Music
The soundtrack of Neil Hagerty's life
By Joe GrossDec. 1, 2005
Thirty years ago, Neil Hagerty was a 10-year-old kid in suburban Virginia. He liked, as he puts it, "reading, music, girls and sports, in that order."
Twenty years ago, Hagerty, who plays the Alamo Downtown tonight, was part of the newly formed Pussy Galore, who would soon catapult themselves into indie rock history with an influential combination of hideous guitar noise, junkyard percussion and the loosest garage rock imaginable.
Ten years ago, Hagerty's band Royal Trux, a loose agglomeration revolving around his surreal junk-jazz guitar playing and then-wife Jennifer Herrema's wobbly, skinned-cat vocals, released "Thank You," its first major-label album. Royal Trux was one of the most fascinating and frustrating bands of the 1990s, a punky Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg futzing around with narcoleptic punk, arty noise, faux-classic rock, tape loops, acoustic ramble and, reportedly, lots of drugs.
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Ion Sokhos
Neil Hagerty's music has been as praiseworthy as it's been perplexing. Neil Michael Hagerty and the Howling Hex play the Alamo Downtown at 7 and 9:45 tonight. |
One week ago, Hagerty was at his newish home in New Mexico. He recently turned 40 and is more of a Dodgers fan these days.
After three post-Virgin albums, Royal Trux disintegrated in 2001 among rumors of relapse, exhaustion and bad feelings. Hagerty and Herrema divorced. Hagerty, clean and sober, seemingly more focused than he'd been in years, launched a solo career that year; his band is called the Howling Hex. More productive than ever, he's released eight albums in four years.
Royal Trux's groundbreaking 1990 double LP "Twin Infinitives" was the first album released on Drag City Records, and it's the label Hagerty returned to after Trux was kicked off Virgin. "We're able to do something more regular basis because of the amount of money we don't put into promotion," he says. In 2005 alone the Hex released two CDs and a limited edition LP. It doesn't sound too far from Royal Trux, frankly, but he seems more in control of the proceedings.
Though the music — and Hagerty's jarring, virtuosic guitar — doesn't sound all that far from Royal Trux, Hagerty says the bands operate very differently. "I get a lot more done," Hagerty says of his life in New Mexico. "It's a whole different everything. I don't need to keep (the band) along the standard rock narrative."
Even with all this work, he still sounds a tiny bit bitter about Royal Trux's haphazard trickle-off. "If it had ended at 2000 (after the final album 'Pound for Pound') I would have been really happy," he says. "Exiting the way that it ended undercuts the whole point. We took on all these sorts of guises and personas, and to be able to switch from one to the other and then get out of it. But then every bad cliché we played with came to life."
Tonight at the Alamo, he and a trio version of the Hex provide a soundtrack to director Rene Laloux's 1973 animated film "Fantastic Planet." For this gig, Hagerty watched some Harold Lloyd. "Those soundtracks are often very literal," Hagerty says. "He slips on something, you hear a trombone slide. I think we're going to improvise around some modes and changes, see what happens."
These days, he picks up musicians from wherever. Locals in New Mexico, folks Drag City recommends, that sort of thing. "I want this band to play pieces that are composed such that anybody on any level of ability can come in and contribute."
It was Royal Trux's mutability that Hagerty thinks was the band's strongest asset, and he's tried to keep that for the Hex. "There were always five completely disparate views on what we were doing and each one was absolutely convinced that they knew what it was all about.
"People will always try to box you in, like a big game of Go."
jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926
