Talkin Tough Singing Tougher

Eleven a.m. seems pretty early in the day to be calling Jennifer Herrema. To imagine the glam-trash queen behind the guttural, scarred voice of Royal Trux and RTX  up-and-about at such an unseemly hour is difficult. But her publicist says that's when Herrema is expecting the call – L.A. time, where she lives – so I give it a shot. No answer. I try again 20 minutes later with the same results. I think maybe she's just blown the interview off, but I leave my number anyway. Thirty minutes later, I get a call.

“Hey, this is Jennifer,” a tired voice says. “Sorry, I forgot all about this and left my phone in the car. I just got up.”

I ask if she wants to reschedule, and she says, “Yeah, would you mind? I gotta go get some cigarettes, can I call you back in about 20 minutes?”

“No problem.”

It seems a little too perfect, exactly the sort of thing you expect from the person who more or less defined  junkie chic in the '90s and possesses a voice that fairly reeks of perpetual late nights and substance abuse. You can never know anyone too well from listening to their records, but spend enough time listening to Herrema's voice and looking at her photographs, and you definitely begin to fashion a persona for the vocalist. In the last 20 years, she's been well-documented as an indie- and major-label rock star, junkie, fashion model and all-around badass, and eventually you begin to suspect she more than lives up to her image – what you hear is what you get.

While still in her teens, Herrema hooked up with Pussy Galore guitarist Neil Hagerty back in the mid '80s and formed Royal Trux, a severe, art-damaged configuration, creating amazing records such as the utterly bizarre, truly singular double album Twin Infinitives — which is either a masterpiece, a mess or both, depending on who you're talking to and how high that person is at the time. The duo eventually took on other members and became a more recognizably “proper” band, releasing a series of records that referenced classic rock and sounded like no one else at the time, even as their work questioned the pleasure-principle inherent in the music they so obviously loved.

Theirs was a tricky balancing act no one else has pulled off so well before or since, and after Trux mutated into a more or less straight-faced, blues-based, hard rock kind of band, the group and Hagerty and Herrema's relationship had both run their course, dissolving in 2001.

Trux left such an impressive legacy, and there was so much ink spilled on the couple (Most famous anecdote: They blew a Matador Records advance on drugs and never delivered an album to the label.), and critics were so fast and loose with words like “deconstruction” (Google “royal trux deconstruction,” for a ridiculously broad sample, as well as a laugh) and “conceptual,” it seemed fair to ask how long, if ever, it would take Herrema to outdistance the shadow cast by her previous band.

“I don't really think about that,” says Herrema after returning from the smokes run, suggesting she's been exhausted of the Trux topic for a long time now.

Hagerty would go on to make solo records and albums under the Howling Hex moniker, as Herrema decamped outside L.A. to form RTX with guitarist Jaimo Welch and drummer Nadav Eisenman.

In 2004 RTX released Transmaniocan, which continued the course set by the last few Trux records, only louder and prouder. Last year saw the coming of Western Xtrminator, whose title was soon changed to RaTX following the threat of legal action from a pest control company that bore a similar name. The record isn't too far afield from RTX's debut, but the addition of Brian McKinley has made it even more of a guitar orgy, reveling in '80s American glam metal as McKinley runs through extended squalling solos throughout the album.

“Yeah, Brian's amazing,” Herrma remarks. “Jaimo came first — he played all the lead guitar and bass and some drums on the first album. Brian had been e-mailing me for awhile — he was a big Trux fan. After a few months, I had Jaimo go meet him, and he liked him, so we brought him out here. He was perfect for the band.”

It's eas