It would be easy to get so depressed that you couldn't do anything.'Īmong Davis' recent disappointments was Elektra Records' decision not to finance a video for Head Trip. Now we're sort of in the position of doing what we can do in spite of those people. To be honest, I guess we had our 15 minutes of fame on commercial radio, and it really wasn't all that satisfying. But it just seems to be a narrowing margin all the time. There's always been a narrow margin of what gets played. 'I'm sure that from the dawn of commercial radio, it's been similar. And the playlists are figured out by these number-crunching automotons that know nothing about music. And it's the same one that goes to the other 10 stations that are owned by the same company. They have absolutely no control over the playlists, at all. 'There are 12 conglomerates that own every modern-rock station in America.

'The more we learn about the ins and outs of the radio scene, it becomes more and more reasonable, honestly,' Davis says. Actually, in conversation he expresses an almost resigned acceptance that radio will never be what he wants it to be. It's an idea he extends on Superdrag's new album, Head Trip in Every Key, with the radio-bashing 'Bankrupt Vibration.' Hearing this track, one tends to assume that Davis is obsessively angry with the state of modern-rock radio. In this song, Davis seemed to be mourning the idea that the dream he'd carried all his life ('playing out rocking routines') had been sucked dry of all its cultural potency. 'Sucked Out' worked as an ultracatchy pop-rock song, but it also exposed a fascinating love-hate relationship with the idea of rock stardom. But anyone who saw the willfully snotty Davis shriek, 'Who sucked out the feeling?' in his 1996 video for 'Sucked Out' knew that here was another pop tunesmith who was jaded before his time. Whereas Costello spent his formative years watching his dad sing big-band music in British dance halls, Davis grew up in a strict Tennessee Baptist household where dancing and drinking were verboten. Davis, leader of the Knoxville, Tennessee, quartet Superdrag, speaks in a strong Southern drawl that couldn't be further from Costello's North England brogue. On the surface, John Davis doesn't have much in common with Elvis Costello. At 23, and with only one album under his belt, he had already accumulated as much bitterness as mere mortals need a decade or two to gather. In fact, the music-biz diatribe song is a veritable rite of passage for frustrated artists. Twenty years ago, Elvis Costello gleefully sang that he wanted to 'bite the hand that feeds me.' Costello's attack on timid radio programmers was hardly the first or last example of a rocker spewing venom at the industry that provided him with a living.

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