voice; I felt a voice," he says. "And I knew in that instant the hole inside of me would never be filled with a bottle of booze. I was tired of running away. I submitted to Him, and I quit drinking, right then and there."

His family doctor would affirm the wisdom of his choice only a few days later when, during a check-up, he told the thin and jaundiced youth that he had reached the point of liver toxicity.

But the roadside epiphany would have other implications as well, for Davis, his family, his bandmates in Superdrag, and for the thousands of fans who have long admired his singular gift for songwriting and crafting powerful, memorable melodies.

Last Call for Vitriol was released according to schedule in 2002, and Superdrag carried on a typically ambitious touring schedule in support of the record. But for John, something had changed: "On those last tours, there were nights I'd look at the crowd, and think 'I don't belong here,'" he says. "These kids would show up at 5 p.m. when we loaded in, and they were already hammered. Then I'd look out during the show that night and see them throwing beer and stumbling around.

"I felt like the ringleader of something I was no longer a part of. I questioned everything, and I reached a point where the whole thing felt dishonest to me."

When the Vitriol touring finally ended last spring, bassist and sometime-songwriting partner Sam Powers announced that he was leaving the band to start a family with his wife, Laura. Soon thereafter, Davis and fellow members Coffey and Harrison followed suit, announcing that they would take a lengthy "hiatus" from Superdrag; a handful of mid-summer shows in Tennessee and Boston were billed as perhaps the band's last.

Davis maintains that he has in no way forsaken the work he did in Superdrag; he anticipates collaborating with Coffey on two more band releases, a live show and a collection of unreleased/retrospective material.

"I'm proud of that stuff," he says. "Those records are 10 years of my life. We put everything we had into it, and it was a great experience. And there's no law that says we can't do another Superdrag record some day. But I finally came to a position where if I'm going to do music, I'm going to serve God with it."

With this new resolve came a new set of problems, the conundrums of creating a new space for his singing and songwriting in a world without Superdrag. Davis set a deadline; if he couldn't find legitimate prospects for a viable solo career by the end of 2003, he would move on to full-time session playing, or perhaps even work outside of music.

Succor came in the form of Nashville producer R.S. Field, whom Davis had met while contributing to Knoxville songwriter Scott Miller's 2001 Sugar Hill release Thus Always to Tyrants. Field had been impressed by Davis' instrumental versatility and all-around musicianship, and when he learned that John was at loose ends in Nashville, he offered him session work with Alabama singer/songwriter Allison Moorer, who already had a handful of major label releases to her credit.

Working a two-week recording session in August, Davis contributed bass, acoustic guitar, piano, organ, and some lead guitar to Moorer's forthcoming The Duel album, due for release in April on Sugar Hill Records. He also played rhythm guitar in the band she took for a performance at the Americana Music Awards, held this year at Nashville's Renaissance Hotel. The concert afforded him the opportunity to meet legendary Elvis Presley guitarist Scotty Moore ("That was kind of daunting."); the paycheck from those sessions "bought me time to get my own thing off the ground."

That "thing" is a new set of recordings that tell of a decidedly kinder, gentler John Davis, one far removed from the confused 20-something whose rock 'n' roll lyrics were often fueled by self-absorption, depression, and worldly ills. "Jesus Gonna Build Me a Home," for instance, is equal parts Beatles and trad-Gospel; "Me and My Girl," an ode to Wendy, is a love song that comes off like Big Star on Motown.

And while most of Davis' new songs speak to his faith—with titles like "Stained Glass Window," "Salvation", and "Closer to Thee"—they're all possessed of the same adhesive melodies that have long characterized his work.

"A lot of contemporary Christian artists' records aren't very exciting," admits Russ Long, a well-traveled Nashville engineer who worked on several of John's new tracks, and will likely collaborate on an upcoming album. "Lots of Christian music really isn't built around artistry; it's built around a message, and the artistry takes second place. But to create significant music, the artistry has to be a primary thought.

"When this legit rock guy came and wanted to do a Gospel record, I was thrilled. John is a phenomenal musician, a phenomenal singer, a phenomenal songwriter. He's a song person, with an excellent grasp of how everything should fit together. He has exceeded my expectations. "

Whether his new music is viable is no longer a matter of faith, but rather one of negotiation. For now, Davis takes both pride and a measure of relief in the fact that he has come out ahead of his self-imposed deadline by receiving a firm recording offer before year's end.

"Now there's a deal on the table and I've only done one gig," Davis says. "Now it's comparable to the situation I was in with Superdrag, in that it's no longer whether there's an opportunity to do a record; it's how to make the best of the opportunity. It's a time for prayer, a time to work harder than I've ever worked in my life. This record will be the most important work I've ever done.

"Then again," Davis adds with the same impish grin that appeared any number of Superdrag releases, "that's what I say before every one of them."
 

December 18, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 51
© 2003 Metro Pulse