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Issue 47
March/April 2005 |
 By
Brian BakerPhotos © Alyssa Scheinson There is a bittersweet moment toward the end of Man on the Moon, the Andy Kaufman biopic starring Jim Carrey as the doomed comedian, where Kaufman is gathered with his family and his doctor for the purpose of informing his family that he is indeed dying. After the doctor delivers the devastating news regarding Kaufman's terminal lung cancer, Andy's sister storms out of the office, pointing out discrepancies in the doctor's dress and demeanor; essentially accusing Andy of perpetrating the most tasteless hoax of his career on his own family. Carrey, as Andy, translates a range of emotions that would fill a psych textbook with a single look, moving from the finality of his doctor's diagnosis to the anguished realization about the nature of his last days to the absurdity of his sister's outrage to the sad resignation that he had gone so far beyond the accepted scope of what constituted comedy that nothing he did or said could now be trusted as the truth in Andy's personal theater of the bizarre. He had become the ultimate Boy Who Cried Wolf, to the extent that there are people to this day who believe that Andy Kaufman somehow faked his own death in 1984 and waits, Elvis-like, in some pop culture Batcave until the right moment to reappear, then pointing and laughing at those of us who foolishly believed he had actually shuffled off the mortal coil. There is a cautionary message in that anecdote for the members of ...And You Will Know Us by the T  rail of Dead, hereafter shortened
to its last three words to prevent anymore carpals from tunneling,
by virtue of the laborious typing their full name requires. For almost
the whole of their career, the Austin, Texas-based, post-modern punk
noise outfit has played fast and loose with their biographical facts,
often telling ten different interviewers ten different versions of
how they met, how they became a band and where the name came from.
They have become such effective obfuscators that they find themselves
in the Andy Kaufmanesque situation of trying to reiterate the facts
to people who are convinced they already know the truth."By now you know that all the stories about us growing up in Texas are false," says Trail of Dead guitarist Conrad Keely. "Right?" Right. Of course, nearly everything we know about Trail of Dead is false. And yet, when Keely is offered the opportunity to correct any one egregious "fact" about the band, he deftly sidesteps the question. "Oh gosh, there aren't any real big lies about the band," Keely says carefully. "There are just a lot of little lies. I'll just let them sort themselves out in the long run." Keely mentions that part of the band's recent hiatus found him venturing to Thailand where he was visiting relatives on his father's side. Thankfully, they live far inland and were not directly affected by the tragedy of December's tsunami. Keely then elaborates on his family ties, noting that his Thai father and Irish mother makes him "Thairish." Although Keely sounds sincere, the claim smacks of more bio invention but he insists that  it is the absolute truth.So it would seem that Trail of Dead is ready to come clean and adhere to a policy of journalistic honesty from here on out. So, the question is posed to Keely, is the song "And the Rest Will Follow" from Worlds Apart actually written about a female stalker that has been shadowing the band for several months, as was stated mere minutes ago in a separate interview with Trail of Dead drummer/guitarist Jason Reece? "Did he say that?" says Keely, incredulous. "Now he's relapsing into the lies." Everybody have their grains of salt ready? Let's hit the Trail. How did ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead come to be? There are so many fascinating answers to that question. We know (at least we think we know) that they didn't grow up in Texas. The latest story reports that Keely and Reece met while both were living in Hawaii, after which they moved to Olympia, Washington where Reece joined Mukilteo Fairies. Reece and Keely then relocated to Austin, Texas where they met guitarist Kevin Allen and bassist Neil Busch and formed Trail of Dead. They could just as easily have sprung, Athena-like, fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. It would be every bit as believable as the stories they've told over the years. As Trail of Dead has probably felt many times in the past, how they assembled is perhaps less important than the mere fact that they did assemble. When their eponymous debut appeared in 1998 on Butthole Surfer King Coffey's Trance Syndicate label, critics were somewhat apprehensive. The band's name suggested a coven of church-burning Norwegian death metallers howling about blood sacrifices a  nd ancient vengeful Arctic wraiths.
What they heard was a quartet of post-punk, Austin-based twenty-somethings
constructing a noisy punk tapestry of stripped-down elegance and appropriately
chaotic density, with an emphasis on the chaos. The album strongly
hinted at the band's incredible potential.Trail of Dead's second album, 1999's Madonna, proceeded along the path of the first, with some welcome focus and concentration folded into the mix, and was equally well-received. After the demise of Trance Syndicate, the band and album were picked up by Merge Records, with Madonna benefiting from the label's more expansive distribution and promotion capabilities. As the band's profile rose, so too did the amount and quality of press they were generating, and soon the gentle truth-stretching they had done in promoting the first album became a torrent of deliberate misinformation. Fact checkers around the country could find no sources to verify or dispute anything that had been said or was being said about Trail of Dead, so most of it went through without challenge. "We're given just enough information to exist as humans, so we'll give you the information that we've received and let you make up your own mind," said Reece in 2002 on the subject of the band's subjective honesty. "The truth is just a bunch of lies. But the truth will set you free, Jesus said." Quite so. In the three years between Madonna and 2002's Source Tags & Codes, Trail of Dead became even more widely known for their incendiary live performances, which almost always ended in equipment destruction and personal injury. Although the wanton devastation seemed to imply that the band had some kind of endorsement safety net to  offset the cost of their splintered
instruments, the one truth from that period is that Trail of Dead
paid for everything they broke, repairing and replacing as they marched
Sherman-like through their own equipment.Source Tags & Codes signaled a definite shift in Trail of Dead's modus operandi. Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine had personally signed the band to his label on a four-record contract, giving them absolute creative freedom. For their major label debut (and third album for as many labels), Trail of Dead wanted something unique without abandoning their core style. Although the band's trademark visceral post-punk attack was still evident, there was a layered and crafted element to the material suggesting a band that was maturing and evolving while they were bashing and shrieking. Source Tags & Codes became one of the top critical albums of the year and was easily the best selling album of Trail of Dead's brief tenure. The group then embarked on a grueling eighteen-month world tour that pushed the band to the limits of its endurance as they continued to pummel their equipment and themselves into physical and emotional oblivion. Afterwards, the exhausted band agreed that a lengthy break was in order. Reece worked on the band's recently completed studio while Keely did some traveling unrelated to touring, including his aforementioned stop in Thailand and a much-needed French vacation. Busch apparently did a lot of soul searching about his place in the band; when they reconvened to begin work on the new alb  um, he announced that he would
be leaving Trail of Dead after its completion."He really lost interest in the band," says Reece of Busch's departure. "I don't think he felt as close to what we were doing. He had otherinterests he wanted to pursue. It ended well enough, there wasn't any sort of screaming match or anything. If your heart's not in it, you shouldn't do it. That's what it comes down to." As the band began the process of conceiving the next album, the inroads and alterations of Source Tags were magnified and stretched to match Trail of Dead's latest upheaval. Just as significant were Keely's struggles to translate the events of the band's chaotic touring cycle and the perspective gleaned from his reflective sabbatical into actual songs. Busch's imminent exit from the band merely added another layer of complexity to an already tumultuous situation. "It took a long time to digest those experiences," says Keely. "That was one of the things that took so long - actually getting back and thinking over what I'd been through. Then there was this weird moment of block where I didn't even know what I was going to write. It was kind of terrifying. I wasn't even sure if I was going to be able to write. But then I began to write." See the rest of our ...TRAIL OF DEAD cover story in the current issue of AMPLIFIER (No. 47 March/April). |
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