Royal Trux was a band that was always ready for the scold. At the very dawn of the slacker era, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema were content to play the part of heroin addicts who couldn’t be bothered to tune their guitars, but the band’s admirable productivity (ten full-length albums in a little more than a decade) always undercut the prevailing storyline that centered on their own uselessness. Herrema was the literal poster child for Calvin Klein’s heroin chic campaign, and virtually everything the band did seemed designed to alienate, for instance using a picture of an unflushed toilet as the cover art for their sixth album Sweet Sixteen.

If Pavement could be said to define the Matador sound in the early to mid-1990s, Trux did much the same for Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn’s adventurous Drag City label around the same time. (”Heaven Is a Truck” was rumored to be Stephen Malkmus’ salute to Herrema.)

In 1992 Drag City released a VHS cassette called “What Is Royal Trux?” that documented the band’s 1990 tour in support of their second album Twin Infinitives. Aside from the suitably low-key live footage shot in Detroit and New York and Chicago, almost all of the footage consists of Hagerty and Herrema sitting around listlessly in an apartment or backstage—except for the unmistakable whiff of Philip K. Dick when a mysterious dude named “Pops Noman” representing “the Society of Collective Detentions” appears to warn the viewer of the insidious trend of teens using their nervous systems in an unnatural way before donning a “Thrill Shell” helmet designed to shut out the malign influence of “the enemy.” Later on a masked fellow holds up a map showing the “nodes of force” in the United States and starts bellowing about the “neural points A, B, and 42 on the intestinal scale.”

Attempting to follow this, er, “narrative” to its conclusion would be a fool’s errand indeed, but you have to admire the effort, half-assed though it may have been. In its non-musical moments, this video feels like outtakes from the early work of, say, Negativland and Richard Linklater. The rawness of the music and the apparent apathy of the performers will serve as a turn-off to many, but those for a taste for ominous lo-fi will find much to interest them here.
 

 
via Biblioklept