Untitled Document Royal Trux: Deep in the Woods by Jay Ruttenberg 1998 —Man, I always knew this Royal Trux fixation would get you killed some day. —Just be careful. —If they get out shovels and start digging a ditch run! And so the warnings go from friends hearing of my impending pilgrimage to the sticks of Virginia to visit the home of Royal Trux front couple Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty. Of course, their worries are ludicrous, arising largely from the short-sighted press that has dogged the band: 'One British guy came here to write an article; saw us sitting around the house kissing the cats, and was still freaked out,' Herrema will later tell me while sitting around the house kissing the cats and freaking me out hardly at all. But 15 hours before the interview I cannot help feeling a pang of apprehension. The Saboteur Mods Download Pc on this page.

I’m spending the night in, of all places, Washington DC’s Watergate complex, where a friend landed a condo sublet (only to be forced into a second job when security fees skyrocketed during the Monica Lewinsky ordeal). My friend asks what the big scaredy-cat fuss is about these Royal Trux people. I tell her how I’d briefly interviewed them years before in a Boston club, how Herrema sat buried in a fur coat and cloud of nicotine, only opening her mouth to quarrel with the goonish Hagerty, who loomed over the table with a cigarette and scowl glued to his lips. Every recent article about the pair, I explain, has mentioned the shotguns they keep inside the very pad I’m about to visit. I show her an old photograph of the Gruesome Twosome, presumably taken during their junkie days. Hagerty’s perpetually glum mug is turned from the camera, his heavy-metal mane draped over the giant '55' printed on his shirt; Herrema sports patched jeans, two enormous skull rings, and a Minnesota Twins t-shirt; her nose and mouth barely protrude from a beautiful mound of blond Bam Bam–style hair that obscures her forehead, eyes, and cheeks, but not her 'fuck-you-too' attitude. It’s part exotic, part trailer trash: either way the grime practically seeps out of the newsprint.

My friend’s still not convinced, so I opt to let the music speak for itself. The Watergate has seen its fair share of sordid activity over the years (Bob Dole sleeps there every night, for chrissake!), yet I still feel perverse putting Royal Trux on the posh apartment’s built-in player. And not just any Royal Trux record, but Twin Infinitives, the duo’s 1990 Beefheartian epic, the one everybody talks about and nobody listens to, the 70-minute, four-cut CD that was fueled by both a unique comprehension of rock and roll’s inner workings and, well, narcotics. I press Play, and the room is enveloped in a blur of chaotic noise, as if the Trux had somehow gathered the dirt from under Keith Richards’ fingernails and molded it into a postmodern mud pie. Guitars belch, Herrema grunts her guts right out of her stomach and onto the acetate, Hagerty moans diabolically even the synthesizer sounds viscous and scrambled.

It’s as if G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord had broken into the apartment and futzed with all the classic rock tapes, inadvertently reassembling them into this brilliant, befuddled muck.

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'Hmmm,' my friend says as I turn down the stereo. 'I’d watch myself if I were you.' Hagerty and Herrema live nearly two hours out of Washington—far enough so they only venture into the city 'about once a year,' associating strictly with one another and with Herrema’s folks, who live an hour away. The area they’ve settled in is rural and picturesque—like a jigsaw puzzle sprung to life. The hills roll, the horses rollick, and Confederate flags flap gently in the breeze. It’s the kind of place where the rich people name their houses and the poor people name their guns, and when I pass locals on the bending roads they wave and nod, regardless of their thoughts on my big Jewish nose.