The Continuing Adventures of Superdrag

From ‘Stereo 360’ to ‘Sucked Out’ to Second Bell, Knoxville’s power-pop kings love the lives they’ve lived and the ones yet to come

Story by Steve Wildsmith • Photos by Jason Cantrell / Cadence Captures

Way back in 1975, those warrior poets in AC/DC foreshadowed the journey of every aspiring musician who plugs a Les Paul knockoff into a Marshall amp:
“Ridin’ down the highway, goin’ to a show / stop in all the byways, playin’ rock ‘n’ roll / gettin’ robbed, getting’ stoned, getting’ beat up, broken-boned / gettin’ had, gettin’ took, I tell you folks, it’s harder than it looks …”
Indeed, as the members of Superdrag will attest: It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll, and sometimes the top is the point of a spire that allows a few brief moments of glory before one begins the inevitable descent.
But what transcendent moments they are.

Gathered together on a Saturday morning at “Vibe City,” the Fountain City outbuilding full of records, instruments and recording equipment owned by Mike and Maria Armstrong of Lost and Found Records, the four men – singer/guitarist John Davis, guitarist Brandon Fisher, bassist Tom Pappas and drummer Don Coffey Jr. – reflect on them with both fondness and incredulity. It’s almost as if their collective memories of those heady days in 1996, when “Sucked Out” made its MTV debut and catapulted Superdrag from regional success in East Tennessee to national (and even international) fame, are things that happened to other people, strange fairy tales of a time when the rest of the world discovered what Knoxville had known for a while.

“When I booked Superdrag for their first gigs, there was no doubt that this quartet was going to be big,” says Benny Smith, program director and general manager of WUTK. “First off, their sound was big and loud and easy to latch on to. Their shows were intense, and the love from the crowd from day one was obvious. And this was the early to mid-’90s, which was a fantastic time for K-Town’s local music scene.

“The Judybats were sort of winding up a bit but still very popular. The V-Roys and Gran Torino were rolling out their goodness, and it seemed like Knoxville had every flavor of rock there was to offer. [But] Superdrag was unmistakably the leader of the indie-rock sound from day one.”

Destination: rock ‘n’ roll

Davis remembers exactly where he was the first time he saw the video for “Sucked Out,” the lead single off of the band’s major-label debut for Elektra Records (“Regretfully Yours,” also released in 1996): a hotel room. Specifically, he remembers Larry Brady, the band’s guitar tech at the time who was a veteran of the fellow Knoxville band Pegclimber, strolling into the room with a fresh Travis Bickle-style mohawk, a WTF moment that quickly fell off the radar when the song, all 2:46 of it, unfolded in a story that includes an inebriated old man, Davis as a forlorn and fed-up diner employee and the guys banging through the song in enthusiastic fashion.

“I never thought it was possible,” Davis says. “I used to watch MTV every single day from the get-go, and when I was 8 years old, Prince was my idol. I thought he was from another planet. I never thought a human being from Earth could be as cool as Prince, and at that point in time, being in a video on MTV didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem achievable at all.”

“It changed everything,” adds Coffey. “We went from playing 200-seat clubs to 1,000-seat clubs, just like that.”
He punctuates the point with a fierce clap before continuing: “We would pull up to the show in our same old van, and we’d be walking up to wherever we were playing and be like, ‘We’re playing here?!’ And then all of the sudden, it’s sold out.”

None of it, of course, happened overnight, and none of it was intentional, at least in the beginning. Like most rockers, the fellas in Superdrag didn’t map out a blueprint for stardom before they ever played their first Knoxville club gig. Sure, they may have kicked around a lot of “what if” fantasies back in the day, but expectations were always manageable.

“The end-all, be-all is that if your [stuff] gets played on the radio, you’re happy,” Coffey says. “You can have success without that, for sure, but when it does get played on the radio, it’s a pretty good feeling.”

“As a kid, you would listen to the radio all night and think, ‘Man, having a song on the radio would be awesome,’” Fisher adds. “But then, getting the opportunity to do it? That’s all we really hoped for in the beginning.”

The radio station that introduced Superdrag to Knoxville was, of course, WUTK – the same station to whom the band is donating its entire stipend for BLANK Newspaper’s Second Bell Music Fest on September 30th and October 1st. Their loyalty to Smith, who has been the heartbeat of the station for decades and was a Superdrag champion even when he stepped away in the late ‘90s, is unquestionable. Because without Smith, the four men say, Superdrag might have found a way, but the path would have been far more arduous.

“I was first aware of the potential for something bigger happening when I booked Punch Wagon for a show that, I believe, was at The Library on the [Cumberland Avenue] ‘Strip,’ not long after I left WUTK as a grad teaching assistant and was doing my No Cheeze Music concert booking,” says Smith, referring to the pre-Superdrag power trio that featured Davis on bass and vocals, Coffey on drums and guitarist Mike Smithers.

Davis had found his way into the scene as a solo musician playing in a project called the Broken String Band, but it was with Coffey blasting backbeats behind him and Smithers riding the rails that allowed him a chance to shine, Smith adds.

“Without a doubt, it was easy to see that John was so incredibly talented, but he was soaking so much in playing with Don and Mike, especially the power-pop sound and drive,” he says. “Brandon and Tom were [playing in] The Used, which was more hard and punk-driven, so seeing John play drums with them also made me aware that this baby-faced Farragutian was just scratching the surface as to what he could do.”

The Used turned and burned on the frenetic energy of Pappas, the guy known as “The Senator,” who today lives in Nashville and serves as both a sideman and a player in a number of his own projects. His mane of dark curls is a little tamer these days, but it’s still as resplendent as it was back then, when his pogo-style playing and scissor kick-fueled power chords made him as fun to watch as Davis.

After Punch Wagon parted ways, The Used brought Davis to the microphone, asked Coffey to pick up the sticks and changed names to Superdrag.

“As far as crowd reaction and the popularity of their demo tape[s] around town … it was easy to see from show one that Superdrag had what it took to make the rock ‘n’ roll that was really popular those days, especially on college radio and on MTV,” Smith says. “It was only a matter of time before the rest of the country, and world, would find out, but it was incredible booking them along the way and watching/hearing them become the band that would be loved by so many.”

Sounds of a vibrant city

The guys released the demos “Stereo ‘360’ Sound” in 1994 and the EP “The Fabulous 8 Track Sounds of Superdrag” in 1995, and by that point, Knoxville seemed primed to become the next Athens, Georgia, or Austin, Texas. The Judybats, The V-Roys, Gran Torino, the Satellite Pumps … the city was bursting at the seams with talent, and a trip to play New York’s Irving Plaza demonstrated just how much the music industry wanted a part of it.

“I remember being upstairs at Irving Plaza and looking outside at a line of people waiting to get in the door,” Fisher says. “It all built very slowly, but then when the video hit, things happened very quickly.”

“Were there scalpers? I think I remember scalpers at that show,” says Pappas, leaning forward on his knees, just a few feet away from where the guys had roared through a three-hour rehearsal the night before.

The success of every band depends on the chemistry between its members, and more than a quarter-century after “Sucked Out” put them on the map, it’s clear that the wisdom and clarity provided by age have deepened the Superdrag chemistry into a lifelong friendship. Ego, pride and competition were certainly a part of the group’s trajectory, but in 2022, on the cusp of a second reunion that’s built on a foundation even more solid than the one anchoring 2009’s “Industry Giants” comeback, there’s no place for those things.

Instead, each man sides into a role that seems written for a Cameron Crowe film. Davis is the introspective poet … Pappas, the laconic jokester with flashes of insight … Fisher, the earnest and exuberant kid in a grown man’s body for whom picking up the guitar never fails to elicit a grin … Coffey, the snickering wiseass and keeper of stories that aren’t fit to print.

There are, of course, dozens, if not hundreds of those – like about the 1996 tour with Echobelly and For Squirrels, right before “Sucked Out” was released, when the buzz around the band was electric, and an intense young fan brought a lemon juice bottle to the boys and asked them to fill it with their urine as a personalized souvenir. (They declined.)

But for every Dada-esque rock ‘n’ roll moment, for every inside joke and arcane reference that make sense only to the guys themselves, there was also a whole lot of monotony and tedium that young bands often never consider, and that are no longer applicable because the world has moved on. (Stopping at a state park in Wyoming, for example, and scrounging through the van for change so Davis could use a pay phone and call a music journalist in Japan.)

“One of the biggest changes I remember is just the grind each day of having a hit song on the radio, because that means that no matter what happened the previous night, your ass is getting up at 9:30 in the morning and going down to the radio station and playing an acoustic version of it,” Davis says. “If we had a show in that city, it meant that day, we were going to a radio station to play acoustic, and I would always try to not play ‘Sucked Out,’ because it’s hard enough to do electric. You seem like a psycho trying to do it acoustic.”

“All the sudden, your world becomes even smaller,” Coffey adds. “What you have to do every day is be a professional-level employee and do what [the label] says.”

There were perks for being a successful employee; after the aforementioned Irving Plaza gig, the guys graduated from a van to a tour bus, and their inaugural ride in it was through Manhattan, with the windows down, drinking Budweiser.
“Before, we would frequently play on stages clustered together very tightly with no soundcheck, and the drums were set up right behind John and I,” Fisher says. “All of the sudden, we were on stage with wonderful monitors and soundchecks –”

“– and had no idea how to set them up!” Coffey chimes in.
“We had roadies. Roadies!” Pappas repeats. “I’ll never forget the first time he went to put my bass on me, and I was like, ‘Give me that bass! You’re not putting my own instrument on me!’”

There was always liquor, which would eventually become a problem for Davis (who’s open about his battle and has been sober for more than two decades now), and after soundcheck before a gig, the boys had one mission toward it: Attack.

And despite the nonstop grind of singing “Sucked Out,” a song that tests the mettle of Davis’ vocal range every time he does, none of the guys would change a thing about that song or that record. In fact, he grins when recalling a particular story from a few years back, when he was playing as a sideman for a Nashville band made up of friends. They were living the van life, and one of the guys thought it might get under Davis’ skin if he played “Sucked Out.”

The van filled with the kaleidoscopic vibrancy of the track, and after it ended, he turned and cocked an eyebrow at Davis.
“What d’you think of that, J.D.?” Davis recalls being asked.

He grins at the impending punchline.

“I just said, ‘That’s what a hit sounds like boys,’” he says. “That’s what I still say.”

The old clothes no longer fit

As much as “Sucked Out” changed life on the road, it also changed things back home in Knoxville. At the height of the band’s popularity, Superdrag was put on tour with Nada Surf, another indie-pop outfit riding the waves of its own hit (“Popular”) at the time. After being gone for months at a stretch, it seemed like East Tennessee had changed dramatically when the boys got home.
As it turns out, the town hadn’t changed, but attitudes toward Superdrag, and by extension its members, certainly had.
“People around you were acting nuts, and there was a lot of idolatry stuff,” Pappas says.

“It bothered me a lot,” Coffey adds. “At least we had somebody to talk to, because The V-Roys were going through it, too, but I felt guilty for a long time. That’s what Hottfest [a now-defunct festival Coffey organized at The Corner Lounge] was about. That’s what starting the studio [Independent Recorders] was about. That was my takeaway from Superdrag: How do you give something back?

“This is my hometown. It’s where I’m from. I’ve never left, and I never will. But it was profoundly different, like, ‘Where are my buddies?’ I’d want to come home and go to the Longbranch, but it felt very weird and different.”

To be fair, Davis adds, it had started before the band found fame. That’s what “Sucked Out” was all about, he acknowledges.
“It didn’t have anything to do with the record business. It had to do with White Avenue [in the Fort Sanders neighborhood],” he says. “It had to do with going back there to a house party with a bunch of bands playing like we used to do, and not feeling like we belonged there.”

The record business, though, had its own pitfalls, as the guys found out on the other side of “Head Trip in Every Key,” their sophomore effort for Elektra that was released in 1998. Conventional wisdom has it that the label threw money at Superdrag after the surprise success of “Regretfully Yours” – on the condition the band record more radio-friendly songs. A Wikipedia consultation reveals the belief that, “The band has admitted as much later that they were taking advantage of the money Elektra provided to them in order to create the best studio album they could, regardless of the label’s demands for radio hits, knowing that they might never have that kind of funding again.”

The truth lies somewhere in the middle but ultimately comes down to one thing: “We just made the record we wanted to make,” Fisher says. “There was no, ‘We need to do this,’ or, ‘We have to do this.’ It was a perfect snapshot of where we were at that time.”

“We’d been playing the same songs for two years, at least, and we wanted to do something that was the opposite of it, and we had the means to do it for once,” Coffey adds. “We had the means to do whatever we possibly wanted.”

Although Jerry Finn is credited with production on “Head Trip,” the guys put in a great deal of work with uber-producer (and Knoxville boy) Nick Raskulinecz, whose friendship with them, particularly Davis, is rock solid to this day. That work, combined with the descent of muses upon the quartet in a way that had them at peak creativity, resulted in what many fans, if not the guys themselves, view as their high-water mark.

“The ideas were just rolling, and it was like the record was making itself and the ideas were in charge,” Davis says. “It just took off in its own direction, and it didn’t sound like any other record I’m aware of.”

At least until Finn bought a copy of the newly released Radiohead album “OK Computer” on his way to the studio in Van Nuys, California, where the guys were cutting “Head Trip.” Hearing the use of mellotron on the Radiohead track “Exit Music (For a Film)” was both a gauntlet thrown and a defeat acknowledged, the guys recall.

“We thought we had found the Holy Grail with the mellotron choir sound, like, ‘Nobody’s going to put this on record!’ But then we heard ‘Exit Music,’” Davis says.

“It was a total mental beatdown, because we realized they were doing whatever we wanted to do,” Coffey adds.

Fisher, however, was undeterred. Even today, he speaks with admiration of Davis’ creativity during that process, and about Jerry’s use of gaffe tape on a soundboard fader knob to get a tremolo effect on one particular song. Even the fact that Davis played the breakdown on the song “Annetichrist” on the same couch where Kurt Cobain had recorded “Something in the Way” served as creative impetus, Davis says.

Elektra, however, didn’t hear what the guys did at the time, and what fans would later. They started by pulling the record’s video budget, then the tour support budget, effectively sending Superdrag back to Knoxville. And then the guys heard what was stirring the greatest interest among Elektra executives, and it seemed the writing was on the wall.
“They were giving all this money to Third Eye Blind, and I remember thinking, ‘This is different than us. These songs are predicted to be hits, and they don’t sound like us,’” Fisher says.

“I expected it to do better than ‘Regretfully Yours,’ because it was a better album,” Davis adds. “I thought we made a lot of advances as musicians in terms of the way we played together. All the work we did on the road really paid off when we got in the studio, and I thought it was a unique album.

“I thought their big mistake was trying to shoehorn it into a format that it had nothing to do with. I thought they should have celebrated the things that made it different than other records.”

Despite the label’s disappointment, Elektra extended Superdrag’s contract, and then with no way to get back out on the road to support “Head Trip,” the quartet turned to writing songs that would become “In the Valley of Dying Stars.” The relationship between the two entities, however, had reached a stalemate.

“When the publishing advances ran out, that changed our whole situation, because that covered a lot of bills,” Davis says. “They wouldn’t let us finish the record we had started, and they wouldn’t put us on the road to promote the last record, and that put a lot of strain on things. That was a turning point where things got dark for a while.”

‘Dying Stars’ and reignition

A contentious phone call terminated the contract between label and band, and soon after, both Pappas and Fisher pulled the rip cord.

“Everything seemed to be collapsing into dark places, and I just thought that if we weren’t going to play live anymore, then I wasn’t going to play,” Pappas says. “That was really sad to me, but I stayed until Sam [Powers] joined in March 1999.”
With Powers stepping in, the guys finished “Valley,” a record that received critical accolades from The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and CMJ New Music Monthly, among others. Elektra had returned the original demos the guys had cut in Nashville with Raskulinecz, who massaged them to completion and set Superdrag up for the next iteration of its existence.
It would be one without Fisher, too, however.

“When we finished ‘Valley,’ you could tell the way things were moving that what we needed to do was go on the road, and I just couldn’t do it,” he says. “It had nothing to do with music or personalities, because we were and still are obviously best friends. I just needed to not be on the road for six months or eight months at a time.”

Powers, Davis and Coffey soldiered on as a trio for a while (playing a remarkable set at SXSW in 2000 that featured Pappas, touring as Bobby Bare Jr.’s bassist at the time, in the crowd) before asking William “Willie T.” Tyler to join the fold.
“We played and played and played and played, and we found this whole other Superdrag audience that didn’t [care] about MTV,” Davis says. “They liked Guided By Voices and bands like that. It was a different world, so we got busy.”

Two things happened in 2001: Davis got sober (he gives all credit to God), and Mic Harrison, their old friend and former V-Roy, came on board as the group’s guitarist. They began cutting “Last Call for Vitriol,” which would be released in 2002, and for the next year, Superdrag tried to keep it between the ditches. At last, in 2003, Powers announced his decision to leave.

“Sam was done, and the question was, ‘Do we want to go find another bassist?’” Coffey says. “By then, I think John had had enough, and I was tired, too. We were both worn out.”

“For me, it came when we showed up at a gig, and there were 45 people already day-drinking at 3 p.m., and I walked onstage and started playing ‘Keep It Close to Me,’” Davis adds. “Before the drums even kick in, I had a full beer sprayed all over me. Here I was, trying to keep it out of my mouth, trying to keep playing, and I just thought, ‘I’m done with this. I don’t want to be ringleader of a band playing for a bunch of people rolling around at the show spraying beer on each other.’”

And so Superdrag, the band, was quietly retired. Davis began focusing on a solo career. Pappas continued to return to East Tennessee with Rock City Birdhouse, the Tom Pappas Collection and other projects. Fisher got a full-time job and made a little bit of music on the side. Coffey launched Independent Recorders in the same space where Superdrag had cut “Vitriol.”
They remained friends, though, and in 2009 they got back together to cut “Industry Giants.” Things, however, seemed forced; personalities didn’t need massaging, but the situation certainly did.

“We had a bunch of songs, but what we didn’t have was a place to practice, because the band was divided between two places,” Davis says. “We had access to a bunch of good studios, and we would come in on a weekend and do it guerrilla-style at a bunch of them.”

“These guys were way ahead of me, in that I got married and had a child later than they did,” Coffey adds. “With a wife and a new baby at home, I remember sitting in on those sessions and playing those shows and thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ And that scared the sh*t out of me. For the first time in my life, I was scared.

“My head wasn’t in the right place to do it then.”

‘The Top’ is where you make it

But, Coffey adds with a grin and a swig of Natural Light, it is now. There’s an unspoken agreement between these four brothers in rock ‘n’ roll arms that if one isn’t ready, it ain’t happening. They’ve played in various combinations over the years – Fisher and Davis have kept The Lees of Memory going for a decade now – and they’ve collaborated digitally on vinyl reissues of Superdrag records. And when the guys in Disgruntled Squirrel Productions contacted all four about making a retrospective video for WUTK’s 40th anniversary, they said yes without hesitation.

“That, to me, is really what brought it all back full circle,” Davis says. “We talked about filming different things and interviews and possibly some kind of performance, and I always thought, ‘Can we play some music, too? Let’s actually play now, because we still can, rather than sitting around talking about playing in 1994.’”

When approached about being one of the top-billed acts for Second Bell – taking place at Suttree Landing Park in South Knoxville – they realized they could do even more good for WUTK, and by extension Smith, by saying yes. Which of course led to rehearsals, which in turn have led to new material.

“We’ve got five new songs, but we’ve not been forcing any of it,” Davis says. “One will show up, and I’ll work on it until I feel it’s in a state to bring it to the rest of them. We’re just keeping things loose, but I’m really excited about it, because I really like the songs. They don’t really sound like anything we’ve done before.

“There are little elements of previous stuff, but to me, they all do a little something different, and to me, that’s the goal every time.”

And yes, he adds, there are plans for a new Superdrag record. Unlike with “Industry Giants,” however, there’s no sense of urgency. “Letting it happen organically” sounds like the sort of artistic lingo that the guys loathe – “We’re not entertainment types, man,” Davis says. “We’re not built for that major-label world where being famous and making money is the art.” – but it’s applicable nonetheless.

“This time, people are probably wondering why it’s taking so long to work out five songs, but we’re letting it happen the way it should,” Davis says.

“The best idea always wins,” Coffey adds. “It doesn’t matter what that is. This is the most democratic band I’ve ever seen. At the same time, it’s got to deliver. It’s got to be up to the level we all agree to, because we don’t want to go up there and let anybody down.”

If such a thing is possible, however, it seems the only way guaranteed for Superdrag to disappoint anyone is if the guys don’t show up at all – and that’s unlikely. They’re having too much fun, Pappas says, chuckling at the image of all four guys during practice, heads down like a collective of microdosing trance enthusiasts, bending notes and experimenting with the vibrato certain distances from the amplifier elicit.

On a dime, the conversation turns to “The Chimp,” a Curious George doll that Pappas stuck on his bass amp in 1994 and has held onto ever since. They howl with laughter at the way they cut a hole in its mouth and would place a lit cigarette in there, watching it burn slowly as they rocked the night away. The Chimp leads to a rabbit-hole dive to Story Town, where they’re sitting stage side, watching The Meices roll up to the venue at start time, plug in and start rocking … meeting Blag Dahlia, vocalist of the Dwarves, because his girlfriend served as the model for the “Head Trip” album cover … Pappas, digging through the wreckage of a van that had been broken into, looking for a club with which to accost a suspicious-looking bystander the boys suspected may have had information on who, exactly, smashed glass and stole one shoe out of each pair the guys had.

That they happened is one thing; that they have lived to tell the tale is even more bizarre.
And something for which they’re all grateful. Their days may be full of more talk about baseball with Smith than where the next show will be played, but the fact they can still play at all … songs that made them famous and ones not yet recorded, to crowds old and new with a fervor fueled by friendship … well, does it really get any better?
They think not.

“Glory be to God, because we could all be dead!” Pappas says.
“I feel fortunate that we’re able to still do it,” Fisher adds. “I’m always thankful, but I feel fortunate to be able to be here and play.”

wildsmith@blanknews.com