Superdrag Is Over, But John Davis Looks Forward with Lees of Memory

Photo credit: Elvis Wilson

I promised myself I wouldn’t just make John Davis ramble on about Superdrag, but I couldn’t help it because Superdrag are done. “It’s a wrap, for sure,” he told me over the phone a few weeks ago from his Nashville home. I told him I thought that the band’s 2009 comeback album, Industry Giants, would have received so much more love had it came out this year, when the reunion album is practically its own industry. “Dude, you’re probably right,” he said. “We basically waited until the global economy was in the tank. That was the moment we chose to make our comeback. Right about the time people stopped buying records and stopped going to shows. That's classic. Textbook Superdrag decisions.”

His band, best known for the 1996 single “Sucked Out” from its major label debut album Regretfully Yours, has been on hiatus since 2010. After a vinyl reissue of that debut album through Side One Dummy in 2012, the band is doing the same for the follow-up, Head Trip in Every Key. Though Regretfully Yours is a 90s power pop high water mark, on Head Trip the band largely abandoned the sound that garnered them favorable comparisons to Big Star, Teenage Fanclub, and Weezer. In its place is a more ambitious, more nuanced record, and one that Davis admits is the best-sounding Superdrag album. It’s also the last one the band released with Elektra.

Now, he’s focused on a new band called the Lees of Memory, which features his Superdrag running mate Brandon Fisher as well as drummer Nick Slack. This is what really excites him. Like a true music nerd, nothing got him speaking more animatedly during our conversation than the vinyl sequencing of band’s forthcoming debut album Sisyphus Says (out September 16). The new music is among the work he has done of which he’s most proud. Before I chatted him up about his band that I grew up listening to, I got the skinny on his dreamy, hazy, shoegaze-inspired new band.

Noisey: How did this new band the Lees of Memory come together?
John Davis: It was kind of a surprise to us. I don't think we knew that we were making a record. For a while [Brandon Fisher and Davis] were just kind of writing and making demos. We didn't really get to work together on that many of them, we were working separately for a lot of the time. Basically everything that I write I make a demo for, I always send to Nick [Raskulinecz, who produced]. It's just a habit. He makes so many records and is getting, like, submarined so much of the time, sometimes I wouldn't hear back from him for a month or six weeks or whatever because he's just covered up. Brandon was kind of the impetus for the whole thing. He had some stuff that he wanted to demo with us and he doesn't really have a drum kit at home. So he brought his family over here one weekend and we just just did one song, "Deliquesce," that's on the record. That was the first song we had and he was really stoked on how it turned out on the four track and that kind of kicked off a spree in writing. I ended up coming up with a dozen or so songs and he was working on more stuff. We were kind of keeping in touch with each other on the way but we thought we were still doing two separate projects. Then it became obvious that we just needed to join forces. I had been sending all this stuff to Nick and hadn't heard much back from him, and my whole plan all along was to send it out on the Internet on Bandcamp, just make it easy for people to download just to try and keep it moving. But he just hit me back and was like, "Dude you got a record here. When are we doing this?" Nobody does it better than that dude, so you'd be foolish to turn down that help. It's been done for a year. All we've really done is put out one 45. I think we pressed 400 total. The whole deal has been pretty low key and we've been sitting on this record for a long time. Which I guess kinda turned out in our favor.

Will you be taking this band on tour?
Up ‘til now we've never played any of this stuff live. And it's been discussed off and on, but I don't know. I might be the least stoked about that whole angle. Writing and recording are what I'm really interested in. It kind of blew me away when I started talking to Side One Dummy, from day one I was like, "We've never played." It blew me away that they were down to put the record out anyway. Normally it's like, "You mean you haven't played 200 shows for 50 bucks and a pizza yet? We'll talk to you later."

How did they wind up working with you guys on the Superdrag reissues?
I think they hit up Superdrag's manager and he kind of pushed the whole thing forward. I have been personally a lot more involved with the second round. A couple of the guys that we were dealing with initially aren't there anymore. Everybody I've dealt with out there has been super nice. With this Head Trip in Every Key reissue, I think they've already showed a lot more love for the record than Elektra did, as I recall. Just to keep it real, they seem a lot more enthusiastic about it than the treatment it got originally. At least that's the way I remember it.

Why is that?
I can't really fault them for anything, because we didn't really make any decisions that made their jobs easier or that pointed to a long stay there. And the record that we came back with for our follow up was anything but the hit 13 times. In fairness, that's kind of what they want from you. That makes things easy.

They wanted 13 more singles like “Sucked Out,” you mean?
I always felt like, reading between the lines, they just wanted a bunch of stuff that sounded like "Sucked Out." That sounded like the first record. We didn't really see them for a long time. They cut us loose and we were at Sound City for three months, solid. And we never saw anybody from the label. Until kind of the 11th hour when we were listening down to roughs. I remember a few of them came by and it was pretty awkward. They definitely weren't too stoked about what they were hearing. And it wasn't too long after that that we had to go somewhere and write more, and then we had to go back in and record more. Kind of the same way that it happened with the first record, but that whole deal just kind of happened naturally, with "Sucked Out" being added to the record at the last minute.

“Sucked Out” wasn’t originally on the first LP?
The record was mastered. We thought it was done. I went home and we had two to three weeks off and I got on a roll and started writing every day, including a bunch of the material that ended up on the second record. "Sucked Out" was one of those that I just threw on a tape and just kind of jokingly said, "Hey, here's the second record. Ha ha." Just kind of to be a dick. I thought it was funny, to be that ready to go in and do some more. That kind of changed. All of a sudden there was going to be a video budget and they were going to promote it to alternative radio. They weren't planning on doing any of that before we came up with that song.

What’s your favorite Superdrag album?
Definitely not the first one. It's probably my least favorite. I don't know, most people point to either Head Trip or In the Valley [of Dying Stars]as being the peak. It's a toss up for me. There are reasons why I would prefer one of the other. Head Trip is definitely the best sounding record we made. That's mostly the combination of Sound City and Jerry Finn. That's basically a best-case scenario for good sounds. The whole time that we've been getting this thing ready and going back and thinking about that time, it's just—when I hear that record I just hear Jerry. I'm just really bummed that he's not around anymore, that he's not making a record right now. He was certainly young when he passed away and he had so much more to do and he had so much talent it was just obvious that making records is why he was put on Earth. He was one of the good guys. When that record came out and it didn't sell the way they thought it should or it was supposed to, a lot of these industry dudes abandon ship after that. They put as much distance between that project and themselves as they can because they want to keep getting calls. To save face they'll shit on it or act like it never happened. Jerry always stood behind it and always backed us. Til the end. The last time Superdrag played in LA in 2008 we did two nights at Troubadour. He showed up down there. That was only a couple months before he passed away. There's that whole mix of emotions that comes along with it.

But with In the Valley, that's just a super personal one for me. That was the hill worth dying on for Elektra. It was like, look, we've given you 30 songs, you don't like any of them, this is our band, this is what we're going to do next, and we're not changing anything. And of course, we got dropped for failure to deliver an album in a timely fashion. I mean, we delivered four albums! They blew it. That's the one where it just makes me proud that we lost our deal, we went back to putting records out on an indie label, got back in our van, kept doing us. Because we weren't going to let the dude that wrote the Vitamin C record tell us what our band was supposed to sound like. And if we had knuckled under and been like, "Yeah, we'll make it more like Third Eye Blind," then we would still be in the same boat today, sitting in cubicles, but we would have to live with that. I'd rather not have to live with that and least know that we stayed true. A lot of those songs were about a death in the family for me. And a lot of deep grief and loss and I'll be damned if I'm gonna just push that to the side to make some dude happy that never had any love for us anyway. I will give it to him though, at least he never tried to pretend like we were friends. At least you knew that going in. Whatever. I'm sorry, I got wound up. It would be one of those two and it would be hard to choose.

Will you reissue the rest of the Superdrag records?
This whole cycle to me is a great way of putting a period on it. I guess never say never. But I would much rather put that energy and creativity and time into the Lees. To me that's a lot more interesting. At the same time, when this whole thing happened and we were starting to get into reissuing this stuff, once creative decisions starting having to be made about packaging and the look of it, even if you don't want to dwell on the past its hard not to jump in. It's just a compulsion. But In the Valley came out on vinyl. I think it's pretty hard to find now. Man, I've heard of people paying ridiculous amounts of money for those on eBay, which kind of makes me feel bad.

So we shouldn’t expect another Superdrag reunion tour.
I would never be down for that like, go out on a tour and play blank album from start to finish. To me, it's just a bad look. If the best thing we were ever gonna do happened when we were 23, why not give up? I don't want to seem ungrateful because I'm lucky to have that. For anybody to care is something to be thankful for for any reason, whether its because of something we did 17 years ago or not.

Todd Olmstead is currently on vacation, listening to Superdrag on repeat. He's on Twitter — @toddjolmstead

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