A singer-songwriter, a noisecore trio, and an alt-rock quartet walk into a bar. There they meet a punk-prog-psych outfit about twenty years their elder. Shots are ordered. Equipment is trashed. The stage crew weaves through the chaos, frantically attempting to maintain some modicum of order. This is not the opening sequence from a terrible summer comedy; it was the scene last Thursday night at Red 7.
If you were into offbeat shit during the 90’s and early 2000’s, chances are you’ve heard of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and their live performance in some capacity. They are the stuff of legend. Here is a band that cut their teeth playing live music in the time before YouTube, where hearsay and blurry photos were often the only available record from the night’s revelry. Rumors of flying guitars and the occasional patron knocked unconscious still linger. The half-joking half-tragic nickname …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Lawsuits was coined at some point.
Lacking any personal experience seeing the Trail of Dead live, I walked into the barely-lit room on Red River and 7th with a mixture of anticipation and morbid curiosity. I was excited to see them play Source Tags & Codes in its entirety—an album I cherished as an awkward and angst-ridden teenager. I also hoped to bear witness to the aforementioned chaos, of which I later became an unwilling victim.
The night’s lineup was solid and certainly not lacking in variety. Local songstress and PPINTL favorite Jess Williamson started things off in quiet, intimate fashion—the veritable calm before the storm. Shortly after, electric noisecore trio BLXPLTN took the stage, delivering a barrage of frenetic rock n’ roll punctuated by continuous equipment failures that seemed not to bother them in the slightest. This would become somewhat of a running theme for the night. Next came post-punk quartet Pop Unknown. Theirs was to be the fitting crescendo to the night’s headliner, a task they filled perfectly with soaring choruses and a richly textured wall of sound.
By the time the Trail of Dead was set up and ready to take the stage, the energy in the room had hit a fever pitch along with the swelling crowd. It was a packed house. Bassist Autry Fullbright II and guitarrist/drummer Jamie Miller began to take their places alongside frontman Conrad Keely around 10:45 pm with fellow founding member Jason Reece still missing. It took a few minutes for him to make his way from the back bar to the stage, establishing a no-fucks-given tone that would carry through the rest of their performance.
As advertised, the band opened with “It Was There I Saw You” to a visibly ecstatic and receptive audience. The performance started off relatively mild mannered and by the books. Reece and Miller switched back and forth between drums and guitar, showcasing the band’s penchant for multi-instrumentality. It wasn’t until the band moved into the appropriately named “Days of Being Wild” when things started to take a turn for the chaotic, as the aforementioned technical glitches began to manifest in Keely’s equipment. Rather than exhibiting the typical response, Keely opted to gleefully rip his guitar pedal setup at the root, toss it across the stage like fresh roadkill carcass, and plug his guitar directly into his amp using a broken instrument cable. This launched the stage crew into somewhat of a panic, as they frantically attempted to fix the rig of a man who was clearly having way too much fun tearing it to shreds. They would fix, he would destroy. They would shake their heads and fix again. He would smile. The song wrapped up somehow, and they moved on to the next one.
From there on it was the Trail of Dead of legend; the Trail of Dead that half-smashes, half-plays their way through entire sets without skipping a beat. Not content with an entire album’s worth of material, Reece and company launched into a collection of classics from 2005’s Worlds Apart, including the explosive “Will You Smile Again for Me”. Stage diving had become a mandatory activity by that point, and I experienced what it feels like to have a camera viewfinder forcefully rammed directly into your eye socket with the force of a flying music fan.
Like their layered and often nuanced lyrics, the Trail of Dead’s performance is somewhat of a dichotomy. Seemingly carefree and juvenile on the surface, Reece and Keely’s stage antics carry an undercurrent of something much deeper. The gleeful destruction and disregard of consequence seems heavy with purpose, perhaps a pantomime of a disaffected and disconnected society obsessed with the superficial. Maybe their performance is less an act of entertainment and more a mirroring of the audience itself, a sort of wake up call. “Look around you. Look at this world. It’s a fucked mess. Why are we standing here, still?”
All photos by Carlos Matos; all rights reserved. Click any image to open in slideshow viewer.
