…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

In one of the most bizarre instances of pop culture dichotomy - on par with David Bowie's duet with Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley singing to a hound dog on the Steve Allen Show - Austin's …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead took the stage for a taping of Farmclub, the now defunct music show on USA Network, hosted by Matt Pinfield and Ali Landry (of Doritos fame). The audience was chock full of silicone-enhanced hotties, male-model types and go-go dancers on platforms by the stage. And though most of them didn't know it, they were about to witness complete mayhem.
As singer Conrad Keely introduced the song "Richter Scale Madness" - "This is a song about killing everyone, let's all sing along now," - the Top 40 weaned audience feigned enthusiasm and the go-go dancers did their best to grind to hard-ass indie rock. The dancers were left with bewildered faces trying to find a beat as the song descended into feedback. Then Trail of Dead did what they've become known for: they broke every fucking thing in sight.
Keely and his band mates took the show in stride, and it didn't hurt that fellow Texans and indie rock phenoms At the Drive-In were on the same episode, "It made it a little easier for us, seeing At the Drive-In there. We'd actually only just met them like six months before then, but we got to know them just through touring and stuff. So that made it seem a lot more familiar. But I remember them really hating it. They specifically asked, 'No go-go dancers.' And we didn't even know that there were going to be go-go dancers. Even if we had known I think we would have said, 'go with the go-go dancers,' 'cause that would have been fun. The whole day was bizarre, but I think doing those TV things, the less you think about who or where it's going out to the better. You gotta live in the moment and not think about all the people that are watching."
Trail of Dead, now signed with Interscope Records, is a band with a mission: dismantling the tired state of mainstream rock from the inside out. And as their appearance on Farmclub showed, beneath all the glossy, bland and cookie cutter music out there lays a seedy, serious current waiting to topple it all.
"If one or two of us go ahead and try to do it and just try to make something decent regardless of whether we're gonna be popular or make money or not, then things will at least have the potential to change," says Keely. "If you trace that back you'll see that it goes far back. It was a lull in music that caused rock 'n' roll to start in the first place. When the music of the '40s became really trite and cloying, it caused youth to create rock music. And even before then - I'm not too familiar with the period between then and the '20s - but that's the same thing that happened with jazz."
Their major label debut (they released two albums on independents: 1998's Self-Titled and 1999's Madonna), Source Tags & Codes, is the kind of album that has the potential to introduce the kids to a new brand of rock, free from faux-aggression, filled with intelligent lyrics and complex arrangements of crunchy, layered guitars. Keely views releasing the album on a major as a way of addressing the lull in rock, "I think that our whole idea of doing that is an attempt to say that if no one is going to attempt to make that music good, then it's always going to be bad."
Much more of an album than their previous releases, Source Tags & Codes shows a band reaching maturity. Where Madonna and the Self-Titled album showed the band's influences on their sleeves (see Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine) and wavered musically over the course of those releases, more hodgepodge collections of sometimes great songs than stellar albums, Source Tags & Codes is strung together musically through wistful lyrical themes of life on the road. From the thick guitars of "Another Morning Stoner" to the full-throttle assault of "Homage" to the melodic bombast of "Relative Ways" to the nostalgic chords of the title track, which closes out the album, it's the kind of album that reaffirms one's belief in the power of rock music.
"I don't believe in any kind of musical snobbery, in fact I've always kind of resented it," says Keely. "And I think that the people that have taken on the kind of attitude that rock was kind of through and called what they were doing 'post-rock,' I didn't really see any difference between that label and rock music anyway. They're still using amplified instruments and in fact it was basically just rock 'n' roll. Same with a lot of other genres that they try to break down into… even punk rock. It helped people to make up labels like that to place it chronologically, but as far as the rudiments of what these people were doing, there wasn't a whole lot different between punk rock and early roots rock, very little difference."
The album has received unanimous praise, and asked whether he is happy with the record now, Keely says, "I have to be honest, I haven't listened to it in awhile. I feel bad. It's not like I have a copy on my own - I might have one on my hard drive. I've been reading these reviews about the record and I've been thinking, 'Man, this must be a good record. I should like go home and listen to it.'"
The band recorded the album over the course of a month with producer Mike McCarthy at Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati, CA. "I think the whole idea was to kind of force a paradigm shift on ourselves by going out into the sensory depravation of the wilderness," says Keely. "It wasn't actually wilderness; it was just really rural."
The studio was recommended to the band by über-producer Steve Albini and has been used by Tom Waits on a number of his albums. The setting gave the band some time off from their nearly non-stop tour schedule, but the seclusion took it's toll at the end.
"There's not really anything out there… Santa Rosa's near there, which was good if you wanted like a Borders' bookstore or coffee. Cotati was cool because the people that are there are so small town. They go down to these two little drinking holes, one's like a biker's bar and there's always like a really small live band. So it was kind of a great place to leave the studio and suddenly hear music that you would never [hear], that's not your own. We didn't come into town very much, so we were basically just constantly surrounded by just ourselves, just the people we were working with. The first three weeks were fine, I could deal with it, but after the fourth I was cracking up, like The Shining or something. It's like the Overlook Hotel, you're just like, 'God, get me back into the city.' Because I definitely am more of an urban person."
Trail of Dead also got to experience the non-urban landscapes on a two-week trip to Brazil. They played a couple of shows in villages ("And villages is the right word," said bassist Neil Busch) and nearly set off a riot.
"The worst was Rio, which was the first show," said Keely. "After that all the turnouts were completely full. We played this tiny little [club]…well they had a skate ramp in the back of this bar, so there were skaters skating and stuff and we played on the concrete floor and the kids were just surrounding us in this tiny little place. We played in these other places that were huge. The crowds were definitely very receptive. It's a good feeling when you've never been to a country before and you don't expect anyone to have heard of you and yet you go there and people are asking you to sign bootleg copies of your record. It's kind of weird. The only time that was really emotional in Brazil was that last show when we thought there was gonna be a riot between the security and the crowd because they went so crazy and these goons who looked like Men In Black, tuxedos. It was a frightening moment. Luckily, the crowd kind of backed off."
It's usually the Trail of Dead men that cause most of the havoc. A live Trail of Dead performance is equal parts rock show, spiritual revival and demolition derby. At a recent performance at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, Jason Reese set off the chaos by busting a Fender and tossing out pieces to the audience. He took his place behind the drum set for the closer, "Perfect Teenhood" (Reese and Keely switch off on guitar and drums) and the song reached its conclusion with Keely busting his guitar against his cabinet as Reese toppled the drums, throwing the snare out to the crowd. The staff of the Hall was none too happy as Reese and Busch took to hurling the monitors around the stage and tension was high as the crowd ate it up.
Still, they've managed to avoid any fisticuffs with security. "Considering some of the things that we've done, they've been pretty cool with us," said Keely "A lot of times the security guards will be into the band. They'll like us, so they don't mind if we knock 'em over the head…by accident. My only problem is that we've been places where they're so uptight about dancing, like in the South, in Atlanta. And the kids weren't even moshing or anything. There was just this one guy who was kind of getting into it and I think he got grabbed and told to leave. It was like Footloose or something."
Their raucous live show has gotten the band into a bit of trouble with club owners around the world and in their hometown.
"We have wreaked a lot of havoc on the Austin club community," said Keely. "Not that it's a community, 'cause all those clubs compete with each other, so they're not even friends with each other. There was a time when we first started playing in Austin where it was really hard for us to get shows and the general attitude that club owners had was that it was that they were doing me a favor for allowing me to play. We never shared that opinion; we were always of the opinion that a band is really what makes a club happen. As soon as club owners know us and they know that that's our position, they're usually pretty cool with it."
Still they've managed to retain good ties with at least one club in Austin, "We played there just recently at Emo's, but that's a place we established a long-term relationship with. We've been kicked out of Emo's personally, not as a band, but just because we were…Jason and I back in the day were just as rowdy audience members as we are band members. If there was a band we liked we'd throw stuff at them, throw garbage cans at them."
Now, with the band poised for superstardom, it seems they're connection with audience is somehow stronger than ever. As they came out to retrieve what was left of their equipment at the show in the City (yes, they still load their gear themselves), the crowd let out a thunderous ovation thankful for the spectacle they had just witnessed.

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