Trail of Dead hopes to forge new classic rock

Signing a contract with a major record label often is a daunting proposition. There are many tales about talented acts that, when gifted with exorbitant recording budgets and facing the pressure of coming up with a hit album, have their music compromised.

"Those horror stories about recording a record are true," says Neil Busch, bassist for ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, who will play tonight at Club Laga, Oakland. "Guys in suits and ties playing Caesar, holding a thumb up or down depending on what he does or doesn't like."

But a strange thing happened when the Austin, Texas, group went into a Los Angeles studio to record "Source Tags and Codes," its major-label debut on Interscope Records: They were left completely alone, with nary a word from the studio for weeks.

"At some point near the end of the recording, we became a little worried," Busch says. "No one had been out at all. We were wondering if they had forgotten about us or if we still had their support. Finally, we had to call somebody at the label to send someone out."

The messenger turned out to be a kid who was an assistant to an executive at the label. And the album the group delivered, left to its own devices, turned out to be one of the most uncompromised major-label debuts of the past year.

Trail of Dead's music mixes guitar-oriented rock with flashes of alternative, punk and heavy metal. Its lyrics range from ruminations about the poet Baudelaire to metaphysical concepts.

But Busch says the band has a simple goal.

"I don't know if it sounds corny or not, but I really think we're trying to create a new classic rock," says Busch, whose bandmates are guitarist and singer Conrad Keely, guitarist Kevin Allen and drummer and multi-instrumentalist Jason Reece. "We have all the elements of classic rock bands that were actually bands. ... We're trying to write classic rock songs that people will look back on and say, 'That was classic rock music then,' a sort of cultural artifact of the time we live in."

The band's first brush with fame came when it played the band Mogwai's All Tomorrow Parties festival in England in 2000. Sonic Youth was on the same bill, but all the British press raved about was the group from Austin.

It helped that Sonic Youth decided to play an experimental set that day, eschewing its more popular tunes.

"We had the pole position that day, I guess," Busch says. "All the press wrote about was the cool band from Texas and how disappointed they were in Sonic Youth. To a certain degree, we benefited from their bad press."

While "Source Tags and Codes" has yet to yield any major hits or get the band airplay on MTV, members are certain they are on the right path. Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine, who has worked with everyone from Patti Smith to Eminem, continues to back the band that he personally signed.

But one of the best things that has happened is a turnaround in how the band is treated in its hometown. Until recently, group members were outcasts in Austin, better known for their sometimes Who-like stage behavior (they've been known to trash a set or two) than their music. But the last time they were home, Busch says, there was a marked difference when they went to their rehearsal space.

"People are a lot nicer to us now. ... The guys who work there are a bunch of heavy-metal guys who don't care about anything, have never cared who we are or anything," he says. "But now, when we go in after being on David Letterman, it's 'Hey, what's up. Long time no see, blah blah blah.' I guess things have changed a little."