Royal Trux Play First Show in 14 Years at Berserktown II
Imagine Crass doing an album of Stooges covers with Mick Taylor on guitar. That’s about as close as anyone can get to describing the music of Royal Trux, the druggy Drag City duo formed in 1987 by Pussy Galore’s Neil Hagerty and his then-girlfriend, indie it-girl Jennifer Herrema, that no doubt paved the way for worthy scuzz-rock successors like Sleigh Bells, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and especially the Kills. After a notoriously rules-flouting career that perhaps peaked with them convincing major label Virgin Records to sign them, let them release an album with a photo of a vomit-filled toilet on its cover, and then give them millions of dollars to go away, Herrema and Hagerty split personally and professionally in 2001, moving on to other music, fashion, and art projects. But they reunited Sunday, Aug. 16 for a one-off show at Orange County, California’s noisemongering Berserktown II festival… and things got very berserk indeed, in the best way imaginable.
By all accounts, up until a couple weeks before their reunion gig, exes Herrema and Hagerty still hadn’t even been in the same room together in 13 years, and they had yet to rehearse. So there was a sense of heightened danger and anticipation when the two hit the Observatory stage (which was still vibrating from the previous incendiary set by Portland punk legends Dead Moon), just as the midnight hour approached. Would this be a comeback, or a trainwreck?
Actually, it was a little bit of both. And it was glorious.
Former Calvin Klein “heroin chic” poster girl and future Judd Apatow Netflix star Herrema was still her iconically and unironically badass, confrontational self, basically a female Axl Rose except cooler and much more terrifying. Staggering/swaggering onstage in her snakeskin boots, trailing cigarette and incense smoke and raccoon pelts, her scowling face almost entirely obscured by her wild bedhead tangle of Cousin It hair and a pulled-low baseball cap, her voice was 100 percent pure vocal fry as she growled, slurred, and attempted to play some sort of elementary school recorder/panflute thingy on deconstructed rock ‘n’ roll classics like “Bad Blood” (definitely not the Taylor Swift song), “Let’s Get Lost,” “Junkie Nurse,” and “Morphic Resident.“
The whole show (witnessed by another rock goddess in the audience, Kim Gordon) had the loose and willfully sloppy vibe of a rehearsal, actually, with the stoic Hagerty wailing away on his skronky guitar and a fidgety Herrema alternating between readjusting her mic stand, crouching low to fiddle with effects pedals, lying on the sticky stage floor at Hagerty’s sneakered feet, and shuffling through reams of notes throughout (sometimes balling up the looseleaf papers in her fists). But as the band eased into a sloppy groove, the method behind their madness showed, and they created the sort of fascinating mess not heard since… well, since Royal Trux broke up in 2001.
As of this writing, Royal Trux say they have no plans to play additional shows; but back in 2012, Hagerty had claimed they’d never reunite, declaring the prospect “depressing.” However, regardless of what the future holds for these ‘90s underground pioneers, their Berserktown gig definitely re-established them as noise-rock royalty.
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