XL Cover Story: And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Beer, burgers and big, fat lies with Austin's most unaccountable rock band
By Joe Gross | Photos by Traci GoudieJan. 20, 2005
Random lost souls have asked me
'What's the future of rock 'n' roll?'
I say, I don't know, does it matter?
This and that scene
Sound all the same to me;
Neither much worse nor much better.
From the title track to 'Worlds Apart,'
by And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Later that same weekend: The band, clockwise from bottom left, is Doni Schroeder, Jason Reece, Danny Wood, Kevin Allen and Conrad Keely. |
Here are some popular rumors about them: Their shows are chaotic messes. They do nothing but smash stuff. They're chronic liars. They're all short. They're (and this one's gotta hurt) rock stars.
Some of it's true. Some of it's false. But mostly false.
This much is definitely true: The Trail co-founders -- guitarist singer Conrad Keely and drummer/singer Jason Reece -- like to make the scene (and, yes, sometimes a scene).
When they're not on tour, the band members make their presence known at shows, art openings and clubs. They're partiers of the first order. Going out with them should be one long blur, right?
We decided to find out and spend an evening with the Trail. But it didn't exactly turn out the way we expected.
You see, as any successful touring rock band can tell you, there's a lot of down time to being in a successful touring rock band. There's lots of planning. There's lots of planes and buses. There's lots of packing.
Jan. 12, instead of blowing the doors off every club in town, the Trail gathered for burgers and beer at Casino El Camino to chat about "Worlds Apart," their rich, complicated new album, and survey the Austin scene. The band -- including guitarist Kevin Allen, new bassist Danny Wood and drummer/keyboard player Doni Schroeder -- were all in the same room at the same time for about 45 minutes.
Why? Were they out carousing 'til all hours, getting loaded and hanging out with groupies?
Nope. They had to go home to pack, to get on a plane the next day for San Diego, to play a party for Vice magazine.
Could these masters of chaos be becoming -- mature?
It's gotta be a lie.
Much as Keely and Reece are the two Trailers you'll see out and about, they're also the two who don't mind giving interviews.
Allen is very quiet, interjecting answers to technical questions and clarifying a few details before sneaking out the door entirely. Wood, who also plays with Austin punk band The Rise, is pleasant, but the newest band member. (The band parted ways with original bassist Neil Busch in 2004.) Schroeder takes a while to warm up.
Of course, the reason these two don't mind giving interviews is because they are notorious liars. Tall tales abound. Some say they come from Plano. Some say their fathers are preachers. (Neither is true.)
It becomes clear that this is almost a good cop-bad cop thing. Sometimes Reece is straightforward, while Keely is obviously making stuff up. Then Keely will play it straight while Reece exaggerates. It's a little annoying, but it's also a defense mechanism and a foundation for a band mythology.
Summer '91
Allen, Schroeder, Wood, Reece and Keely at the private studio the band built in North Austin. |
"He showed me some beats he was making," Keely says of Reece. "I turned him on to Rush."
The two ended up in Olympia, Wash. in the late '80s. "I moved there because Conrad's family moved there," Reece says between bits of burger.
They picked a heck of a time. Olympia's punk rock scene -- as vital as those in Seattle, Chapel Hill, N.C., or Washington, D.C. -- was thriving. Reece and Keely were especially inspired by Beat Happening, the primitive rock band lead by K Records founder Calvin Johnson. (It's safe to say that Trail of Dead's fondness for switching instruments comes straight out of Beat Happening's amateurish trade-offs.)
Keely and Reece performed together, but nothing too serious. "We played this one show, a benefit for the Olympia library," Keely says. "Almost everyone walked out. There were, like, three people left."
Then as now, everyone hung out together and went to the same shows, including Johnson's groundbreaking International Pop Underground Festival, which brought together independent bands from around the world.
"Nirvana was really important; Fugazi playing up in Seattle," Keely says, thinking back. To hear these guys (and plenty of other residents) tell it, the summer of '91 was an astonishing time to be in Olympia, to be part of young punk rock.
"You got the feeling that something was about to happen," Keely says. "In '91 it did happen and there was all this optimism in the air. It didn't get better than '91. By '93, '94, people were just wishing it was '91 again, the energy of that year."
Reece pops in as a reality check. "It was such a good year," he says. "but at the same time, I lived in a (rat)hole. I lived paycheck to paycheck. We were 18, 19, out on our own for the first time, trying to make ends meet, trying to find out what you're here for."
The punch line, of course, is that the Nirvana explosion didn't last too long. Indie punk never really did become the mainstream, and the Nirvanas were replaced with Nirvana sound-alikes and nü metal.
"Like any revolution, you look back on its failures as much as its successes," Keely says, which is why "Summer '91," the fourth song on "Worlds Apart," isn't a nostalgia trip as much as a plea to move on: "Take me to that summer past/And tell me is it really worth remembering? . . . Those mythic dreams weren't meant to last."
"It's actually not a song about reminiscence, it's about looking forward," Keely says. "If things can't get better then what's the point of living?"
Relative ways
|
Keely and Reece moved to Texas in '94, and by '95 Trail of Dead was an ongoing concern, playing a few shows as a rowdy, chaotic two-piece.
"Austin is what made music more important for us," Reece says. "It's where we decided this is what we're here to do. Then we met Kevin and started sounding better, more than a kind of a joke between just the two of us."
Allen picks up the story: "Jason McNeely from Windsor for the Derby came over and said, 'Can you fix my friend's guitar?' I got my soldering iron and came over to Conrad's house and his guitar was just laying down in the middle of his living room in pieces. I said, 'Uh, I think she might be dead.' "
Both as a duo and a quartet, Trail received an enormous buzz around town as chaotic, instrument-smashing noisemakers with a sharp sense of the epic, from their brilliant name on down.
Of course, their songs' odd tunings took forever when they only had one busted guitar each. "Our tuning breaks were a lot longer than the actual songs," Allen says.
Former Trance Syndicate Records owner (and Butthole Surfers drummer) King Coffey was floored by one of their messy shows. "I think the first show I ever saw was at the late great Blue Flamingo on Red River," Coffey says. "You got the sense it was going to fall apart any second, with busted strings, blown amps, maybe a possible fistfight. But then they would launch into one of their mini-epic tunes and the place would explode.
"I know it's cliché to say," Coffey continues, "but it was one of those occasions where the line between the band and audience was blurred. It was hard to tell just exactly who was in the band and who was just a fan. It was one of those punk rock peak experiences for me."
Coffey is proud to have released the band's first album in '98, but also is glad they've moved on. "I thought they would wind up as one of those great bands that no one would ever hear," he says. " I'm convinced that if Trance was still around and they had remained on the label, they would be lucky to play for 25 people at Room 710."
But they did move on, recording the fabulously noisy "Madonna" in 2000 for the popular indie label Merge. They even signed to mega-powerful major label Interscope Records in 2001, a move that looked, frankly, terrible for both parties.
But 2002's "Source Tags and Codes" was a sharp little album, peacefully coexisting with acts such as 50 Cent, Eminem, and other monsters of the pop marketplace.
Which brings us here, to Casino el Camino, where everybody knows their name, so much so that it's agreed that they couldn't possibly take a "rock star" group picture here because, as Reece puts it, "the folks here would never stop making fun of us."
Regrets, they've had a few
|
"The Austin scene is very fragmented," Keely says. "You can see any type of music you want in any one night: country, blues, salsa, metal. So to even say there's a music scene in Austin means you're talking about 50 different things."
Local bands they admire include Knife in the Water, America is Waiting, Explosions in the Sky and The Crack Pipes as well as up-and-comers The Swords, Gorch Fock and Tia Carrera, the latter two featuring guitarist Jason Morales, whom the guys know from the Olympia days.
"We have it so good that people take it for granted," Reece says. "People really get comfortable here." Which is why it's nice to see a band from Austin (as opposed to a country band or singer-songwriters) get its name out there. "I think we're a good representation of Texas as much as our band has nothing to do with stereotypical Texas sounds," Reece says. "I think it's helped us. People are intrigued that a band like us is Texan."
Of course, not everyone in the band even lives in Texas at the moment. Doni Schroeder has been drumming professionally since he was 18, and the 23-year-old Nashville native still makes his home in Tennessee. He met the band a few years back, when Trail producer Mike McCarthy was working with Schroeder's old band Forget Cassettes.
"They wanted some help on 'Smile Again,' so they asked me to come down a little bit before South by Southwest last year to help," he says.
The band toured like madmen in 2002 and 2003, taking a break for the back half of 2003. By the end of the year, they started to build their own private studio in North Austin.
"In the early days, we'd have to scrounge for studio time," Reece says. "We were very lucky to get a lot of it for free. Then we started paying for it and then it was like, 'Why are we paying for this?' " Building their own studio gave the band the freedom to experiment on songs, and write them different ways.
"We spent a lot of time getting drum sounds and building the studio at the same time, " Keely says. "So the first song we worked on ('Smile Again') took three months. We thought if we if we can get it down for this song, then we can make it work for all the other songs too. Schroeder came in to assist, and then the other songs came out really fast."
The band went in a completely different direction with songwriting, working over songs in the studio, eschewing feedback, distortion and noise for layers of percussion, piano and strings. Themes range from the nature of aggression ("And the Rest Will Follow") to the way American privilege is reflected in the pop music scene ("Worlds Apart"). Yes, folks, this is their prog rock album.
"This record wasn't an easy thing," Reece says. "We really are not the same band we were two years ago. But with us it's never been easy."
Keely thinks this is laying it on a bit thick. "But the record sounds so safe," he says, looking at Reece.
Reece wasn't expecting this. "If you wanna say that, that's up to you, man," he says. "We all went through lots of trial and error that makes you question why you do it. It's a very honest record. It would have been dishonest to do what we do in the past, to remake 'Madonna.' We were in flux. We lost a band member, we gained two.
"Being in a rock band is never the most sure thing," he says.
Glimmers of hip-hop
The group splits up around midnight. Reece, Schroeder and I head off to the Whisky Bar and Red Fez, two places Reece sometimes DJs. Keely swears he'll catch up with us later, but that's the last time we see him. Allen and Wood are long gone. Time to pack.
The beat is banging at Whisky Bar, and oddly enough, Reece claims hip-hop feeds into what Trail is about. "Hip-hop albums have concepts and themes that are right on the surface," Reece says, ordering a round. "We want to do that, too."
Reece chats up the DJ and works the room a bit. He's not the crazy man that was promised.
Reece grabs his drink and comes back over to the bar. It's getting late, but he seems to be the only one who isn't worried about packing or tomorrow's trip. This is what he does: works the room, plays and screams in Trail of Dead. It's turned out all right. Of course, sometimes he can't get in anywhere he wants.
"The Walkmen were playing at The Parish, and my girl and I went to see them. We couldn't get in. It was a bad scene, we ended up at Emo's to see (Wu-Tang rapper) Raekwon. We thought this could be good or terrible.
"He was amazing. Every sound felt right, everyone was singing along, hands were in the air. The Walkmen show would have just been people standing around. I love the passion of a show like that. I love the whole idea of people just not caring what they look like. It was just pure exuberance."
He pauses and takes a sip of his drink, and manages to nail his band in four words:
"I don't like composure."
jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926
