Babylon A.D. is one of the best hard rock bands to emerge from the legendary Sunset Strip, although they were originally based in San Francisco. From their two classic albums in the early 90s, their period of non-existence due to the grunge reign and their triumphant return, the band’s lead singer Derek Davis gives us all the details in a delightful chat with him.
Interview: Sakis Nikas
Rockpages.gr: Derek, it’s been a few months since the new album came out. How do you feel about it now…are you completely happy with it?
Derek Davis: Yeah, we’re pretty excited about all the reviews that we’ve got from all the magazines and done a lot of interviews and stuff like that. The two of the singles have done really well. “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, hit number three on the classic charts and “Wrecking Machine” hit number two on the classic radio chart. So the album’s doing really, really well. You know, I don’t think we could have written any better, to be honest with you.
Rockpages.gr: Let me tell you that the most striking element on the album is the fact that the whole atmosphere reminds a lot of the first album…at least, that’s my perspective. What do you think?
Derek Davis: Yeah, we kind of made a conscious effort to that. I listened to the first album quite a lot while I was producing the record and I wanted to kind of get that fat sound that the first album had. And, you know, we tried to make sure that we picked the great quality of songs that and, you know, just like you said, that’s what we try to do. We tries to capture something similar to the first album, but yet modern, you know…
Rockpages.gr: There are quite a few highlights but surely one of them is the song “Face of God”. I know that’s a deep cut but the lyrics and the vocal melody are really powerful. What can you tell us about it?
Derek Davis: Yeah, well, coincidentally enough, that “Face of God” is going to be the next single that’s going to be coming out in the next couple weeks. So we’re going to try to take that to Christian radio as well as, you know, the standard classic radio and hopefully will get a lot of airplay out of it. This band, you know, we’re all Christians in the band, and it was just something that when I was writing the song, it just kind of, you know, the chorus kind of wrote itself, the melody and the chorus kind of wrote itself. And then I wrote the lyrics around that. I think it’s one of the better songs that I’ve ever written. You know, it’s right up there with like “Desperate” or “So Savage the Heart”. And, you know, some people might think it’s just a little bit different because it has religious overtones to it. We’re not really thought of as a religious band like Stryper or something like that, you know? But I think the song speaks for itself.
Rockpages.gr: You know what, Derek…I’d love to hear some more melodic stuff like the title track or “Looking For A Hearbeat”…songs that back in the day would have been tagged “commercial”. I know that you have quite a few leftovers from the writing sessions. Any chance of listening to such songs in your next album?
Derek Davis: Well, like on this album, we wrote 17 songs…we put out 11, but we wrote 17 songs that we demoed, and we let five different people kind of analyze them and choose what they thought was the best on a scale of 1 to 10. So it was just the band picking the song, saying, this is a great song or not. It was more like we had outside people that we trust their opinion. Give us a score from 1 to 10 on each song. And it was kind of like we had our own independent A&R team in a way, you know, and if you took the you took a song like, let’s say, “Looking for a Heartbeat” and you gave it to five different people and we asked them to score on a 1 to 10, some person might say it’s a seven and a half. Somebody might say it’s a nine and a half, somebody might say it’s eight, but we’d be able to kind of tell, get a gist of what people like based on the five different people that we sent it to. And then you’d know if it was a good song or not. So the songs that we put on the album were all the ones that had the best ratings, and there wasn’t anything on the album that was less than a seven and a half. So we thought that was pretty good. You know, we had a lot of nines…“Face of God”, which was a ten actually across the board, which was pretty crazy, you know, like there wasn’t one person who said: “Well, it’s a pretty good song”. It was everyone was like, “Wow, this song is great,”!
Rockpages.gr: You describe a situation where one could easily reckon that it’s a pretty democratic band…
Derek Davis: Yeah, it’s a democracy…absolutely. I might have a little bit more of a say, you know, to be honest with you, just because I produce and I write, you know, I write half the songs and I write all the melodies and lyrics and produce the stuff, but I let everybody have their say and I want everybody to contribute as much as they possibly can, because that’s a band sound, really. It’s not just about me, you know? It’s about the whole band. I mean, I have my own solo stuff that I do that I like, you know what I mean? That’s me. So I don’t have to try to say that all these songs have got to be mine. I’d rather have songs from everybody in the band. I’d rather have them give me as much material as I possibly can so that I can write around that, you know? And that’s the Babylon A.D. sound!
Rockpages.gr: Would you say that the addition of Craig (Pepe) and Dylan (Soto) helped the dynamics of the band?
Derek Davis: Yeah, absolutely. It just made it feel a lot more powerful. The band is tighter, more focused, kind of gave us a good energy boost, which was what we really needed. You know, after Jamie left and Rob had a medical condition he couldn’t play anymore we were kind of floundering around wondering what we were going to do. And it just so happened that Ron, our guitar player, had been jamming with these guys. And as soon as I said, Hey, do you want to make another record? We got an offer from a label. You know, he was like, I already have the guys. So we went and checked them out and we practiced about seven or eight songs. The very first practice and I swear to God, they songs were perfect. They sounded just like the record, I asked them if they can play all those Babylon A.D. songs…you know, “The Kid Goes Wild”, “Hammer Swings Down”, Bang Go The Bells” etc…and they said “yes”…they absolutely nailed it! The songs sounded just like they did on the record.
Rockpages.gr: Who had the idea for the cover sleeve and the album title?
Derek Davis: That was my idea. You know, I wrote the song and the title “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day”. I just thought it was a really cool title, you know, and it had a lot of connotations to it. The lyrics are really cool and everything, and I just felt that the cover that I came up with was really cool. You know, when I write songs…I like a lot of movies, you know, I go and see a lot of movies. So I’m always thinking of a song in like it’s a movie like it’s a mini movie. Maybe the song’s 4 minutes long, but to me, it’s my little miniature motion picture, you know? So I always have a vision that goes along with the song. And that’s why we do a lot of videos, you know, because I want the videos to match the song so that I could kind of get it, get it over. People understand, you know, where I’m coming from.
Rockpages.gr: Why you didn’t continue with Frontiers? Did Perris Records make you a better deal?
Derek Davis: Tom Mathers is the president of Perris Records, and I’ve known him for quite a few years. We did “American Blitzkrieg” with him about 20 years ago. And so we’ve stayed in contact, you know, over the years. And we did the album “Revelation Highway” in 2017 on Frontiers Records. And so Tom contacted me about two years ago and said: “Hey, have you guys got any material you know, got any extra material?” I said, Well, I do have a live tape. I have two shows that we recorded. Maybe we could put some live stuff out. And he said, Well, are you working on any new material? And I said, Well, it just so happens that we do. We are working on some new material and we have some demos, you know, would you like to hear them? And he said, Yes, sure. So we sent them some demos and he said, this is going to be great, you know. So he was really excited about the new record, the demos that he heard. And so we put out, you know, the live album, “Live Lightning” just to let everybody know that we’re kind of like back on the scene, you know, back in action…that the five year hiatus through Covid and everything is done. The band is back, you know, firing on all cylinders, kicking ass!
Rockpages.gr: Rome might have not been built in a day but I know for a fact that Babylon A.D. signed a deal with Arista within a couple of days upon arriving to Los Angeles. Crazy or what?
Derek Davis: Yeah, it was kind of like living in a fantasy for one week or something. We literally moved down to Hollywood at this apartment building called the St James, where everybody stayed there. Charlie Sheen lived there, so it was like Crazy Party Madhouse! We found ourselves living at this brand new apartment building right on Hollywood Boulevard, right up the street from Chinese Mann’s theater. I mean, you can walk there within 100 yards, you know. And so it was off the hook and every night we’d be down at the Rainbow or the Roxy or the Whiskey or whatever. But the weird thing was that we all transported ourselves from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Saint James in Hollywood. And then I think we got there on a Tuesday or something. And we hadn’t practiced or anything. We still had our all of our gear in our apartment. We had a one bedroom apartment with six guys, and we just partitioned off the apartment, you know, and we’re like, we’re going to get a record deal. And sure enough, that Saturday or Friday night, Clive Davis called our manager and said, I want to see the guys tomorrow. He said: “I set up a place at S.I.R. Studios and I want to see them tomorrow because I’m going to be in town”. So, man, we kind of freaked out. We were like, Holy shit, we got to get our shit together by tomorrow, you know?
So we went down to the studio early in the morning and we practiced the set a couple of times, and Clive got there maybe about 3:00, 2:00 in the daytime with some A&R guys from New York. Our guy, Randy Gersten from the head of the West Coast in our team, and they all sat there on a big couch right in front of us, literally like right in front of us. We were on a big stage, but they were on a couch like, you know, 20 feet away. And so we just blasted off seven songs right in a row. And soon as we got done, I swear I remember it to this day, Clive Davis literally jumped off the couch! He just gets off the couch and he opens his arms and he goes, Welcome to the family boys! And we all looked at each other like, what? You know, we were kind of in shock. You know, we didn’t know what he was going to say and we were like, does that mean we get a record deal? And he said, absolutely, Our lawyers are going to get in touch with you guys. We’re going to make you guys bigger than Aerosmith and all this other shit (laughs). And so, yeah, it was weird because it’s like a dream that came true.
Rockpages.gr: Derek, I am a huge fan of the first couple of records. After all, my generation grew up with MTV and songs like “Hammer Swings Down” and “Bang Go The Bells”. Do you miss those days?
Derek Davis: For me, it was yes and no. I mean, it was like being on a roller coaster. A crazy roller coaster ride. You know, something is going on every single day and every single moment in your life. You know, it was hard to stop the train…a lot of partying, a lot of cool people who did a lot of crazy stuff that I never really thought we’d do, you know? But the band had a good ride. We were really popular from about 1988 to 1993. And then, of course, Nirvana came and said, Hey, no more Hard Rock! Just like everybody else, it doesn’t matter who it was…Warrant, Dangerous Toys, Winger. Everybody got dropped at the same time, you know, like off with the old and on with the new. So I think everybody started floundering and we started floundering around that time. So I think from about 1993 to about 1999 we really didn’t do anything. You know, it just kind of felt like we got kicked in the teeth and everybody kind of grew up, got married, went to college. We started becoming like normal human beings instead of just a crazy party rock band cause we were known for some pretty outrageous shit at the time. So it was a good time to grow up, you know? I mean you’re on extreme high and you’re on extreme low. There’s really not that much in between and when we’re on the road, it was always just a constant. Go, go, go! You’re doing radio interviews all the time, and you’re playing the show and you’re meeting a lot of different people. For me, being a singer was like hardly no time for sleep. It was tough, man. And, you know, you’re traveling down the road. You’ve usually got about eight guys in the bus and it’s just us living out of a suitcase. And we did that. We were on the road quite a bit. A lot of people think that we didn’t play that much, but we played all the time. We did six United States tours that were 2 to 3 months at a time. We played with a lot of bands and we did a lot of festivals and things like that. We got offered a couple of big, big shows with Alice Cooper and Aerosmith and we always thought that it was going to be what it is, man. When you’re in that bubble and you think the train is going to keep on going forever. And when all of a sudden we got dropped…we were living in L.A. at the time. I went from having my own house in Los Angeles, a Corvette and living the life really…then next thing I know, I had nothing. I had to move back home and move into my mom’s house with my wife who was pregnant.
Rockpages.gr: Do you think that Babylon A.D. reached its commercial peak back in the day?
Derek Davis: I don’t think so. I think the proof is just based on this album, I think that I’m way better songwriter, lyric wise and melody wise. And I’m a better singer too, you know? I know I am. I can listen to the old stuff and go, Wow, you know, Yeah, it was pretty good, but I could do stuff a lot easier now. And I write, I constantly write all the time. Now, before I used to write but I wasn’t writing every single moment of the day like I seem to be doing nowadays. Last year, you know, I got a boatload of songs recorded that I’m just trying to figure out, how am I going to put all these songs out, you know? That’s the hardest part for me…having all these songs that I’m sitting on and then I keep writing new ones all the time.
Rockpages.gr: I truly believe that Babylon A.D. and not only was really benefited by the advent of social media as more people got to discover the band. What’s your opinion?
Derek Davis: Yeah. I think that’s pretty much true, because if there wasn’t like social media stuff, Facebook and Instagram or whatever and everything else that there is out there, I think bands like us would just really be floundering and not really have that much of an audience because how do you get your message out if you don’t have social media? The magazines that were prevalent and the MTV that was so prevalent 25 years ago and broke a lot of bands they are not around anymore. So you basically got to make your own videos and you got to promote yourself. It’s very hard for a band to keep generating and cycling news you know what I mean? And getting the word out there that, hey, you know, we’re here, we’re here, look at us, you know, that kind of thing. But like you said, if it wasn’t for social media, I don’t think we’d even probably exist right now. In reality, you know? But it is a good thing of technology. That’s correct.
