JENNIFER HERREMA
by Travis JeppesenThe entity known as Royal Trux was officially born when 15-year-old Jennifer Herrema met a young guitarist named Neil Hagerty in Washington, D.C. in 1985. The two paired off almost immediately and moved to New York a couple of years later, Herrema to attend the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, Hagerty to join the anti-hardcore trash band Pussy Galore. It was in New York that the two began composing music on their own, at first simple minimalistic compositions, which eventually grew into multi-layered blasts of sonic frequencies.
Once Neil quit Pussy Galore, the Trux removed themselves from the limelight that New York inevitably sheds (with one self-released album under their belts, as well as an advance from Matador for a record they never got around to recording), heading west where they attained outlaw status in support of a nasty habit. In a rare early interview, Jennifer spoke openly about working as a stripper, and when Neil was asked how he supported himself, casually replied, "breaking and entering."
But the Trux also proved during the San Francisco years that they were more than just delinquent junkies with the classic double LP, "Twin Infinitives." The Trux unveiled a semiology of their own invention, forging a new logic in what was sort of a rock n roll interpretation of jazz musician Ornette Coleman's theory of harmolodics (competing frequencies of sound.) The layering effects of guitar filtered and funneled, synthesized weirdness, and dead air competed with the detached voices of Neil's warbling sci-fi paranoia and Jennifer's spaced-out, indecipherable grumbles. The effect is akin to two parallel, yet totally separate poles of thought polyvocalized onward into forever, yet deftly executed, giving it a symphonic feel, a metonymy creating an equilibrium between chaos and order.
The Trux musical style is inimitable, consistent only in that it sounds drastically different from album to album, while their lyrics tend to cover incomprehensible territories, what Beckett called the unnameable, whether reaching into the depths of the mundane or carrying on an important conversation about no one in particular. The third, untitled, album painted a mellower, but no less intense landscape, while "Cats and Dogs" can easily be regarded as one of the best efforts floating about in the grunge-polluted waters of the mid-90s. The best introduction to early Trux is probably the 3-LP "Singles" collection, which showcases a wide range of rock experimentation.
In 1995, Royal Trux were signed to Virgin for a three album deal, after Neil and Jennifer re-wrote the contract according to their own terms (supposedly, they even demanded fur coats as part of the deal.) Trux ended up putting out only two of the three records, "Thank You" and "Sweet Sixteen," the latter they built their own studio at home to produce themselves, a practice they've stuck with pretty much since the very beginning. Virgin was reportedly unhappy with the outcome of "Sweet Sixteen," yet Trux was legally required to get paid for their next record, according to the contract. When Virgin asked to hear the record first, the Trux refused, so Virgin ended up having to pay them for a record that they never put out.
The record in question, "Accelerator," released on former label Drag City, was arguably their most speaker-scarring solid rock effort to date. The excellent "Veterans of Disorder" preceded their last record. It was around this time that Neil published his first novel, "Victory Chimp," a bewildering sci-fi adventure detailing the ape protagonist's conquest of the almighty villain Chon with sidekick Occula. Jennifer kept busy during these years, as well, modeling for Calvin Klein, painting, and designing jewelry. Both have contributed writings to magazines and have compiled a mind-boggling website www.royaltrux.com.
The following interview with Jennifer was conducted in the summer of 2000, right after Royal Trux canceled their world tour amidst rumors of a drug relapse (the pair had been chemical-free for several years.) Later on in the year, Jennifer went into rehab and Neil put out a solo album, announcing that Royal Trux was no more, although rumors have been floating that another record is in the tins.
Unlike a lot of great rock bands that tend to go on past their primes, the Trux showed that they still have juice flowing through them on their last album, the summer masterpiece "Pound for Pound." It would be a shame if they quit now, while they're still ahead of everyone else, but there's no real way of predicting what will happen. Neil and Jennifer have always defied expectations in their no-bullshit approach to getting things done, refusing to compromise their integrity in allegiance to any established system of thought.
Inarguably, the Trux's finest achievement is the development of their own set of peculiar aesthetics which they've etched out with their music, art, writing, as well as the way this philosophy manifests itself in their lifestyle. They're outsiders in an America that doesn't even exist.Travis: How did you and Neil [Hagerty] meet? Was it before Neil joined Pussy Galore?
Jennifer: Yeah, it was way before Pussy Galore. I graduated high school a year early, it was my senior year, I was 16, and my boyfriend had just died. But it wasn't a sad affair. He was a very horrible person.
I used to hang out with Neil's best friend, Dane. He told me about this band he was in. Ever since I was 9, my dad had been taking me to see music, rock shows, everything. By the time I was sixteen I'd seen the Rolling Stones twice, I'd seen Rush, I'd seen the Kinks, I'd seen Metallica, I'd seen every hardcore band you could imagine cos the straight edge scene was going on in D.C. and the shows were all ages.
I was also in school and all the older kids would have parties and they'd have the best acid, weed, and shrooms, so then it'd be a whole different thing. We'd be listening to Ozzy and Zeppelin and Yes and Jethro Tull, so it was a whole different thing.
So I had all this music in my head. I went to see this band that Dane was in, and it was basically Neil's band, Neil and the bass player from Government Issue (the D.C. punk band), and this guy Dane, and I don't know who else. It was at this really weird place, a place that'd never had a show before, over by Malcolm X Park in D.C. It was kinda like a regular joe kind of yuppie type hang out when gentrification started coming along. I walked in there and saw all these people and I was kind of weirded out by that kind of social behavior that everyone seemed so accustomed to. Then Neil walked on the stage and he took over the whole room and I was like wow the sound of his voice, the presence he commanded, the way he played. After all the music I'd seen, I'd never seen anything like it. I was like, "Man! Who the fuck is that?"
I'd never seen him before. He was kind of crazy. I got introduced to him, but I knew he lived in D.C., had gone to the University of Connecticut and got kicked out. He had moved into an artist warehouse space, a concrete room by New York Avenue, it didn't have a shower or anything, but he lived there cos he was painting a lot. I also knew he was always just fucking with people really hard. There was one girl who I never knew, but he wasted her, set her hair on fire. Just stuff like that, like, "Oh, man." But I kind of persisted.
Dane would paint over there too, so I'd come over and listen to music and kind of try to fade into the background, check out the whole situation. Within a week I got a sheet of acid. It was Neil and me and this girl named Holly who was a friend of Dane's. We ended up tripping our asses off for five days straight. We were on this bed in the middle of this concrete room, and we were very much positive that we were on a boat and the rest of the room was filled with water. Neil turned into Huey P. Long and was in charge of the boat. We needed to get food but we couldn't get off the bed cos we were stuck, if we got off then we'd drown.
And then when we finally got out of it, it was like "This is it." And we've been together ever since.
What writers are you into?
I'm really into textbooks. Neil's been taking them away from me. Looking up diseases and stuff -- this was way before my dad got sick. And of course I've always been really into pill books. I have a 1989 edition, a 2000 edition, and there are all these drugs in the latest edition that didn't even exist before.
Other than plain old fact searching, I've been reading a lot about the Plains Indians. I make a lot of jewelry, I'm a silversmith, and in a way the Navajos and the Plains have influenced me so much ­ well, actually, almost all Native American crafts have. But I've been reading a lot about their decorative rights, ceremonial arts, and constantly studying my Middleworth books.
The last novel I read, I have a friend David Berman (Silver Jews), he wrote this book called ACTUAL AIR. I think you'd like it. I really, really liked it. I've known him for so long, even before the Silver Jews and he'd always been working on it. It was a great book that came out a while back. I just got an email from him a couple of weeks ago. He told me to read THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING, a collection of stories by Ben Marcus.
There's another book I got a little too into called GROOMING GOSSIP AND THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. It's a sociological study on humans as if it were studying apes. All within the same context and keeping the same things in mind, really tongue and cheek, why people do the things they do, how they fit in. Yeah. It's fascinating.
I'm kind of guilty, like, we subscribe to the New Yorker but only read it occasionally. Joan Didion does a lot of writing for them and she's one of my favorites. A lot of her books are essays, some are novels. PLAY AS IT LAYS. THE WHITE ALBUM is like a book of essays and they're really great. That feeling where the words were coming out and she was not having to think too hard.
Why did you have to cancel your last tour?We were like, you know, I knew about it right before we left and I thought the best I could do was keep moving. The tour was going to be so intense. Three weeks east coast, three weeks west coast, Japan, seven weeks in Europe, with only a few days off in between each gig. No, man, I was like, the stress manifested itself in the most physical way. I thought some really horrible thing had happened, like God took my appendix out. The pain I had was really intense. The ambulance came and got me and I couldn't move. They said there was nothing wrong with me. Stress just manifested itself really intensely. They gave me a shot of non-narcotic medication that didn't work. Nothing happened. So then I was just doubled over dying, all hooked up. The weird thing is I was really dehydrated and I had been drinking four bottles of water a day. I was all hooked up. Neil came in and I was screaming and finally the woman entered Demerol into my tube and then I was like, "There you go." Then they had me on a prescription that helped. I guess it just opened the door, cos I started drinking and I was like "We know where this goes."
I also needed to be with my dad. He's only 55 and he's dying of cancer. I thought he wouldn't be there when I got back if I went out on tour. You never think something like that will happen, but you know, they were saying he might have three months, at best. So he's doing all the traditional shit, chemo, but I took him to a doctor of natural medicine and I put him on like seventy supplements and I guess it's happening.
The next day, I got called from L.A. to do a movie. When I was there, he flew to San Francisco to see my sister. Then I came back, and I had to go to New York to do a photo shoot with Terry Richardson for Dazed and Confused. When I got back from New York, he had gone back to San Francisco, and I hadn't gotten to spend any time with him.
But the shows we did play, it made it hard to stop cos it felt so good. They were kicking.
There were all these rumors going around that the tour was canceled due to a drug relapse.Yeah, definitely. That's what people thought. But in a certain way, I did relapse by, like, taking narcotic prescription and drinking. But it wasn't like that. It was basically me knowing that it would be like that any minute if I didn't stop.
Everything happens for a reason. If I had gone out on tour, I wouldn't have been able to be in this movie or do the shoot with Terry Richardson.
Terry Richardson is cool. I was with him from 3 o'clock in the afternoon till 3 in the morning. It was really, really real. I was wearing this ten thousand dollar outfit. Terry is an all-around good vibe guy.
Did you meet his wife, Nikki?No. They're divorced now. I never met her.
She starred in Bruce la Bruce's latest film, SKIN FLICK. Have you ever seen any of his films?No. What're they like?
Kinda like low fi, 8mm, punk/porno flicks.That sounds like that Richard Kern movie FINGERED. It's really whack, black and white. You should check it out.
So you went to the New School for a little while, right? That's where I went to school.Yeah. Then I took graduate classes at the big building on 5th Avenue. I audited them for no credit. I just wanted to take the classes I wanted to take. They have to set themselves apart somehow. Who were some of your professors?
I sat in on a lot of Lynda Schor's writing workshops. She's really cool, totally spaced out. She has a really good book of short stories out called "Appetites."
Yeah, I know Lynda Schor. It was all women's issues, everything we read. Everything we read was somehow pointing in the direction of oppression. It was really fucked up. I hated those kinds of classes. I really liked the psych class I took.
Yeah, it's all identity politics, all that bullshit. Hopefully that's a fad that'll die out with the 90s. So how do you compose your lyrics? Do you and Neil collaborate, or write separately, or?We do both. I'll go off and write on the computer and go and go and go and then I'll have Neil look over it and he'll open up his files and go and go and we check everything together and pull things apart and put them together. It's so weird. We're so different but at the same time, we're very much alike.
You've lived in a lot of different places ­ New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Chicago. What made you decide to move to rural Virginia? Do you feel that this sort of self-imposed isolation helps you get work done?Yeah, it's definitely conducive to work. I had lived in major cities all my life. I didn't even get my driver's license until 1994 when we bought our Jaguar. I was in southeast D.C., New York, San Francisco, and I spent a lot of time in Chicago. After all that, my dad had farmland way out in Virginia, like 80 miles from the Tennessee border. He was still working in the city at the time. My parents would go to Africa to visit my sister, and we'd housesit for them. We wrote [fourth album] Cats and Dogs while house-sitting for my parents and we didn't miss anything. We were so into it. Not having to think about things cos there aren't people in your face all the time like in the cities. If you need stuff to do, you've got your computer that you can look stuff up on, records, books, TV. It felt really natural.
So after my parents came back, we rented a house nearby. We got Drag City to put us on the payroll, so we'd get paid by Drag City every month. So we knew we could afford it. As soon as we got our first check from Virgin, we started checking out houses. The one thing I always wanted, my whole life, was my own land, my own house, a place where I could keep all my stuff and no one would fuck with it.
[Neil and I] never had any fucking money. I grew up normal -- we weren't poor, we were regular middle class, nothing fancy, but we never had to go without anything. We were definitely not anywhere near rich. Once I moved off on my own, I was responsible for myself. And I had been poor for so long. I just ended up having to do so many fucked up things to get money for all the wrong reasons. And I just said to myself, "Now I will never have to do anything like that again."
I went to tons of houses and there would always be cool things about the houses but it was never quite right. And then one day the agent brought me here and we drove by it cos we couldn't see the address and I saw it behind us and said, "God, I wish it was that one." And the agent stopped, turned around and said, "Oh, actually, this is it." And we went back to look at it and I just bought the house right away, called Neil up and said, "I found our house."
In addition to music, you're also an accomplished jewelry designer and silversmith. I saw those cool skull rings that you sell through the Royal Trux website.Yeah, that's just a Royal Trux cast I designed and it's made to fit all sizes. It was meant to not cost a lot of money. But, no, I make [rings] from scratch. Straight up silversmithing. I got commissioned to do two wedding rings for this Rock n Roll couple in New York. I don't know them, don't know anything about them. I've been corresponding through e-mail trying to figure out what they're thinking of cos I've gotta like it, too. They were saying big, kinda chunky, nothing fancy, no stones, 24 karat white gold. Then I finally came up with what I thought was perfect for them, like, all day. All day I was sawing with one of those big drills they have at the dentist, making prototypes.
How did you like living in New York?It's definitely a chore living in New York. You can learn so much and get a lot out of it but it will also take everything away from you unless you work 24-7 to avoid it. You're always bombarded with images and people, and you just want clarity. We figured it out after like three years and said there's nothing left that this town can give us. It's such an incestuous tiny town. Like Mayberry. When we lived there, we lived in so many different places. We lived on Clinton, 1st and C, Little Italy, 11th and C, we lived in Greenpoint in Brooklyn. We lived in the YMCA for a long time cos we didn't have anything else. We just moved. We'd get a dally with wheels and go.
When Neil first went up, the only reason he joined Pussy Galore is cos I was going up to go to the New School and they were going to pay him a good salary and rent, but he moved up a month before me, and when I got up there he was so fucked up all the time, he was on the brink of being thrown out of the Pussy Galore apartment cos they were very straight-edge. So finally, he ended up just living with me at the midtown YMCA in one of those tiny box-sized rooms. I don't even know how long. Maybe half a year. Then Jon Spencer and his wife wanted to rent another place, a two bedroom apartment and he wanted to know if Neil and I could move in there with them cos the YMCA was like a closet. They asked if we wanted to move in, and it was five hundred dollars a month, which way too much for us. So we negotiated, Spencer said he'd pay $250, and we moved in. So we lived with them for a while.
Was it fun hanging out with Pussy Galore?Pussy Galore was so totally different it was so funny just to be in the middle of it. Neil came up with the perfect remedy when he joined the band. He was the baby of the band, he was only a teenager and they were all older, and he took on the role of knowing exactly what was going on, that he was smarter than what he was seeing, but he was always so fucked up. But that was Neil, that was his persona, which was the only way he could even tolerate the guy (Spencer.)
Were you and Neil writing songs together as Royal Trux at this point in time?No, not at first. The way in which we played together early on was a really pivotal point in what Royal Trux has become, the way we responded and worked together. I grew up playing piano and guitar. I gave up on guitar after I met Neil, cos once you see someone play guitar like that, then it's all over with. So at first, I would hum and sing and do piano, but we didn't come up with any lyrics cos there weren't any melody or song patterns or stuff that we'd work on.
And just, over the course of the years, we started rehearsing every day. Finally we started bringing in the lyrics and started putting all sorts of sounds and stuff into it, putting it all together for the first album. The first song we ever composed was "Fix It." Jon Spencer paid us for it, and he put it on the Pussy Galore Right Now! album. I didn't sing, I was doing instruments on it. It was a real simple song, very unlike the others, just me and Neil. And then we did a Royal cassette tape.
But the whole scene at that time, I was like a little kid in a weird way, cos I wasn't anywhere in it. It was like, you know, in the fucking ninth grade I went to go see Sonic Youth on their Evol tour. It was a whole different generation of people, older people. There were all these other bands that kind of were living in the same universe in the same decade that I used to see all the time cos Pussy Galore always played out and always played with these different bands but there was no mutual ground. One person, Shauna from White Zombie, was my best friend in New York. She was three years older than I was but we hung out normally, just hung out, ate food and played pinball and stuff.
Do the two of you still keep in touch?No, she moved to L.A., and then she and Rob [Zombie] broke up, and it was just really weird. I always considered her and Rob kinda like me and Neil, so it was way too weird. She sent me a copy of Famous Monsters, her band's album, which I didn't care for too much...
But New York in those days, it was all about Pussy Galore, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur. It was definitely an in-crowd, but totally an older crowd. I was 17 years old and the girlfriend of the guy in Pussy Galore which was actually a great alterego cos nobody bugged you and you got to see everything. But as far as downtown culture, there really wasn't any, it was these particular bands, Homestead Records kinda ruled New York at the time.
It was also very much a means to an end for all of them and it never felt like a means to an end to me and Neil. It was more like a beginning. I guess we were pretty notorious cos we were fucked up all the time. We both had really bad problems with drugs and drinking.
Yeah, the drugs and the Stones references must get a bit annoying after a while.But I talked to one of our press agents. She just sent me a review in some magazine where we were compared to the Rolling Stones again. I just learned to accept it: we always will be. And she said, you know what? It's actually a compliment. Cos you don't sound like the Rolling Stones. They're just making a comparison.
As for the drug thing, you know, I was smoking weed when I was 12 and doing coke by the time I was 14, and I didn't even try to quit doing anything till I was 21, so the majority of my life has been spent under the influence. Everything I did was based on that type of reality ­ walking, eating, talking, etc. So people accuse us of being fucked up, and I don't really understand why. I mean, maybe we act funny or talk weird or something and just aren't aware of it because of the mindset that we've spent most of our lives in.
Any big plans for the future? Have you started working on any new projects?
We're gonna make another album. Right now we have a list of shit that we are going to do and that are going to be accomplished.
But since Veterans of Disorder, we toured constantly and the last day of the tour we recorded Pound for Pound for five days straight, and then we immediately moved to Philadelphia for eight weeks to produce a band for Dreamworks, and then we came back here, and it was almost time to go on tour. I just haven't had any free time. Whenever there's a just-do-nothing time, then it's, "Oh, now's the perfect time to come to Europe and do press!"
What happened with Virgin?Well, major labels, they have to sell units. The statistics go like this: 90 percent of all records, both independent and major label, that are released and distributed sell less than 5,000 copies. For indies, that's not bad at all. Especially smaller independents. We totally sold more than that on Drag City. But there are these steps that are preordained in the music industry to get you to a certain place, a certain stature.
Ever heard of Ben Harper? He's been on Virgin for 10 years and they've been cultivating him and cultivating him and finally, the time was right. And with Virgin, persona and marketing and media are everything. EVERYTHING is about sales. Down to photos, art work, marketing, advertising, posters, who your publicist is, all that. And they really wanted something a little more tangible, a little more solidified, as a package.
We got signed by the president of Virgin who was a really cool guy. He'd never signed a band before, he'd always been in publishing, for years. He'd signed Nirvana for publishing. He was a Japanese guy with a British accent. We were the only band he'd wanted, we were the first he signed. I know what he meant when he said it, but at the same time, I didn't. We were in his office, he was trying to reach our lawyer and he was bestowing gifts upon us, Sonic Youth box sets which Neil basically declined, which was pretty funny, almost as good as the time he bailed on meeting Keith Richards.
But the guy was like, "Look, in rock n roll, songs are what music is about. With rock n roll, that's what it is. It will be like that forever. We want the next Rolling Stones."
I understood he wanted substance; quality, he didn't want, in my opinion. Cos the Stones have never been genre specific or pigeonholed. Your grandma will go see them just like the 12 year old next door will. But I also kind of knew that we were talking about more than just that, but I knew he wanted us so I took about three weeks to write a contract, everything we had to have. We sent it to our lawyer and the lawyer was like, "Oh my God. Please!" I mean, Warner Brothers and Geffen wanted us, so I was like, "Give this to us."
So the next day, the president called and said, "Okay." Virgin accepted all of our terms.
The whole idea from the beginning was to bring us up organically and steadily to success or sales numbers and the number of fans. They didn't want it to be as it was, like a phenomenon thing. They wanted it to seem "real" and "organic." That was their angle, but they wanted very much to use a lot of things about us that we had at our disposal as marketing tools. Which, you know, I mean, many people have gone on to use these exact things and have gone multi-platinum but we weren't gonna sell ourselves as fucked up junkies, white trailer trash.
So that was their big marketing scheme?They said look, the main thing you have going for you is you're an incredibly mysterious band, but there are things that people do know about you, so the best thing to do is to exploit those things. So ultimately that's what I dunno. A shit load of bands ended up doing that in the end anyway cos it was just so cool. But these are people who are older than us and hadn't even started doing drugs [until they got signed], didn't know where it was gonna take em, or had false impressions about being in a different plane. You know. Fucking rhetoric, right? That's how so many people made their careers -- Courtney Love, etc. That whole fucked up white trash drug thing, if it hadn't been exploited, so many bands would have never made it.
And so due to the contract that we wrote, it didn't matter how many records we sold. Even if we didn't sell a record, even if they didn't release what we recorded, we would get every single penny for every record. So there was no incentive for us to go along with this fucked up business. The cash was up front, cash in hand. We definitely did things in the context of a major label, got to hire the producer that we wanted to, used Joe Walsh's studio, just things we always wanted to do.
And then certain things like parties for the artists and stuff. You know, I mean, I never went to parties, what the fuck? So we were just trying to figure that out.
We hired this manager, Elliot Roberts, who was our producer's manager. He was interested in managing us. But somehow his guy kept getting mentioned and he's from LA and his name is Tom Atencio and he just had this vibe about him, he had managed Jane's Addiction and New Order and he is the man that broke No Doubt after we fired him. No Doubt wouldn't have existed if we hadn't fired him. They had been trying to get him for years, and we fired him and he was like why not?
So we meet him, he's like, "Fly out to Los Angeles and we'll meet." And I said, "No, you come here." So he showed up and it was just like a movie. He looked like The Manager. Perfectly white teeth, perfect tan, Armani suit, white BMW. So we totally hired him. He knew the industry inside and out, all these weird things that are par for the course, all these things about releasing major label records so we were just kind of checking him out, asking questions, following his lead. It was exciting to do. Whatever.
But then it came time to make our second record for Virgin (Sweet Sixteen). David Briggs was gonna produce it, but then he died. We had always produced all of our own records, so we decided to have our manager call up Virgin and -- part of the contract was we got to administer our own budget so they just transferred it all into our account -- and we wanted to produce our own album. The budget for that second record was so huge, so we built a huge studio and we were gonna do it all ourselves. I'm not gonna pay a producer 60 thousand dollars when I can do it myself. They looked at that as going backwards instead of "evolving." There was nothing they could do about it, and there was nothing our manager could do to change our minds. So the manager became indispensable, so we fired him.
What I can say now is that Sweet Sixteen is a record I can put on and forget it's me. When Sweet Sixteen came out, a lot of people hated it. The record company definitely hated it. But then, I hadn't even thought about it. This year, it suddenly all made sense. When we did Twin Infinitives, everybody hated it. All of a sudden, after people listened to it a few times, people started to get it. It's the antithesis of Thank You. I feel that Sweet Sixteen was above Thank You in slickness. I knew we were taking it a step further. But they weren't gonna be the Thank You Songs. It was entirely immediate, recorded in two days, but it took four months to mix, mind you. But the vibe was there. It was real. It had that vitality to it. Sweet Sixteen was like, um, a magnum opus. We recorded track by track, 32 fucking tracks, layer upon layer. When we finished it, I felt the same way I felt after we finished Twin Infinitives. In my own mind, it made so much rock n roll sense. But you never know what other people are thinking or whether they even have the time to put it on more than once. It's a piece of art work.
Do you think that rock n roll has a future, or is it pretty much over with?
It totally has a future. Yeah. The fans are gonna take it back. There will be a moment in time where it will be like when I was 9 years old, when the people ran everything. It wasn't the corporations and it made it that much more exciting and meaningful. Whereas now a lot of music flies by real quick but it has no lasting impact or impression and I think that eventually that's gonna be the thing that's lasting, people will take it into their own hands, and it will cultivate itself into not analogous to the 70s punk scene or any other scene before it, but analogous to a point in time when everything was driven by the artists. As far as rock n roll goes, the way I think of it, it could never die. It's not possible. Cos all rock n roll has ever been is just like raping and pillaging and stealing from other sources and turning it inside out and making it your own. Everyone says everything has already been done. But I'm talking to you on the phone right now, and this conversation has never been put into a song. As far as rock n roll being dead, no, I don't see that happening.
Are you still building up your studio at home?I'm totally down with vintage gear and analog gear but I'm also really into technology and the digital age and being able to combine the two, the hybrid that allows you to do things. The only annoying thing about digital technology is that it's just a little too accessible to dumb asses who waste people's time. It's beyond annoying. But you know, so it goes and if it's shit it won't be heard anyways. But, man, God, like, I get catalogues every month from our equipment supplier with all these weird things, they're like algorithms, and I just have to have all this crazy shit. But we bought, like, a hard drive digital recorder and a vintage two-inch reel to reel but we also have a lot of ADATs as well. But we bought the master, the king of all kings of compressors on Ebay. It was Zeppelin's and Sly Stone's. It has the most intense sound coming out of it. You can't even describe it. We were just staring. We were like, "We have to have this." Things got out of control. We didn't pay that much more than we wanted to pay, so things worked out okay.
Well it seems that Drag City embodies all of the qualities that you locate in what rock n roll once was. It seems like they allow artists to do pretty much anything they want, no bullshit involved.Drag City is all art-driven and it's all based on the right things cos there's never any thought of betrayal. There couldn't be, cos there aren't papers signed. It'll always be a 50-50 split. We can do whatever we want, whenever we want. They send us the checks for everything. [Label guru] Dan Koretzky is like an arts advocate and he's not rich. He just does what he can. That's the amazing thing about Drag City. But that was something we had to weigh when we went to Virgin, which had some things that Drag City didn't ­ tons of cash, major means of distribution.
So was Drag City hurt when you decided to leave and sign to Virgin?No way, man, they were like, "Go for it!" Drag City was in on the whole Virgin deal. We went and met with Geffen while Koretzky met with Virgin. They were cool with it. I wrote it into the contract that he got to make all the vinyl for Thank You and keep the money. Little things like that.
The only thing lacking at Drag City is umlike, in my mind, and Dan is a really smart business man and he never overreaches or goes out of bounds and puts himself at risk, but I have this philosophy that you have to spend money to make money. He's not really in a position to do that. He can't buy his way into any magazine he wants. With Virgin, we could've been in any magazine we wanted to be in, they just had to buy us in.
The second thing being Drag City's relationship with radio, which is just a problem that I have cos we don't really serve as college radio anymore. I haven't heard college radio in a long time except for brief periods when we're driving around on tour and it's always horrible. I shouldn't make vast generalizations cos I'm sure there are good things out there, but in general, college radio across the board, it's a joke. CMJ charts ­ fuckin [Drag City label mates] the Red Crayola were number one for a long time and they sold no records. So I'm trying to steer them away from college radio. I'm really pitching for them to find somebody to work commercial rock for Royal Trux because yeah, I think that there are a handful of songs on our previous albums that could've done well on commercial radio, so that's what we're trying to figure out now.
But it's hard cos in the end, it all comes down to money. Even if it's in a different form -- instead of checks, you've got Rolexes. I've met some very supportive commercial rock DJs, but for most of the old school radio DJs (like the old school major label presidents), it all comes down to money.
Is Neil going to write another book at some point in the future?Neil wrote another novel. It's a mystery, a straight-up genre book. And the last time we talked about it he was gonna write three genre-specific novels, but different genres and put them together as one book. A collection of novellas, based on different genres. That's the last thing we talked about, actually.
Do you think you'll ever write a book?I am going to do a book one day, but it's gonna be ghost written. I just fucking -- within the past nine months, like, got put on Aderol Methamphetamine for Attention Deficit Disorder. My mom never told me I had it until recently, I had no idea, and now I feel so much more normal and more lucid and more concentrated. But since that time I went on my medication, I knew that I could write this book, it's basically written, I know it, I just can't type it. I can write songs, short pieces for mags or whatever cos it just kinda comes out, but with novels, whenever I start thinking too hard about anything I go to hell. Novels are so complex. So it's gonna be the novel written by so and so as told by. I don't think any of my writings extend beyond five pages.
Do you have a particular favorite of all your albums? I think "Twin Infinitives" is sort of a masterpiece, like it'll go down in history as being a really amazing achievement.I listen to them so long when I'm recording them, and then listening to the songs to make arrangements when we go on tour, so when I put them on occasionally it surprises me. I listened to Accelerator the other day and was like, "Wow! I can't believe I did this."
Yeah, Accelerator fucking rocks. Is it true that Twin Infinitives was influenced by Philip K. Dick?It's hard. Neil and I are very much alike. We're also very different. If he said it, it very well might've been what he was thinking. All I was thinking was "pure mutations of Blue Oyster Cult!" Cos lyrically, I'm in love with it. Have you heard their second album?
No, I haven't.You've got to check it out, their second album. I was really into that and I was also really into the groundedness of the rock, but not wanting just to stay right there, cos that's Blue Oyster Cult, so you know, we didn't want to make a record that had already been made.
He's real into Philip K. Dick, sci fi, but lately he's been on a comic rampage ­ X-men, Fantastic Four. He's got this whole theory about the Marvel universe. There's Marvel and then there's D.C. Comics. Marvel makes it so that every single thing that happens in the span of Marvel Comics, 1969 to date, it all makes sense. There are no inconsistencies. It's a whole universe, really carefully mapped out. The illustrators change year by year and he's really into checking out the different ones. We saw the X-men movie last night. It was the first time I've been in a movie theatre since 1996.
No way!Yeah, we live three hours away from the nearest movie theatre. But we see everything cos we have a satellite TV, we just see it later than everybody else. Also, I had a hard time cos the screen was so big. I had to keep getting up and moving back because my vision wasn't taking it all in. I was getting nauseous.
But it was a good movie. Neil's been filling me in on the characters so I knew what was going on.
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