John Davis by Matt Hickey

Throughout Superdrag’s decade-long run (the band went on likely permanent hiatus in 2003), 30-year-old John Davis acted the part of the stereotypically hard-living frontman. Late in 2001, during the recording of 2002’s Last Call For Vitriol, Davis’ alcohol intake, combined with poor eating and sleeping habits and long days in the studio, resulted in erratic behavior and serious health issues—his liver became toxic and his skin turned a shade of jaundiced yellow. On Nov. 11 of that year, while driving to be fitted for a suit to wear to as part of his upcoming New Year’s Eve wedding festivities, Davis, consciously oblivious of anything awry in his life, was reborn by the time he reached his destination. MAGNET spoke with Davis about his spiritual reawakening and the self-titled Christian-based solo record (on Rambler) it spawned. Before we get into the record and your faith, let me ask a few things about Superdrag. You started the band when you were pretty young, right? Yeah. We had other bands prior to Superdrag, but when I first started playing with (original guitarist) Brandon (Fisher) and (original bassist) Tom (Pappas), I was 18. And you’re how old now? I’m 30 now. What do you feel like you accomplished with Superdrag? Do you even think about the band in those terms? Well, I can’t help but look at it in the most highly personal terms. You ask me a question like that, I start thinking about how educational it was. I don’t mean in terms of leaning this chord or that chord or learning things in a hands-on musical way—though it was that, too—but just learning about life. Learning things like, do you have a work ethic and how do you put it in place? How do you carry yourself? How do you deal with people? How do you stand behind a T-shirt booth and talk to people that you’ve never met before that feel like they know you because they have your records? I mean, (drummer) Don Coffey Jr. is older than me, and he taught me a lot. I didn’t have brothers or sisters growing up. Those guys were like older brothers. Don, in particular, taught me a lot about life. I kind of grew up in that band. To a certain extent, when you’re 17, 18 years old, you’re kind of already grown up. But when we started playing in the group and started doing shows, that dovetailed precisely with me moving out of the house and starting to make a way for myself. Then there’s the whole other aspect of it: writing the songs, making the records, doing the tours. Musically, what do you feel you accomplished? When you start a band, you have an imaginary band in your mind that you want to sound like. It’s always going to be some equation involving your favorite bands. I wanted to have the melodies of the Beatles, the guitar of Dinosaur Jr, the drumbeat of Teenage Fanclub, etc. I think we made that band. We became the imaginary band that we wanted to hear, that we felt like didn’t exist. When I first met those guys and started playing with them, it was a Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam world, at least in Knoxville. Nobody was trying to incorporate Big Star into what they did. The second-generation Beatles-imitator factor was missing. When it comes down to it, it’s just rock ‘n’ roll: We had a band and we made records and we toured like tens of thousands of other young people do in this country. But by trying to communicate honestly and put it across in a way that was heartfelt, it meant something to people, and it still means something to some people. Ultimately, if you can look back on your work and feel like you did something that made someone feel better than they would have without it, even if was just for 35 minutes or however long it took the record to play ... I don’t know, I think you have to look at life in those kinds of terms because even the greatest success, when we’re dead and gone, it’s gone. Recently, I was kind of hung up on the book of Ecclesiastes, and that’s pretty much the whole point of it. The guy’s saying, “I look back on all the works of my hands and it’s grasping at the wind.” That’s a healthy way to look at things. Being in a band and sitting in a van for nine months of the year, the world gets real small. And it’s like, “If I can just get this T-shirt to stay on the wall with duct tape, everything will be right with the world.” And that’s what it takes. You have to have that passion for all of it, or else you wouldn’t do it. There’s no point. It always amuses me when people accuse bands of hatching some kind of get-rich-quick scheme by starting a band. Man, that just doesn’t happen. Even if you look at somebody and think it happened to them, I bet you it didn’t. Superdrag’s back story in terms of the record industry is not unique. Definitely not. It’s almost a well-worn cliché as to almost be a waste of breath to talk about it. When I was 22, I didn’t realize that. Now I do. Nobody wants to listen to somebody who gets to make records for a living complain about how hard it is. It doesn’t evoke a lot of sympathy from people. But that goes back to the original point about the educational factor. When we made our first record, I didn’t know anything about anything. Now, at the opposite end of things, I feel a little bit smarter than I was then. As far as the future of Superdrag, or lack thereof, when you decided to go in a different direction, why was it termed a hiatus rather than a breakup? Do you think there may be Superdrag work in the future? I don’t think you can ever completely discount something like that. I don’t mean to draw any parallel, but I don’t think Black Francis ever expected to stand on a stage with Kim Deal again. But it happened. As far as Superdrag, there was a season, and it came and went. I don’t think me getting saved was the only factor in it. Just like anybody, as we got older we wanted different things out of life. When you’re doing stuff on our level, you basically do what you do at the expense of everything else in your life. That wasn’t working for me anymore. Now, with starting back at square one and hitting reset on the whole thing, from the get-go, I’m able to say, “Hey, these are lines that I can’t cross no matter what,” and it doesn’t affect three other people. The decisions we used to make as a band affected four of us, our wives—everything else we did fell by the wayside so we could make it to the Chucker in Tuscaloosa that day. There were things that we couldn’t see eye-to-eye on. From a personal standpoint of wanting to write a new kind of song, I have a totally different kind of heart about things and a different way of looking at things. I felt like a phony getting up and singing some of the stuff. And that’s the honest truth. I didn’t feel like I was being honest. When that realization hit me, I didn’t feel like I could go on. Did you feel that way almost because that material was written by a different person? I do feel that way a lot. In the rare instances when I’ll hear the records or see the old photos, I think it looks and sounds like a completely different guy. I’m not trying to make any of this into an essay on the evils of drinking or drugs. For me, if it hadn’t have been that, it’d have been something else. I didn’t want to get up onstage and sing a song I wrote when I was on LSD. That’s just one example. Every once in a while, I catch wind of these controversies on the (www.superdrag.com) message board about this kind of stuff. People think that maybe because I said something in a certain way that it meant I didn’t care about [2002’s Last Call For Vitriol] or that last tour. Man, that’s not true. The reason why I had to get out of it was because the instant I figured out my heart wasn’t in it 200 percent anymore, that’s when I had to stop. I’d like people to know that they’ll never see me onstage playing an instrument or doing anything that I don’t care about. If I wanted to do something I don’t care about, I’d stock shelves at Target, or I’d unload a truck somewhere and just get a paycheck. With Superdrag, it wasn’t like we were Aerosmith, with some legacy. You won’t see us on Behind The Music. The one thing we have is our integrity. If that’s called into question, that’s the one thing that really bothers me. People not liking this song or that song or preferring this record to that one, that’s a matter of taste. I just wouldn’t want people to ever think that we tried to do anything malicious toward them or tried to be dishonest with them. Next Page >> 1 2 3