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Royal Trux, "Stevie (For Steven S)"Neil and Jennifer would matter-of-factly elaborate on the menacing mob threat: "You put one of ours in the hospital, we'll put one of yours in the morgue." In their version, it was: "We'll put two of yours in the morgue." (And for better or worse, usually worse, this became my own personal credo.) Royal Trux, in their embodiment and in their music exuded the ultimate take-no-prisoners attitude. Their devoted fans admired them for being both hardcore and aloof. At the same time, there was a vulnerability that came through, as if hurt had been wrapped in the armor of cockiness, muscle cars, and full-tilt boogie. Weren't they, after all, perennial truants who were on the run from the straight world? Forever scaling the wall of a psychic reformatory that could neither contain nor break them? (This may sound like mythologizing or romanticizing, but you get the drift.) In one of their most transcendent tunes, "Turn of the Century," when Neil sings, "You won't have to be some useless kid / The only choices so bleak, twisted all upside down," it sounds as if he's reassuring someone who reminds him a whole lot of who he used to be. And then Neil and Jennifer harmonize, poignantly out of synch as always, "So get me my coat little sister and I'll bring the car around." While it's often a mistake to confuse the singer and the song, for these Veterans of Disorder, the promise of escape, of getting lost and finding oneself, was very likely the story of their once fucked up lives, and plenty of misfits just like them. And it's no big stretch to recognize that that's what drew us to them in the first place. One of the central lines in "Turn of the Century" suggests the kind of belief that optimism alone, and usually one person on their own, can never really sustain. "Feel the wheels moving, we know they'll go on perpetually."When they split, Neil and Jennifer's most ardent fans would have to come to the realization that Royal Trux did not belong to them, that a band—even one that lasts for a dozen or so years—is not much more than a set of circumstances that people agree on until they don't anymore. Possession may be 9/10ths of the law, but that last fraction encompasses an entire universe where human beings are concerned, and humans, especially those onto whom we project ourselves, are essentially unknowable. A band doesn't belong to its fans, just as we have no hold over one another—husbands and wives and lovers. Children aren't the property of their parents, and parents aren't owned by the accidents of birth that filter down from the cosmos. And everyone, as Royal Trux remind us in the song, "(Have You Met) Horror James," gets stamped with an expiration date.Since they called it quits, Neil has performed with the Howling Hex, with whom he's recorded numerous albums over the years, and Jennifer has subsequently had two bands, RTX, and her new outfit, Black Bananas, who just released their debut, Rad Times Xpress IV. Neil and Jennifer are still making music, just not with one another. Now and then I listen to their old records, and they still sound as rocking and gnarly, and as weirdly compelling, as they did the first time around. When the stars favorably misalign, and the atmospheric conditions are just right, 1 + 1 will = 3.Did Royal Trux ruin my life? Hardly.Previously - If You Build It, They Will Come, If You Tear It Down, Will They Go?