NME interview [October 2000]

TRASH CITY ROCKERS

...And You Will Know Us By the Trail Of Dead, not to mention the trail of destruction, trashed guitars and fireworks this feisty Texan four-piece leave in their wake. But, believe it or not, they also want to make the next 'Pet Sounds'...

The snare drum flies over the NME photographer's head and smashes into the speaker stack. It's followed by the bass drum, which ricochets off his legs and knocks him to the floor. Pieces of guitar start to rain down on the front row of the audience - a crowd of people who are currently throwing water, bottles and glasses at the band. White noise is cascading out of every amp. Suddenly half a guitar flies through the air and all the group roll off the side of the stage.

There's a notorious Stooges live album called 'Metallic KO' which documents their final chaotic gig. On it they're being attacked by local Hell's Angels who are throwing chairs and bottles at them, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead try to recreate that feel every time they play. Tonight at Austin's Atomic Café - a downtown goth club staffed by the Addams Family and a man drinking raw egg yolk - they've succeeded again.

Jason Reece (drums/guitar), Conrad Keely (drums/guitar), Neil Busch (bass) and Kevin Allen (guitar) have been playing together since 1997. They have been banned from virtually every club in Austin. Later Conrad will confide to NME that they have a "fairly uninhibited approach" to playing live. It's quite an understatement. After all, this is the band who, on the first date of their first American tour, set off fireworks in the venue, had a bottle fight with the owner and were physically kicked out onto the street with all their equipment. They haven't looked back since. Alongside At The Drive-In and Queens Of The Stone Age, they're the best thing to happen to American rock since Nirvana.

If you're looking for a band to believe in, you need look no further than Trail Of Dead. They arrive with their own tailor-made mythology. Their name was inspired by a Japanese Manga cartoon about a mythic army of destruction. They look like a cross between the Sisters Of Mercy and The Jam. Their ambition is to make a record that ranks alongside The Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds'. They sound like Sonic Youth driving into the side of a mausoleum. And, oh yeah, their theme song is called 'Richter Scale Madness'.

At the moment they feel like the last great rock'n'roll band on Earth. They talk it like they smash it, and their commitment is all-consuming. Conrad has a shrine to The Beatles in his front room, Kevin spends his spare time in a Rolling Stones covers band, and Jason and Neil live in a house littered with pieces of broken equipment. Later this month, they arrive in Britain for the second time. You have to go and see them.

It's the night after their gig at the Atomic Café, and Trail Of Dead are sitting in Jason's bedroom, getting loaded on vodka and beers. They're disappointed with NME, because before we left they e-mailed the office and instructed us to bring a consignment of Ecstasy with us. Fearing how the US authorities might act, we politely declined. As you'll quickly see, Coldplay they aren't.

The history of Trail Of Dead has hitherto been shrouded in mystery, but we know it starts in, of all places, Hawaii. Conrad and Jason met there when they were 16. Jason remembers Conrad looked like something out Of The Dark Crystal. Half Thai, half Irish, he had shoulder-length hair and a mum who encouraged him to take acid in the house. Conrad says when he met Jason he was going through his "gelfling period". No-one's sure what that means.
"All we did in Hawaii was take acid and smoke pot," says Jason. "Then we'd go to a primary school in the middle of the night and smash the living fuck out of it."
"I was very angry," offers Conrad by way of explanation "There was so much to be angry about"

Six months after they met Conrad dropped out of school and moved to Olympia in Washington state. Shortly after, he was followed by his mum, and then Jason. There, life didn't exactly take a turn for the better.
"It was a dark time," admits Jason. "Conrad's mum would put up runaway kids, their house was like a home for lost youths. There were always at least ten people sitting around doing acid. In the end, their house got burnt to the ground."
"The police would be round all the time. The neighbours hated us," concurs Conrad.
"We'd have all these great ideas but we were too wasted to do anything about them," sighs Jason.

Those who saw Conrad at the time remember he was emaciated and covered in cuts. Him and a friend, James Olsen, would sit in his room designing album covers and plotting what they'd look like at every stage of their career. They had a band called Benedict Gehlen, named after a headstone they'd seen in their local cemetery. Conrad was convinced they were going to be "the biggest rock stars in the world". Such ambition flew in the face of an Olympia scene, which at the time was dominated by the militant DIY punk of labels like Kill Rock Stars and K.
"I had a real conflict of interests," Conrad laughs. "I loved punk, but I didn't like the political side of it. The people in these bands were all middle-class kids, a lot of them were on trust funds and they had all these stances against rock stardom and the music industry. I thought it was easy for them to rail agai nst it.
"I'd always been poor and I'd come from a working-class background. I thought it was absurd to say that rock stardom ruined artistic integrity. Some of my favourite artists, people like The Beatles, were rook stars but they had more artistic integrity than all these people who said they were punk put together. I couldn't reconcile myself with what they were saying."

In the end, he decided to move again. He just wasn't sure where to. Jason - who'd been a lot more into the scene and had drummed for a number of local groups - came to his rescue: "I took mushrooms and came up with this grand plan about why we should move to Texas. I thought if bands like Scratch Acid (precursors to The Jesus Lizard) or the Butthole Surfers could live in Austin, then we could as well. I wanted to start over. "I was inspired by Patti Smith's 'Horses' and wanted to make a record that stuck in human consciousness, a record that really meant something. I was ambitious. We both were. We listened to My Bloody Valentine's 'Loveless' all the way down to Texas, we thought it was incredible and all we wanted to do was make something as intense as that.

Conrad and Jason arrived in Austin in December 1994. By March 1995, they'd formed ..And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.
"I had a lot of reservations about the name," says Conrad with a grin. "I thought if we had a name that ridiculous, no-one would ever take us seriously. After a while, though, the thought that no-one would ever take us seriously began to appeal to me. We added the 'And' just because it put us at the top of most alphabetic listings. It wasn't a goth thing, if anything we had a mod aesthetic. The whole goth thing started in Britain. NME said we were goths, no-one else ever mentioned it."
"I've always thought we were southern mod gothic skate punks," deadpans Jason.

At first, it was just the two of them. They had a 'death metal' pedal that made the worst kind of white noise imaginable. During their second gig, they smashed all their equipment and threw it at the audience. Over the next two years, they continued to wreak havoc wherever and whenever they could, while gradually expanding their line-up. First, guitarist Kevin Allen joined. He got the job after shoving his dad's Les Paul through an amp at his trial gig. He was followed by bassist Neil Busch, who was similarly primed for destruction. Six months later, their reputation was preceding them at their local Austin clubs.
"I suppose we had a reputation for breaking things," deadpans Conrad. "Jason would throw bottles at the wall, and Kevin and I would always smash our guitars. People thought we were assholes, but we were one of the only bands who ever stood up for themselves. In Austin, clubs think they're doing you a favour by letting you play, my take was that we were doing them a favour. "
"We thought all club owners were full of shit," says Jason.
"We used to get treated so badly," recalls Conrad, "that we would go onstage and think, 'You were fucking with us earlier, so now we're going to fuck shit up.'"

Despite their reputation for being "insane", eventually they were approached by Trance Syndicate, the local label run by King Coffey, former drummer of Butthole Surfers. He wanted to put out a single by them; Trail Of Dead refused.
"Our vision had nothing to do with singles," spits Conrad, "We were influenced by concept albums, and there are no singles on concept records. Who cares about fucking singles? You put one out and it just sits in a dustbin. We wanted to make something more permanent than that."
Jason: "We wanted to make a record where you had to sit down and listen to the whole fucking thing. We wanted to make something like 'Pet Sounds' or Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon'."
They finally persuaded Trance to bend to their demands and in 1998 their self-titled debut album appeared. It came in a sleeve showing Alexander The Great fighting in India. The inside was decorated with lots of ink drawings of gargoyles. A blizzard of dense feedback and flailing Keith Moon drumming, it was an epic of self-destructive abandon, and as soon as it was finished, the band resolved to take it out on the road.

Trail Of Dead's first American tour was a riot of sustained destruction. As we've already mentioned, it started badly in Minneapolis when they set off a box of fireworks, filled the venue with sulphur and were then severely beaten. By the time the tour was over eight weeks later, they'd smashed all their equipment, urinated over one unfortunate club's sound desk and were covered in bruises and stitches. In two short months their reputation was sealed.
"We walk into places now," explains Neil, "and promoters come up to us and say, 'We hear you guys throw guitars through plate glass windows.' We had one club owner who paid us to get out of his club. He said, 'I'm not paying you for playing, here's $150 just to get the fuck out of here.'"
"I think to start off with our tour agents thought we were fucking crazy and a complete liability," sighs Kevin.
Neil: "To start off with, we just used to smash things because there was no one at our gigs and we were drunk and wanted to have a good time. That's still why we do it. Although we get more people coming these days. I think it's become like the Roman Colosseum when we play live. There's a contingent of people who just come to watch the gladiators shed blood. We're aware of it but we don't care."

For two years now, Trail Of Dead have kept up this near constant schedule of demolition. In the meantime, they've also released a second album, 'Madonna'. That's the one with an Indian goddess with a painting of John Lennon stuck to her forehead on the cover, and the first one to be properly released in the UK. A blizzard of dense feedback, it's a bit like the first album, except angrier, louder and even more destructive. Trail Of Dead feel they have to sound this way.
"There's a long history of Texan punk bands all the way from The Dicks to Butthole Surfers, who've blended straight punk with this psychedelic freak-out thing that comes from groups like the 13th Floor Elevators. We're part of that tradition, and the reason why we're so intense is because it reflects how we feel most of the time. We're fucking broke and have a lot of anxieties. Of course, we're going to sound angry."

People still say you sound like Sonic Youth though.
"So what?" shouts Conrad, suddenly irritable. "I'd be lying if I said we had nothing to do with them. We got that comparison right away and I wasn't offended by it. I just thought at least Sonic Youth are fucking good. There are worse bands to be compared to, right? "I mean, all we've ever wanted to do," he concludes with a flourish, "is be like the Sex Pistols when we play live and then like Brian Eno or something when we get into the studio. We don't just want to be remembered for having broken a lot of stuff, we want to be remembered for having made a record like Public Enemy's 'Fear Of A Black Planet', something that completely changes the way people think about music."

This ambition is what sets them apart. In a world of nice music made by nice men, Trail Of Dead are determined to re-animate the spirit of rock'n'roll. They are everything a band should be - a whirling collision of wired ideas and furious abandon. They want to be rock stars. They want to be as great as The Greats - a freewheeling, riotous blend of The Who, Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles - and don't see any reason why they shouldn't be. Their mentality is at odds with the rap-metal thud of America, and the polite acoustic mimsy that currently prevails in Britain. They're one of a kind, genuine outsiders and keepers of a holy grail they've dreamt about since they were kids.

To prove it, after the interview, they take NME out on the town. By the end of the night one of them has sustained minor crotch injuries after falling off a trampoline, and the others are rolling around the floor of a party having their fingernails painted by some "Dallas girls".

More than anyone else - apart from Queens Of The Stone Age - Trail Of Dead are living it. As we bid them farewell, they assure us when they get to Britain, they're going to embark on a heroic campaign of destruction. Now you've heard their story you can understand why. For Trail Of Dead this isn't a job, it's a mission.