• Interviews

• All
• Music
• Cinema
• TV
• Comic Books

Nov 25, 2024 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish Photography by George Middlebrooks

John Davis has been an indie-rock institution since the mid-’90s. After slogging around in the underground for a few years, Davis and his band Superdrag found breakout success with its first major label album, 1996’s Regretfully Yours, bolstered by the single “Sucked Out,” which made waves on alternative rock radio as well as MTV. The attention and the undeniability of Superdrag’s power pop melodicism poised the band for further success before the industry machine decided it had other ideas. After the band’s ambitious follow up, Head Trip In Every Key, Superdrag kept making records, albeit without the same major label bankroll, until breaking up briefly in 2003.

Superdrag reformed in 2007 and has been intermittently active ever since. However, through the ups and downs of his most known musical project, frontman Davis kept as active as ever. With even a cursory glance at his Bandcamp page, you’ll find enough music to keep you sated for weeks, in different outlets from solo albums to projects with names such as Magic Panther and The Rectangle Shades to his Lees of Memory band with Superdrag guitarist Brandon Fisher, and scads of demos and home recordings to boot.

Davis’ recent album, JINX, was initially meant for Superdrag. The band even began work on the album before things were scuttled. Ultimately, Davis went in a new direction, gathering Tennessee music legend Stewart Pack and his son Henry and bashing out 10 tracks in a flurry of recording as a power trio in Davis’ hometown of Knoxville. Think all those magnificent ’80s SST records mixed with Davis’ own signature pop smarts, and you’ll be pretty much on track as to JINX’s sound.

Under the Radar caught up with Davis in his new family home in Knoxville to discuss the new album and what happens when best laid plans end up changing for the better.

Frank Valish (Under the Radar): You grew up in Knoxville too, didn’t you?

Yeah, I was in Nashville for about 18 years, but I moved back in 2020. I had a sick parent who needed some help, so I’ve been here ever since. We actually just moved into this house.

Is it weird coming back home?

Well, there are definitely some full circle moments. I work part time, a couple nights a week at my friend’s record store, and to get to the record store I have to drive past these apartments that I lived in in like 1998. So it is kind of weird like that in some ways. But we were here quite often to visit family. So we were around that whole entire time.

I love the new record. I understand it was intended to be a Superdrag record. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about what led to that falling apart. Were the songs being worked on by that band and things just didn’t connect?

Well, it actually has been a really long process. I started writing these songs in January of 2021, so it’s taken quite a while to, number one, get a record finished. We started out making demos here in town at a place called Vibe City, with Mike Armstrong, who’s my friend that owns the record store, Lost & Found Records. We were just taking things really slow, not wanting to get in a big hurry to do anything, or rush anything, or force anything. So as a result of that I probably spent more time thinking about this batch of songs than any other batch previously. We started stacking up some material, and we got ready to take a few of them into the studio and, without dragging anybody through the mud, where things broke down was kind of between me and the producer, and it really didn’t have anything to do with the other guys in the band. But when things blew up, to me that just signaled that it was time to rethink the whole thing and approach it from a completely new perspective. So I called up my my friend Stewart Pack, who’s been like a hero of mine literally for 30 years, because of all the great bands that he’s been in and all the great records that he’s made around here. But the thing was, I was really trying to get in touch with his son, because Don [Coffey Jr., drummer] from Superdrag, did some recording with his son, Henry. And he said, “Man, Henry’s got it going on. He’s got the best recording operation in Knoxville. And so, of course that’s where I wanted to go. And so it ended up being like a package deal. I got a father and son rhythm section and production team.” So that’s a pretty cool thing. And I think they had fun working on it together. We were working on this stuff every Tuesday and Thursday for a while. They really had a lot to do with how the songs are arranged. We were kind of on a mission to get rid of all the excess. So all the songs got shorter. Most of them got faster. You know how sometimes in a song, you can circle the airport, kind of waiting for the next idea to to happen. Well, any of that was eliminated. We’d just go straight on to the next thing. So it really ended up being a drastically different record than what we started out to make. I do think that Superdrag will make another record. It just won’t be this record.

Yeah, I wondered how much, how much changed in terms of how you envisioned the songs when it moved from a Superdrag record to this power trio, as it were?

Yeah, we just kind of hit reset and weren’t really bound by any of the old demos or the old ways of doing them.

So you’re just able to kind of rethink what you could do with the songs in the new format, with the new players, and just kind of took it from there?

And I don’t think we ended up sounding like the Ramones, but we were definitely inspired by the Ramones, just like their first LP, the spartan-ness of it, just drums, bass, guitar and vocal, nothing that you wouldn’t see on stage. And there are a handful of overdubs that make it sound a little bit more record-y, here and there, but not very many. It’s a pretty spartan deal overall.

My brain goes to like those first few Hüsker Dü albums, not the hardcore stuff, but the first, the first few, after those first few.

Wow. Well I take that as a great compliment, because I love their career, especially like Metal Circus, New Day Rising, some of those. I wore those things out. And you know, that was another three piece. We were actually thinking about SST too. And besides Hüsker Dü, there’s the Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr. They had tons of three piece bands. So again, hopefully, without aping any of those, I definitely think we were inspired by them, which I kind of always seem to be to one extent or another.

Was the album in any reasonable stage of completion before you had to kind of make a left turn?

Not really. We had four songs in various stages, and only two that were finished, quote unquote, so we hadn’t gotten very far. And that was another factor in this decision. We had gone into the studio right before Christmastime of ’22, and by May of ’23 that was as far as it got. That’s a tough way to make art.

And to come out with two finished songs,

Right? I can remember one of the, one of the Lees of Memory albums, there was a period of eight months where we couldn’t get to it. Couldn’t do anything to it, and that was maddening. I couldn’t stand it. So I don’t want to be in that situation again.

You seem like you always kind of have your hands in something creative, in one sort of a stage or another.

Well, it might be kind of like how a shark has to keep moving or it dies, you know. I don’t know. I mean, since about 1994 I’ve kind of been in a constant state of making one record or another. I guess maybe at some deep level, I’m afraid that something terrible might happen if I’m not in that state. And, you know, sometimes that can be to a detriment. You can definitely get in too big a hurry, and you can definitely force things sometimes, and that’s not always the best position to be in either. But with this stuff, by the time it comes out, it’ll be more than three and a half years since I started putting these songs together. So it’s, it’s bound to be time for something else.

Did the songs come together quickly once you got the two new guys on board?

Oh yeah, I would say we probably didn’t spend more than an hour and a half playing any of them before we started going for takes. Because those dudes are total pros. I mean, they really are. Nothing could be easier.

It had to feel like a weight off when things started to click with these songs that you’d been working for on for a couple of years.

And it just goes to show you, you don’t have to be in some million dollar studio either. I mean, it was like an extra room above the garage, and to my ears, sonically, it really doesn’t lack anything. There’s nothing missing that I feel like, you know, another 25 grand worth of microphones would have settled. I wanted to approach it as if that Stratocaster was the only guitar I had, rather than get into that thing where it’s like, we can round up 28 different guitars so we have to use all of them. And there are cool things that can happen when you do it that way. That’s kind of what we did on Head Trip in Every Key to an extent. But I kind of liked, for the for this record, just committing to that one. And with the Strat, you got the five positions. So it really is a pretty versatile instrument. The neck pickup and the bridge pickups sound completely different. So it was just that one Strat and a couple of different Fender amps. It’s very Fender-y.

Were all the songs written around the same time, because I understand that you are or were newly engaged when you wrote some of them, and some of them seem like they were inspired by new love. Others, maybe not so much. But were they all written around that time?

For the most part, yeah. It definitely kind of oscillates back and forth between the the very highs and very lows, like I guess most records probably do. But yeah, there are definitely some that were inspired by my fiancé, no doubt. 100%.

I wanted to ask you how you kind of envision promotion these days. I know a lot of the stuff is on Bandcamp. It seems like you don’t really tour that much. I don’t know how much press you do, but I kind of sense that you write and you record what you want, when you want, because you want, and maybe aren’t terribly concerned with the aspect of of promotion that that maybe was so present when Superdrag started.

A lot of that is just because, you know, with the Lees of Memory, anyway, we had some label help on the first album, Sisyphus Says, but then the next three were just full DIY, just us doing what we could by ourselves. We got a little bit of press here and there, which was great. But, you know, there are just certain things that I can’t do myself. And so this time, to have some label help, and to have Force Field, and Terrorbird is doing their thing at radio, it just kind of elevates the game to a level that I can achieve by myself. Those Lees of Memory projects, the double album, The Blinding White of Nothing At All, that was me boxing up every record, putting every piece of tape on it, taking every one of them to the post office, and all that. But then when we made Moon Shot, we were able to pay for it, which was great. So I consider the Lees of Memory to be a big success, just because it always sustained itself and it and enabled us to keep making more records, which I guess is always the goal, ultimately, is to get to the next thing,

Right. But you can pick and choose where you want to devote more time and energy to the beast and where you might not need to.

Well on this cycle, I’m happy to be doing interviews. I don’t ever mind doing interviews at all. You know anybody that’s interested in talking about it, I’d love to talk to, you know.

(https://johndavisbrandmusic.bandcamp.com)

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.