A conversation with Royal Trux's Neil Hagerty from 1999
Talkin' baseball, thrift-store shopping, and Ricky Martin with a true veteran of disorder
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the ‘90s and ‘00s and present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
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THE OPENERS
I didn’t know Dave Sweetapple personally, but I know quite a few people who did, and over the past week, my social-media feed has become a veritible public memorial for the Newfoundland-born musician, who passed away suddenly last Thursday at age 58. To give you a sense of how highly regarded he was, consider the fact that, in 2010, Sweetapple formed a band with two certified indie-rock legends—Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis and Cobra Verde’s John Petkovic—and they named the band after him. (His dalliance with Mascis also carried over to their stoner-metal power trio, Witch.) But offstage, Sweetapple wore many hats, including photographer and label operator, most recently with the great Brooklyn imprint Outer Battery (which has overseen vinyl releaases for the likes of Swervedriver, OFF!, Dinosaur Jr., and Faith). My deepest condolences to those who knew and loved him. Here’s something to remember him by: the video for Sweet Apple’s 2010 power-pop corker “Do You Remember,” in which he takes the starring role.
Notes on the latest additions to the stübermania 2024 playlist:
It’s the summer of Chapel—Webb Chapel, that is. The prolific indie-rock project led by Philadelphia’s Zack Claxton drops its third album of 2024, World Cup, on September 6, though unlike his previous one-man-band affairs, this record was made as a full-blooded foursome. If you like SST-era Sonic Youth, you’re gonna EVOL this. (In related news: some aspiring shoegaze band really needs to lay claim to the name Chappell Drone before it’s too late.)
Melbourne, Australia’s Quivers—creators of my favourite song of 2021—just released a new album, Oyster Cuts, their first for the mighty Merge Records. I’m especially taken with the atypically long six-minute closer, “Reckless,” which sets their luminous harmonies and gentle jangle to a space-rock drift, like Dark Side of the Moon done C86-style.
I’m pleased to note that new album from alt-pop star and noted Stephen Malkmus scholar beabadoobee features a song, “One Time,” that actually sounds just like the Terror Twilight deep cut “You Are a Light.”
Sunderland’s fraternal art-rock troupe Field Music are not a band I return to with much regularity, but every time I do, I kick myself for not doing it more often. The ever-reliable Brewis brothers release their eighth album, Flat White Moon, on October 11, and the juddering single “The Limits of Language” finds them still claiming sole ownership of the middle ground between XTC and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
If Donald Glover is indeed retiring Childish Gambino, hopefully that gives him more time to hop on Revyn Lenae tracks like her woozy psych-soul stunner “One Wish.”
The new video for the latest single from Elias Rønnenfelt shows the Iceage frontman strumming an acoustic guitar in an open field against a backdrop of rolling hills, but fear not, he’s not going all Noah Kahan on us—“No One Else” is a folk-punk paean to lost love that’s as raw as it is romantic.
Here’s a link to the unembeddable Apple Music version.
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty from 1999
Date: August 20, 1999
Location: Phoner—Neil was at home somewhere in Virginia, I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto
Album being promoted: Veterans of Disorder
The context: Approximately 98 per cent of interviews I did in the late-’90s were with bands that were either deciding on whether to sign with a major label, had been dropped by a major label, or who were waiting to be dropped by a major label. Royal Trux belonged to Column B. The former underground darlings had released two albums of unapologetically skeezy rock ‘n’ roll on Virgin Records—1995’s Thank You and 1997’s Sweet Sixteen—to little commercial success, after which they were released from their contractural obligation to deliver a third album for the label. But where most bands in their situation would get dumped onto a mountain of debt they couldn’t possibly repay, the fine print in Royal Trux’s contract put the label on the hook for a buyout. So partners in crime and creation Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema took the money and ran: They bought themselves a compound in the woods of Virginia, returned to their former indie-label digs at Drag City, and released the best album of their career.
The Royal Trux saga is one of grim mythology, dramatic break-ups, and rockier reunions, but this interview with Hagerty occurred during a period of relative contentment and stability. Talking to Hagerty is actually a lot like listening to a Royal Trux record: just as their music seesaws between between classic-rock clarity and avant-garde obfuscation, our conversation slid back and forth between casual small talk about baseball and music to abstract existential philosophy and tangled tangents. (Coincidentally, this interview happened around the same time I stopped following sports with any degree of regularity, so this transcript doubles as a document of the last time I could credibly carry on a conversation about baseball.)
Neil and I spoke a few weeks before Royal Trux played a rare Toronto headlining show at the legendary El Mocambo, where their all-time favourite band, The Rolling Stones, famously recorded part of their 1977 concert set, Love You Live. It was also the last time Royal Trux ever performed in Toronto—a June 2000 date got cancelled at the last minute, as did a planned post-reunion stop on the ill-fated White Stuff tour that never happened in 2019. The two things I remember about that El Mo show:
It was awesome.
Jennifer was rocking a freshly shorn mullet, 10 years after they had gone out of style and a good 25 years before they came back. (She was always ahead the curve.)
Veterans of Disorder’s lead-off track was “Waterpark,” a revved-up AC/DC-worthy rocker that was essentially perfect musical manifestation of Jennifer’s new haircut—and an easy place to start this late-summer conversation:
How are you enjoying the summer? Going to a lot of waterparks?
Not me, no, that's Jennifer’s thing. She loves it.
I figured you weren’t the type to put on trunks and go tubing on water slides.
No.
So being down in Virginia, what baseball team do you root for?
Well, right now, I’m kind of rooting for the Reds or the Oakland A’s, the Phillies—you know, the small-market teams. Because the Orioles… I let go of my main team. It’s so pathetic and disgusting, you know… [Note: I assume he’s referring to the Orioles’ subpar performance during the 1999 season.]
And you don’t even have Ripken’s streak to root for anymore…
That sucked. Because he had some great years for them, but it's almost like it was a distraction. And now that he’s a mere human, a lot of writers are like, “he's finished,” you know? I mean, he's having a good year despite those injuries, whenever he gets a chance to play.
Have you ever pondered the eerie correlations between careers in rock and careers in baseball?
A little bit…
In both cases, you're considered washed up when you're, like, 40…
Yeah. There's nowhere to go.
By calling the new record Veterans of Disorder, are you recognizing that you're becoming older players in what’s often referred to as a young man's game?
Yeah, right, yeah. But we were old when we were young. Everyone seemed like they were 12 when we were 20. So now, when it's actually true [that we’re older], there's that much more distance. It just seems like it’s always been that way.
There's also the theory that as you get older, you start to feel younger…
Yeah, though only the old say that, right?
How old are you now?
I think I'm 34… that's one thing about music: barring arthritis, or paralysis, it can go on a lot longer.
How's your hearing holding up?
Oh, that's good. I try to take care of that, you know, because of the Pete Townshend thing. I saw Mission of Burma when they did their farewell tour, and it was almost like a PSA for protecting your hearing, because the dude [Roger Miller] wore those airline… you know, the runway guys? He was wearing those super strong earmuff things.
At this point, Royal Trux almost seems to be moving beyond just music and more into, like, a state of mind, because I've been following the Pink Heart Society [fan club] on the web, and you're writing books now…
You know, I worked on that book for a long time, and I just waited to put it out, until… everybody hated us, you know what I mean?
Is that multimedia expansion integral to your longevity?
Yeah, maybe… I mean, when things like the world wide web are on the cover Newsweek, it's got to be something that we have to get involved in, you know, because that's when we pay attention to it. I mean, we were using it and stuff, but when it became the big thing, it was like, “we gotta make a website.”
Veterans is the first record you’ve done after completing your ‘60s/’70s/ ‘80s trilogy with Thank You, Sweet Sixteen, and Accelerator. So I was wondering if there's any sort of conceptual pretense to the new record…
No. Whenever we started thinking conceptually, we just threw that idea out and tried to leave, like, whatever was not interfered with on the tapes and stuff like that. We did it a couple times, like, five times—we’d go in and try different places and just keep doing stuff until it was just natural to the extent that we weren't, like, controlling ourselves.
I noticed you sent it all the way to Abbey Road for mastering…
That was cool, because they sent us the name of everybody that worked there and all the records that they had done. So we were able to, like, pick based on their résumé. That was cool.
So what was on this guy's résumé?
It was, like, Procol Harum and Pink Floyd, and then some more recent stuff, like Oasis and that kind of thing—what they might call “rock.”
Are there any sort of pre-millennial implications to Veterans of Disorder? One theory that people are throwing around a lot is that as we approach 2000, everyone wants to reclaim the past, and a lot of songs on the record have very simple folk melodies and jug-band instrumentation.
Yeah, well, that's just because we didn't overthink it. As I was saying, it was more natural and we didn’t screw with it too much. It's funny, because it ends up being like that. But that's just the way it is. We forced things really hard on the last three records, but this one sort of ended up in the same way, anyways. That's kind of what we're thinking about: fate versus free will. That question had been answered, but then I think it was a teenage delusion, you know? It's kind of bizarre.
You've always been about destroying the labels that people try to put on you with each record. But does the need to constantly reinvent yourself ever start to feel like a routine? Do you feel like there's anything left to subvert?
Oh yeah, that’s the thing—it’s that question of satire: “life is so crazy now that satire is useless! Nothing that satirists can dream of could be anymore insane”—that kind of bullshit. As if life was so straight in 1910 you know?
So do you think the dominance of irony in pop culture is starting to crumble?
Shit, yeah, man. Because that's another thing: When we were in New York, and there were a lot of these bands… it's very strong for the popular sales force, this irony, which we always thought of as, like, ambivalence.
It's like an excuse for not having to try,
Right, because they didn't have to try anyways. And with most of these people, we thought, “oh, wait a minute—they're totally set up. They got all the money in the world.” So it's like, fuck—it’s just this huge cabaret.
Was that one of the main reasons you left New York?
Yeah, really. We ran into the same people everywhere. We tried to play places that were the least popular. There was this place that The Spin Doctors played way back in ‘88, Nightingales, and you’d see scrawled on a cardboard sheet: “Tonight, Spin Doctors.” And everybody we were around,was like, “uggh, fuckin’ losers.” So we tried to play there, but I don’t think we ever played there. We played across the street.
Well, for better, for worse, most of the accolades you've received have come from an urban/hipster/college-radio scene, which tends to be much more cynical and analytical. Whereas there's probably a lot of Stones and Zeppelin fans in the Midwest who would dig what you're doing, but can't get Drag City records at Walmart…
No, man. Or Borders either.
So how do you reconcile that?
Well, see, that's the thing, we try to tour out there, and we try to play, for example, St. Louis—it's a great city. And we’ll go to Iowa City, Fort Wayne, Champaign, Illinois—all these places. It's funny, because then you think, “well, a lot of those are college towns.” But, I mean, there's nothing you can do about that.
Have you eradicated the college-rock crowd from the audience yet?
No, I mean… when I was in college, it was so much more open-minded. I’d go through lots of different things, you know? Like I used to know the words to “Karma Chameleon,” I saw Jonathan Richman, I used to go to shows and just stare… like so not judgmentally. I mean, I think it's cool. It’s just that thing of getting burned out being The Thing. I remember John Trubee—remember that guy? “Blind Man’s Penis.” It was on… fuck, what was that label? He did this thing where he wrote these lyrics that were ridiculous and he sent them to that country-and-western thing, like “your poem set to music.” And then he toured around a little bit and one month, I remember in 1984 or ‘85, he was the coolest thing around and then [pssshhhht], gone. So to me, that’s the problem with the little irony camp and the college-radio camp or hip camp—you get burned out. This is why we change and do all this stuff that gets up their noses. They’ll say you’re good or you suck—either way, they’re saying it.
It seemed like everyone jumped off the bandwagon with Sweet Sixteen, and then hopped right back on with Accelerator.
They did, right? But Sweet Sixteen was a record that got us a lot of new people to listen to us, because it was quality musicianship. So we get a lot of “the singing is terrible, but there’s some definite musicianship”—this is, like, in Musician magazine or weekly newspapers in New Mexico. We opened for Pavement for a while during that record, and that was cool, because it was for people wrapped up in their own small-Beatles world.
But isn’t that the complete encapsulation of the college-rock hipster crowd?
Yeah, but it’s like the far end of it. It’s like the proletariat of the college-rock scene.
It’s funny, because when I interviewed Stephen Malkmus recently, we talked about the same thing—how Pavement would almost rather play to Phish fans than indie-rock fans at this point.
That’s interesting, because Pavement are just a natural band—they don’t worry about “oh, did we evoke enough Lightnin Hopkin’ tonight?” They just go out there and they feel comfortable with their songs, but they have that thing in the audience where people are like, “oh, this is a brilliant song!” We’d walk around in the bathroom and hear people in the urinals discussing the way they performed one of their favourite songs. But they do well: they play, like, three nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco, so you can’t really complain.
At this point, who do you think the ideal Royal Trux fan is? Or have you stopped trying to figure that out?
We have it in mind… it’s two things: It’s what somebody already is and then somebody who’s unformed and what they could potentially be. That’s more of the thing that we think of. When we first started out, it was somebody who was already set, a consumer of some kind. And it kind of worked out, but now we think more in terms of somebody who’s just faced with all this fucking noise and information and how me might make something that, if they happen to find it, it might send them in a different direction. We’re big thrift store shoppers and public-library thieves—that’s the way I love to come about things.
Are there good thrift stores in Virginia?
Oh yeah! And they’re not kitschy places. They’re places where people actually go to get their new school clothes and stuff.
So everything isn’t $200…
No, it’s like a bag of clothes for a quarter. Jennifer was doing this thing for a while where she was just going around and cleaning out the thrift stores here and then going to New York and making a 1,000 per cent profit on it. It was amazing. We have a dump near where we live, you take your garbage there, and every Sunday is the day where you bring your furniture and stuff, and there are people there waiting.
So how long are you touring this record?
A long time now. What we’re going to try to do is just keep going, like we did before. We had this period where we went and it was just basically steps—we opened up for Sonic Youth and then from that we did the Lollapalooza thing. That was really cool because it was like “the rise of a rock band!” And then it ended up with us signing [with Virgin].
Did you bond at all with Mercury Rev at Lollapalooza? [Note: I’m not sure why I asked Neil about this specific band—maybe I was just hoping that two of my favourite avant-rock groups of all time were besties.]
No… it was really weird. Mercury Rev had a poster with those Sherman Williams Duron paints. They made these full-size posters the size of a door—like, a woman scantily clad with her hands up over her face. You just used wallpaper paste to make it your whole door, like life-size. And then we were going to use it as a poster, and we looked around, and they had just used that as a B-side collection cover. And we were really into Robert Creeley, and we were gonna call him and see if we can put one of his poems to music, and then we get this record, and it turns out Mercury Rev had gone to SUNY Buffalo and they knew Robert Creeley and they had already made a fucking record with Robert Creeley! And we had the same booking agent for a while, but I don't think we've ever met.
It’s funny: because they're up in the Catskills now, they had to get out of New York, too.
They didn’t go west, though. You gotta go west first. Portland now would be better.
What does the west-coast education give you?
It’s just great to get away from the east. And then you’re still an outsider, so that’s good—you can see things for what they are. And it’s just nicer.
Do you want to be a perpetual outsider?
Well yeah, but not to force it and be wilfully different. The other thing you’ve got to do is just think a little bit, and you can step completely outside the whole framework. Marx said you couldn’t do that. But now with this, like, meta-reality inside of all reality, now you can really do it. So it's like a whole ‘nother market.
So how does having TV as your only link to the outside world affect your perception?
I wouldn't say that it’s our only link. Touring really is the link. And plus, we live in the outside world. We don't live inside of “the pressure cooker of the Beltway,” you know, blah, blah, blah. So, I mean, TV is more like our link to the inside world, you know, like the fake world. We don't watch a lot of MTV. I watch a lot of sports and C-SPAN. That music shit, I can't watch it anymore,
MTV isn’t even music television anymore.
No, it's great, though. It's much better than what it was 10 years ago—man, it was so fucking bad, Poison and all that. I love the hip-hop shit so much better. I think it's a much better time. I think music's in a great, great state right now. I really like it a lot.
Like, in the commercial sense?
Everything seems to be just in the right place—like, pop stuff is seen purely as pop music. Like, who's that guy, Ricky Martin—like, they don't make amends for him. They don't have classical-music scholars going, “well, he uses a phrasing here that's reminiscent of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto,” like, you know, they used to do that with The Beatles and shit. They’d try to say, “oh, it's pop, but it has substance to it!” Now it's just gloss, it's shit, it's pure. I think that’s a really cool thing.
You ever gonna write a book on how to succeed in the music industry?
Yeah, man. We keep very careful notes... it was just like a step-by-step thing, and it would be like the most fucked up process that you'd have to go through and be like, "oh man, this ain't worth it." Just let the whole thing die.
The irony is, everyone were calling you sellouts for signing to Virgin for Thank You, but you're still here to tell the tale…
That was good. [Signing to Virgin] was one way that we got into people's houses or whatever that would never have heard about us. Even if only, like, a thousand people stuck around, that was cool. So, yeah, I don't give a shit about that [sellout] stuff. It was all about the money, you know.
It's all about the Benjamins.
Yeah, exactly! It's funny, because we didn't make any money from the actual sales of the record. It was all based on us being able to look like some kind of people that the record companies, in their drugged-out delusion, would think, "they're the next Nirvana!"
Sweet Sixteen never even got released in Canada.
I know! We'd go around buy it. We'd go to record stores when we tour, and we'd buy any copies at the trade-in and try to collect as many as possible. Maybe we should just put the whole thing on mp3 and just put it on a site somewhere so it's available for free.
So what did you think of the whole Woodstock [‘99] deal?
Oh right, the new one? The first new Woodstock was like '94, and Neil Young refused to play, and he made these hats which was like a parody of the logo for the first one—a guitar neck with a big buzzard sitting on it. I like Lilith Fair a lot. I think it's cool when shit like that happens, and it actually works. Like, the first Lollapalooza was a big surprise. But I like playing clubs, man. That big-show bullshit is just fucked.
Even in the '60s, you'd see Hendrix or The Who in the 2,000 seat theater, that was as big as it got. Now, you're watching a JumboTron for two and a half hours.
And they say, "We can't help it—crowd control, man." They always say "hit records are made, not born." When we did the Virgin thing, we had this manager who used to manage Jane's Addiction, and we paid him a lot of money because we wanted to learn, and see him work. We had a lot of respect for him in a weird kind of way. And, he said to us, "I want this to seem really organic.” That was the first thing he said. But we weren't like, "we're gonna blow the lid off this shit," you know? We really wanted to get a first-hand feel for it and decide, "is this something we want?" Because otherwise, you're always on the outside thinking "jeez, I wish I could be big."
But even when Jane's Addiction were around, they were still only playing, like 4,000-cap room but now it's 10 years later and classic-rock radio has picked up on them, and they're bigger now than they ever were.
It's like the time that George Harrison and Paul Simon played on Saturday Night Live in like '77—fuckin' stupid. I was like, "this is so weak."
It's funny to see indie-rock turn into classic rock and following the exact same model where you have bands reuniting for greatest-hits tours.
It's like Bad Company. They were on pay-per-view for their first show back, live from Miami... okay, I'm supposed to have another call now, so your time's up, man.
Alright, we'll see you at the El Mo on the 14th of September. If you're in the night before, Cheap Trick are in town.
Oh no, I never liked them. I like Aerosmith. That's my band from that time. And Thin Lizzy—for the record.
ENCORES
Royal Trux didn’t make a lot of music videos in their ‘90s heyday, but they did inadvertently produce one of the greatest YouTube clips of all time. Here is nine minutes of them trying to do station IDs for various alternative-music video programs, transforming the major-label promotional grind into performance art:
After Royal Trux’s aborted comeback in 2019, Neil Hagerty fell on some seriously hard times in 2023, but fortunately, earlier this year, his ordeal came to a happy conclusion.
Like last week’s newsletter subjects, Ween, Royal Trux are one of those bands for which there is no universally agreed-upon entry point, as their albums are all so different from one another, and going in blind can lead to some distorted first impressions. So let this playlist ease you into their universe, by gradually guiding you on a journey from their most accessible music to their most inscrutable. (Spotify version is below; here’s the link to the Apple Music version.)
But if you’d rather dive straight into the deep end, here’s some good news: Fire Records recently reissued their 1990 messterpiece, Twin Infinitives, on vinyl.
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please pay a visit to my PWYC tip jar!