And You Will Know Them By the Trail of Debt
Life on the road for the Trail of Dead means fixing broken-down vans, sleeping on the floor at a stranger's house, and living hand-to-mouth. What keeps the Austin indie band going? Rock and roll.
mychael says: this was a great story of a great band. thanks for sharing! (March 16th, 2009 at 9:08pm)
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Underneath the frenetic misbehavior, however, was a band that was producing some surprisingly good music. King Coffey, the drummer for the Butthole Surfers, signed the group to his Austin-based label Trance Syndicate Records in 1997 and put out its self-titled album the following year. That effort turned heads: David Fricke praised the Trail of Dead’s “glorious display of shattered-glass guitar tonalities and migraine-beat precision” in Rolling Stone in 1998, and Detour magazine invited the band to New York for a photo shoot. All was going well until that fall, when the Trail of Dead tried to launch a tour that was supposed to take it to 29 cities around the country. The band had met with disaster on the road before, arriving at an El Paso show pulled by a tow truck, losing several guitars in a New York City heist, and putting out a fire that started in its old Ford Econoline outside Waco. But all of that paled in comparison to the calamity that struck, only one day into the band’s first major tour, in 1998, when its van was stolen in New Orleans.
“It had everything in it that we had collected since we were teenagers,” said Neil with a sigh. “A customized Les Paul, a Flying V, a bass cabinet that had gone on tour with AC/DC . . .”
“We were completely devastated,” Kevin said.
Everyone nodded and then muttered in unison, “Devastated.”
The band members scrapped the tour, though not before they borrowed guitars and a girlfriend’s car, drove 36 hours straight to New York, and played the College Music Journal festival several days later. Trance Syndicate folded soon afterward, and the group—faced with breaking up or persevering—decided to stick it out and headed back to the studio. A tape of its rough mixes caused indie rock stars Superchunk to take notice, and the band, which owns Merge Records, asked the Trail of Dead to join its roster last year. Still, as the relationship with Trance Syndicate demonstrated, a record deal doesn’t solve all of a band’s problems. “People have this misconception that things are easy because we’re signed to a label,” Jason said. “We’re doing well for a punk rock band: We go out on the road, we tour, we play. This is the dream, but we’re still at the very bottom of the deal.”
“This is not a luxurious life,” added Neil. “You can’t work a decent job, your girlfriends are angry, your friendships fall apart. You’re stuck in a van with three sweaty guys all the time. But we’re best friends; we’re like brothers. We’ve all lost jobs and broken up relationships for this band, and we’re in it for the long haul.”
The long haul found us five hours outside Austin with a van that refused to start. Neil tinkered with the engine until dusk, finally getting it to run long enough for Kevin to steer us to an auto parts store, where the two set to work. Touring is as much about waiting around—for a sound check to end, for a club owner to pay up—as it is about the few cathartic moments onstage, and the band seemed resigned to being stuck in Lake Charles for quite a while. Conrad sat on the curb sipping sake and watching Neil check the spark plugs, every once in a while dryly singing a few lines of Bruce Springsteen: “You can’t start a fire / You can’t start a fire without a spark . . .” The group has become proficient in fixing such problems—once, in New Mexico, they looped guitar strings around a wobbly muffler to anchor it to the van—and by eight o’clock, the engine was running again. “Let’s haul ass!” Kevin cried as he fired it up, and we all took our places back in the van, now strewn with fast-food wrappers and empty Lone Star cans. We drove hurriedly past towns called Evangeline and Iota and Mire, over the Atchafalaya River and the Mississippi, until we reached New Orleans, only a few minutes before they were scheduled to play.
The club was dark and only half full, and the band put on a lackluster show having missed the sound check. The headliners, a local metal act called Blackula, had already filled the stage with its equipment, and the Trail of Dead were left with little room to play, perching themselves awkwardly on the edge of the stage. But their loyal fans, mostly girls, didn’t seem to care: They clustered around them, riveted, and swayed to the sound of Jason’s voice. At the end of the show, a pretty girl who had seen the band play in Tampa Bay last fall and who now stars on MTV’s The Real World: New Orleans, approached Kevin, her camera crew in tow. “I love your band,” she gushed.
That night, like most nights on the road, Neil, Conrad, Jason, and Kevin relied upon the kindness of strangers, staying with a drummer named Natalia they had met the last time they passed through New Orleans. They rarely stay at hotels—even a single room at the Motel 6 is deemed lavish—since every penny spent further distances them from making a profit. They will not earn royalties until they have settled the overhead costs of touring, recording, and merchandising with Merge. “The label is like a bank you borrow from,” Jason explained. “They give you name recognition and publicity and distribution for your records, but everything else you have to pay back.” Since Madonna’s release in October, fewer than 10,000 copies have sold, of which the band receives only 30 percent of the profits; its shows, which usually command $250 guarantees, are hardly money-makers once the cost of gas, food, van repairs, equipment, and the booking agent’s 15 percent cut are factored in. Unless the band gains a wider audience, the chances of its members quitting their day jobs—serving coffee and working as temps—aren’t good. The best they can hope for, Jason explained, is to become self-sustaining while on the road. And long term? “To have a number one hit single,” he laughed.
Natalia threw a party for the band that night that ended near dawn, when everyone collapsed onto her floor and tried to catch a few hours’ sleep. Conrad and Jason wedged themselves between the furniture in Natalia’s tiny living room, Neil crashed in the van, and Judy and I lay down in the kitchen. Around noon, everyone awoke bleary-eyed among the remains of the festivities—spoiled sushi, empty beer cans, overflowing ashtrays—and joked about the night before; Conrad strummed his guitar as afternoon sunlight crept through the blinds. Kevin had caught a ride to Baton Rouge the night before, and after bidding Natalia good-bye, we headed his way, the van’s radio humming. The conversation soon turned to the number of Austin groups that had fallen by the wayside in recent years, never able to translate hometown popularity into a broader appeal. As if to prove us wrong, the hit song “The Way,” by the Austin band Fastball, came on the radio, then another, by Sixpence None the Richer, from nearby New Braunfels. “It’s Austin hoot night in Baton Rouge,” Conrad joked of the unlikely song pairing. “Someday we’ll be rock stars too,” Jason said with a grin.
It takes a certain audacity to slog it out in a largely unknown punk rock band, but shows like the one the Trail of Dead played that night in Baton Rouge perhaps make it all worthwhile. The venue, a bar called Spanish Moon that had been a black social club during segregation, was packed when the Trail of Dead took the stage that Saturday night. The band was in fine form, exploding with energy as it tore through its songs, the crowd dancing and reeling and waving its fists. As the show wound to a close, Neil, bass in hand, fell to his knees; Jason launched into a Pete Townsend windmill routine and then tumbled into the crowd. Conrad kicked the drum kit across the stage, toppling a stack of amps, and Kevin tried to coax a melody out of his now mostly broken guitar strings. The band was sweaty and ebullient, the audience transported. They pulled first Jason and then Neil into the crowd and held them aloft—Jason still singing, Neil strumming the bass—while feedback reverberated against the club’s brick walls.
As the set came to an end, Jason regained his footing onstage and stared out into the crowd, grinning in the spotlight. In seven weeks he would be back in Austin serving coffee, but for now, this was his moment. “There’s not much left to play with,” he shouted to the crowd, motioning toward the fallen amps and disassembled drum kit. “I guess we should just pack up and head home . . .” But the audience screamed for more, and the band gave it to them, launching into a blistering encore. The stage was slick with spilled beer and broken glass, the crowd both drunk and exultant. “Rock and roll!” the girl next to me screamed. “Rock and roll!”
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Madonna (Merge)
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