...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead: Truth Is Stranger
'Source Tags and Codes,' which scored a perfect 10/10 on Pitchfork, came out 20 years ago
2002. 'P-L-A-N-O-E,' spells Jason Reece of . . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, the hippest band to come out of Austin since Scratch Acid in the mid-'80s.
With the band's major label debut Source Tags and Codes to be released Tuesday (2/26/02) by Interscope, the members have been doing wall-to-wall phone interviews. At this particular moment, Reece is on the phone with an Australian journalist who he wants to make sure doesn't confuse the band's birthplace with the sprawling Dallas suburb of Plano. "It was a real small town, with just a corner grocery store. There was nothing to do, so we all started singing in the church choir," Reece continues. "Our parents encouraged us to pursue music because they thought it would keep us away from drugs." Then there's that loony, maniacal laugh. He goes on about how the quartet drifted apart after high school, but then hooked up again in Austin, where bassist Neil Busch was attending the University of Texas.
You keep waiting for Reece to own up to his fabrication, but he never does. Coming soon: an article in an Australian paper about how the infamous stage-trashers and white noise pirates used to be choirboys. Journalists have fallen for the tale -- fleshed out in the band's bio and verified by their publicist -- as they did 12 years ago when a kid from the Dallas suburbs named Robbie Van Winkle posed as a street tough from Miami nicknamed Vanilla Ice.
"It's fun to lie," Reece says.
So how do you know when The Guys In the Band With the Impossibly Long Name are telling the truth about their past? You meet them in 1996, before anyone outside of King Coffey has ever heard of them. You interview them before they become overnight sensations in the UK by blowing their musical models Sonic Youth off the stage at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in April 2000. You find out that Reece and Conrad Keely, who swap duties as drummer and guitarist-vocalist after almost every song are, like you, from Hawaii. So when you run into each other, you reminisce.
Don't mess with me, Trail of Dead; I know your story.
The year is 1988, and a 16-year-old punk rocker with spiky blue hair named Jason Reece walks up to a perfect stranger on the first day of school and asks "Is your name Conrad?" Reece had just moved to Oahu from the Big Island of Hawaii, where one of his friends had been telling him about this weird and fascinating half-Thai, half-Irish fellow named Conrad Keely who went to the high school (Kalaheo) Reece was transferring to.
"How did you know?" a startled Keely asked. Reece mentioned their mutual friend, who had given a pretty good description of Conrad -- but really, he was easy to pick out; there are awfully few weird and fascinating people attending high school in Hawaii, where standing out will get your ass kicked. Though the instant friends would not play together until moving to Austin in 1994, the trail of the band started when destiny's children met that first day of junior year.
As far as musical tastes, the two couldn't have been farther apart. "I was totally into thrash punk -- I used to play drums in all these hard-core bands" says Reece. "But Conrad didn't really care for the hard fast stuff. He was into Rush, King Crimson, prog-rock stuff."
The first band they could agree on was the Replacements, though Reece liked the earlier Sorry Ma period and Keely preferred the more mature Tim. In some ways, nothing's really changed since then: Keely's songs are generally more layered and melodic, just as his personality is more quirky and withdrawn. The affable Reece, meanwhile provides blasts of vein-bulging fury. Together, they've come up with a sound that's bubbling under one minute and over the top the next.
Reece says he came to his aggressive bent after an unhappy childhood growing up in a shack on the Big Island of Hawaii without running water or electricity. His father was a construction worker from California who surfed a lot and started a nondenominational church. His mother did manicures in the nearest town, 20 miles away.
The only haole (white person) in his middle school, Reece was taunted and terrorized almost daily by his Hawaiian and Samoan classmates. "Mostly it was little annoying stuff, like flicking the back of my neck in class when the teacher wasn't looking, but I got totally pummeled a few times." He was a lost child without any real interests except petty vandalism. Then one day, he was visiting a friend and they found a box of Maxell cassettes with words like "SoCal Mix" and "Brit Punk" scrawled on the labels. In the raw, frenzied, rebellious music a friend's older brother left behind, Reece found what he was looking for.
The only problem was that the tapes didn't have song titles or band names. "There was one song I really liked about Spanish bombs or something, but I didn't know who it was until about five years later, when I bought 'London Calling' by the Clash and there it was."
Life in gorgeous isolation can get tedious for nimble minds, so after Keely moved with his mother to Olympia, Wash., in 1989 and wrote to Reece about all the music that was happening, the friends were soon living together in the Great Northwest. "We saw the best of it and the worst of it," Reece says of his time in Grungeville. "There were some great bands, especially the Melvins and Beat Happening, but the (hype) was suffocating. It rained all the time and everyone was on heroin -- what a miserable place. It bugs me to no end when I read that the band started in Olympia. Man, we couldn't leave that shithole fast enough."
It was Jason Morales of Starfish, which had recently moved from Olympia to Austin, who suggested the clean-slate move the mopey mop tops had in mind. When they arrived here in 1994, the plan was to form two bands, with Reece playing drums in Keely's band and vice versa. Keely wanted to call his group the Crosstops. But then when they hit on the name . . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (there are many conflicting anecdotes, of course, as to how that came about), the new musical vision fell into place. They would be dark and jarring and sinister and skittery. Then they would break stuff. There was danger in that name.
"We were totally influenced by what we called ourselves," says Keely. "I think if we stuck with the Crosstops, we'd be a ska band today."
Initially a two-piece group closer to performance artists than a real band, Trail of Dead asked Kevin Allen (ex-Andromeda Strain) to be its second guitarist -- purportedly because he had the same haircut as them. Glorium bassist Busch, whom Reece and Keely worked with on an orchestral project at the Salvage Vanguard Theater, rounded out the quartet.
"I didn't get what they were doing at first. They were pretty awful live," says Allen, "but when I listened to the tape they gave me, I could really appreciate the songwriting." Indeed, there's real craft at work beneath all that racket. It wasn't long before scenesters were buzzing about the band that played the Blue Flamingo transvestite/punk bar with arms flailing and trashed its equipment at the end of the set.
"Rock 'n' roll should be a spectacle. It should be total chaos," says Reece. "What's the point of being in a band that just stands there and plays?"
One of the group's earliest fans, Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey, brought a six-pack of Budweiser to their house one night, and before the first belch, Trail of Dead was the newest signing to his Trance Syndicate label.
"Everything just took off after that first record," says Keely of the self-titled '98 debut. "All we ever wanted to do was tour, and having a record on Trance gave us, like, this stamp of approval. Sometimes, the name of the label was bigger on the posters than the name of the band because people who liked one Trance band usually liked all of them." Despite the band's goth-sounding name, prospective fans knew it would be closer to art-rock and experimental pop because of the affiliation to Coffey.
Life on the road hit a major bump, however, when the band's new van, full of all its equipment, was stolen in New Orleans in late 1998. With the tour scrapped, the quartet headed back to Austin and started writing songs for the next album, Madonna. Exploring themes of deification in the pop marketplace, a subject Keely is well-versed in, having majored in popular culture at Olympia's Evergreen State College, the album was put out by North Carolina's Merge label after Trance dissolved.
Interscope President Jimmy Iovine read a rave review of Madonna in a British paper and, duly intrigued, pointed the company jet to Austin, where he caught the band, augmented by the Tosca string section, at the Atomic Cafe.
"I was just shaking my head that they weren't already signed (to a major label)," Iovine told the Los Angeles Times last October. "For me to find them by reading a magazine in Borders is still beyond my comprehension."
While poring over the band's creative control stipulations (including the right to make indie records on the side, which they plan to do later this year with an EP of weird covers for Merge), Iovine put Trail on the bill of the "Farmclub" show he was producing for the USA Network. The idea was to align the group with musically like-minded fellow guests At the Drive In, then the hottest new band in the country. But it was kudos from the show's third act, Outkast, that gave the Trail its greatest thrill. "Our biggest goal has always been to play on a hip-hop bill and have all the rap fans get into what we're doing," Reece says. "The guys in Outkast were really digging that part in 'Richter Scale Madness' where Conrad starts screaming 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' They asked us what our name was and when we told them they almost fell down laughing."
Watch Trail of Dead kill, kill on ‘Farmclub’ with Outkast in the wings.
When the members of the band sat down to talk business with Iovine, they were a bit intimidated. "He's produced everyone from John Lennon to Patti Smith to Bruce Springsteen," says Keely. "I mean, he had the Mellotron John Lennon played on 'Strawberry Fields' in his office." But if they felt a bit like kids in the principal's office, they held firm to the demand that Madonna producer Mike McCarthy would be at the helm of the next album.
"We owed it to him," Keely says of the man who sneaked them into Bill Ham's Lone Star Studios after hours so they could record for free. "Mike stuck his neck out and stole us our second album. He deserved to produce us with a major label budget."
Iovine agreed and stayed completely out of the way during the month the band holed up in the ranch studio in Cotati, Calif., where Tom Waits has made his last two albums. McCarthy reciprocated by producing an ambitious album that measures the primal with the cerebral, fully realizing the grandiose tension that had been dabbled in on the first two albums. Source Tags and Codes is the band's Daydream Nation -- fiercely creative, yet strangely accessible. "When we turned in the record, the only suggestion we heard from the label was that the vocals weren't loud enough on the first song ('It Was There That I Saw You')," Reece says. "We said we liked 'em that way and that was the end of it."
There's also no intention of reining in the band's bratty behavior, which recently got the boys thrown out of an influential London radio station because they refused to turn down their amps during a studio performance after execs in an upstairs board meeting complained. And if anything, the label will encourage the onstage mayhem that seems to be the peg for just about every story on the band, including a piece in the current Vanity Fair. We'll also soon be reading about the group's trail of destruction and familiarity with minor emergency clinics in Spin and Rolling Stone.
"I think one of the reasons we make stuff up is so every story won't read the same," says Reece. "We don't want to be known only as the band that breaks shit. That's boring. But it's not like we have any control over what we do. It's the crowd that makes us go nuts. To be the focus of all that energy -- it's just intense, man.”
And that's no lie.
…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead will play a free SXSW show March 17 at 6:40 p.m. on the Lady Bird Lake stage.