A Theater of Spectacle

A band’s name can speak volumes about their music. Or not.

In reality, bands’ titles are arbitrary and often misleading. 10,000 Maniacs were really anything but maniacal, and Limp Bizkit has just got to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the true flaccidity of that band’s music, not to mention its members and its fans.

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead is also a bit of a misleading name. On first hearing those ten words strung together in the moniker of a rock outfit, images arise of Corrosion of Conformity-style metal—loud, repetitive grinding riffs that spell out doom for all nay-sayers and the ears of long-term listeners. That’s not quite the case. If a rose by any other name does indeed smell as sweet, then it would stand to reason that this band could very well go by the name The Fluffy Bunnies, or something. Okay, maybe not.

This quartet of multi-instrumentalists—Conrad Keely, Kevin Allen, Jason Reece and Neil Busch—from Austin, Texas (a true American music mecca) fits its tag quite well in fact, and though the music is devoid of all things that might connote devil locks, in-unison head-banging and an aural assault like a Panzer blitz, it is the actual substance of the band and their music that lives up to the name. The sound does encompass all the elements of a rock ‘n’ roll band—guitar, bass and drums played at varying speeds with an emphasis on the heavier side of things and lyrics rife with personal catharsis—and the general vibe is one of hearty reckless abandon. The group’s live shows are becoming legendary as the band tours the nation—one reviewer a the South X Southwest Music festival in Austin began her review with a list of things that hit her from the stage, and she still gave the band a stellar review—and their recorded works—a self-titled debut on Trance Syndicate and their latest release, Madonna, on Merge Records—have gotten nothing but great reviews.

With a new album in the racks, a freshly completed tour with indie superheroes Superchunk and a solo tour currently traversing the nation, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead member Conrad Keely took some time to speak with The Synthesis about touring, the weather, the meaning behind the group’s name and their music, and the criteria for a good live show. And he did it all without a trace of seriousness. Well, almost.

You guys are about to go on tour.
We’re leaving in a couple of days. First we’re going to go to Denver. We’re a little concerned about the weather because it seems that Denver is under a couple feet of ice or snow. And you know, we’re Texans, we don’t have snow chains or coats or anything like that. Right now Austin, it’s about 70 degrees, sunny. What’s it like out there?

Today it’s supposed to top out at about 55.
Fifty-five? [Silence] So it’s kinda’ cool, then. But when we get there, it’ll be kind of a relief from the Northwest. We’re coming there from Seattle… no, Portland, actually. And I know very well what to expect up there. At least it’s not going to be snowing, it’s just gonna be damp and miserable.

You guys have one of the coolest band names we’ve heard in some time. Where’s it come from?
Um, it was from a codex of Mayan origin…

No, seriously…
[laughing] Well, the truth is almost always more absurd than making something up. Most people don’t believe us, but really, we just made it up. It was modeled after another band name that some friends of ours had. They had The Prophet No Lord Shall Live as their band name, and we liked that. But if all that’s too boring of a story, you can just say that we got it from an ancient codex down in Mexico, okay?
We’ve been told that it sounds like a western name, like The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. So when we originally came up with it, we were going to go for this western theme. We even had the name typed out in saloon letters, and were even going to do flyers with that bandito theme. But that look just didn’t become us.

The name certainly is indicative of the music’s powerful edge. Where does the band derive its sound?
I like to listen to a lot of world music, a lot of Afro-Cuban music. We’re all really big fans of early The Who, and it just kind of takes off from there. We’ve all listened to ample amounts of Pink Floyd, and we still do. We were launching this concept for creating an album that would be a unified piece—a single piece that would not be broken down into 20 songs but actually conceived as a sculpture—and that I think came from listening not just to the mega-rock concept albums from the ‘70s, but also from listening to a lot of hip-hop albums like De La Soul is Dead.

What does each band member bring into the mix?
Well, I suppose everybody’s got their own mark on the record, even their own individual tracks. When someone brings in a song or an idea, the others collaborate, and basically, the band does all the arrangements. It’s a collaborative effort as far as that goes. But I don’t know that each of us has an individual writing style; I can’t say that Jason’s songs are all the soft ones and mine are all the heavy ones, or anything like that.

The band members are multi-instrumentalists—you switch off instruments. How does that work in the studio?
Usually, it’s just who ever is available to drum. Like on the first record, Kevin—who probably does the least amount of drummer—did the drumming on the last song, just because he had the touch for it. When we assign roles, it’s generally by who we think is going to work out the best for that song.

How about live?
Well, that’s always a problem live. It’s always kind of a scrounging musical chairs. We’ve heard all sorts of criticisms, like "you guys switch off too much." But we’ve tried to develop sets where the switching off doesn’t take so much time, because it’s a matter of someone sitting down at guitar, another person walking around the drum set, and another person coming to the guitar and tuning it. Sometimes, it’s kid of like this dead time when Jason has to go do some spoken word or something, to keep everybody interested.

So I’m assuming that you don’t have a standard set list.
Well, we haven’t until recently, until this last tour we did with Superchunk. I think it was the first time we’ve ever played the same set list night after night, and that was mainly because we only had three guitars each, so out of necessity, there was a basic set list that just kind of worked. If we deviated from that, there would have been these yawning tuning breaks. And that’s another thing—rarely are two of the songs in the same tuning. I’m really jealous of these rock bands…my roommate’s in this total rock band that can end a song, and the next person just starts a lick, and boom, they’re playing the next song. I guess we’ll never be able to do that, unless we all have double-necked guitars. Which we are considering getting.

How was the band received by the Superchunk crowds?
We saw a lot of looks like they were trying to figure out what was going on—looks of confusion and astoundment. But it was generally pretty positive. Sometimes I would get upset: "God, no one liked it. No one was spitting beer on us!" What’s a show if no one is throwing a bottle at you? These kids would come up to me and say, "Wow, you guys were great." And I’d say, "Did you really like it? Because you didn’t throw anything."

Who writes the songs’ lyrics?
Usually, the person who came up with the song, and the person who writes the lyrics is generally the person who sings them.

What kinds of meanings are behind some of the songs?
Oh no, never meaning. You crazy? We don’t have meaning. This isn’t about meaning, it’s about money, fast cars [laughing] … I guess I can only talk about that songs I’ve written and what they meant at the time, and yeah, they had very specific meanings.

Some of the stuff I’ve read refers to some of the lyrical content as having metaphysical or some sort of other higher spiritual meaning.
I think that stuff came out of actually having a concept, a unifying theme. That was one of the unifying themes that just kind of seemed to come up out of nowhere. Not that any of the songs were specifically metaphysical, but of course, when they were all put together and all the lyrics were on one page, we noticed that some of things tying them together were themes like the absence of the sacred in modern society—which is also, by the way, a really good book by Jerry Mander—and things like popular idols being moved from sacredness to being icons of popular culture. And you know, we don’t talk about those things as being good or bad, they’re just observations. And it’s not even something that we’re railing against, I mean, in some ways it’s kind of a neat thing. As far as individual songs, at least when I write them, they’re generally about interpersonal issues I have with specific people, and those are often where I can find the most inspiration.

So what is the overall unifying theme of the album?
I would never try to put that into one sentence. I mean, to say that would be like telling people what to think of it, and I would not want to do that.

It’s up to each person to interpret it for themselves?
Like any work, any creative product. It’s kind of like the joy of reading of a book is imagining what things are going to look like, and not having it all drawn out for you by the author. We just want to allow the listener’s imagination to interpret it however they want. And we’ve gotten some pretty interesting interpretations. People have come back to me and asked me, "Hey is this song about Hitler, or World War II?" and other just really ‘out there’ things. I say, "No, but if that’s what you get out of it, then great."

I hear all kinds of fun things about the band’s live show.
Yeah, you know… we sit around in a circle in these chairs, we smoke a joint in front of the audience, and then we light some incense and get groovy [laughing]…

The reviewer of the band’s show at South X Southwest starter her review with a list of things that hit her from the stage.
What hit her?

"A couple of bottle caps and some beer splat, a Flying V guitar and a sweaty drummer," is what it says here, among other things.
Oh, the crowd threw those, that wasn’t us…

Even the sweaty drummer?
Yeah, he was watching the show [laughing]… Actually, that was a great show, one of the greatest nights of my life. I mean, not just our show, but afterwards I went and slam-danced to L7. I hadn’t seen them since I was a kid. It was just one of those magical nights when you stumble into every show you want to see for free. That was a really fun time, but I remember being kind of subdued for that show because they’d given us a warning.

Do you regularly warrant warnings?
Um, I think if anything, that people… A lot of things break when we play and I don’t know what it is. Seriously, tuners will stop working and drum pedals will just kind of loosen.

Does that come from kicking them or smashing them on the floor?
No, it just happens. It’s as though there’s some kind of weird jinx or something. And once that happens, we have to really rely on looking as if we’re playing [laughing] rather than actually playing. Which is probably why we’ve never released any live recordings.

I read a lot about broken instruments and even a little blood-letting from time to time.
I think the Austin musical community is responsible for a lot of that. It’s a really tight-knit community—it has been for several years—and the bands are always trying to do this one-upmanship thing, especially live. When you live in a town like this, everyone’s seen each other 20 times, and you can’t do the same thing 20 times in a row, each show has to be a lot different. I remember there was a time when we used to play at the only club in town that would book us, this tiny place called The Blue Flamingo. You could only fit 50 people in it, any more and they would be spilled out onto the sidewalk. We played there almost every week for a time, and I think that’s where we really developed this sense of the show, this theater of spectacle, because we had to.

Bookmark: