RUN ITS COURSE
A decade later, Course of Empire utters its last words
By Robert Wilonsky
It's not how they planned it, bidding farewell in the margin of an
advertisement. But there it was last week, buried in the Trees
ad found on page 97 in the Dallas Observer. On July 18,
reads the ad, Course of Empire will play its "last show ever."
The announcement is not in bold type, not blown up to
broadcast the end in grand fashion. The phrase "last show
ever" is in fact hidden in the fine print, the words in parentheses
next to the band's name, almost like a whisper on the printed
page.
"Does it really say that?" asks Course drummer Michael
Jerome, when told of the ad's content. He laughs in disbelief.
"He didn't want it to say that."
He in this case is Course of Empire frontman Vaughn
Stevenson, who has decided to end the band he co-founded a
decade ago with guitarist Mike Graff, bassist Paul Semrad, and
drummers Chad Lovell and Anthony Headley (he was later
replaced by Jerome). Stevenson, who had planned to circulate
fliers the week of the final show, says the end, which comes
almost exactly 10 years after the band made its local debut on
July 4, 1988, was just inevitable after all this time. He is,
plain and simple, too exhausted and disappointed after a
decade of selling records by the handful to carry on.
"You know how hard it is to have a relationship with a girl for
10 years?" Stevenson says. "Try having it with four guys." He
laughs, insisting he's neither thrilled nor disappointed in the
breakup, simply resigned to it. "But we're all right. I am sort of
the one who brought it to a head, but everyone I think feels
similarly."
Indeed, only Jerome is disheartened by the decision, he
refers to it as "disappointing," but Stevenson says that's just
because Jerome hasn't been in the band since the beginning.
"He's not as beaten down as the rest of us," the lead singer
jokes. "He's younger than us and tends to look at things on the
positive side."
Stevenson's decision to end the band comes after six months of
nothing but disappointment and bad luck. The year began with
the release of the long-delayed Telepathic Last Words, which
hit with all the impact of a melted snowball: Save for some
airplay on KTXQ-FM (102.1), the single "The Information"
failed to get played on local radio; KDGE-FM (94.5) and
KEGL-FM (97.1) virtually ignored the song altogether, so
much for that local radio playing local rock fad. Then came an
aborted tour with the band Two, fronted by former Judas
Priest singer Rob Halford. The tour, which began in the spring
and was supposed to last more than a month, didn't make it
past the third week; Two's label, the Trent Reznor-run
Nothing, wanted the band to play in Europe and stop wasting
its time and money playing the States.
When the tour ended a month ago, Course returned to
Dallas with the vague feeling that the end was near, says
their New York City-based manager Jerry Jaffe. Jerome says
he took two weeks off to go on vacation and returned to
discover that Stevenson was ready to call it quits. "When I left,
I hoped things would change, and then I found they got more
solid on where they stand," says the drummer, who now plans
on going back to school and disappearing for a while. "So you
move on."
Jerome, Jaffe, and execs at TVT Records (the band's home
since February 1997) wanted Stevenson to wait it out a little
longer. They had hoped he would give "Kaptain Kontrol," the
second (and most radio-friendly) single from Telepathic Last
Words, time to make a dent on radio. But Stevenson's a smart
man: He knows radio doesn't give you a second shot these
days. Either a record breaks, or a band breaks up.
"In my mind, this was sort of the last record anyway, but I was
willing to try to give it a full shot if that's what everyone wanted
to do," Stevenson says. "Although I've changed my mind in the
past, I was convinced this was it."
The end of Course of Empire "was always a possibility," says
Jaffe, who has managed the band since 1994. "It's always a
possibility when you realize your record is not going to go gold.
There's a certain inevitability about it if you don't reach a
certain success level. It's not like one day someone from the
band calls and says, 'Guess what, we're breaking up.' It
would be a shock if we were selling three million records and
Vaughn called and said that. Then I'd be like, 'Oh, no! I'm
having a heart attack.' But it's not a surprise."
And so Course of Empire becomes one more local band that
disappears into the ether like so much smoke and empty
promise. They add their names to the growing list of
Dallas-based bands who sign to major labels and then wind up
writing their names in the history books in invisible ink, see:
Jackopierce, the New Bohemians, Tablet, the Buck Pets,
Vibrolux, Funland, and so many more. Some were good, some
were bad, but all were once hailed as the next big something or
other once upon a time. They sold their souls for living-wage
advances to Mercury or Island or Arista or A&M, and we
applauded their signing on the bottom line, so desperate were
we to get a band on the charts and help this city's so-called
music scene get over its inferiority complex. Now, all these acts
stand as proof that getting signed is indeed the worst thing that
can happen to a musician; any band that hasn't figured out by
now that it's better off recording and pressing and selling its
own CDs is dumber than it looks.
Yet news of Course's demise doesn't come as any great
surprise. Indeed, there are probably plenty of people who
thought the band broke up some time ago: Three albums in 10
years don't do much to build a fan base. The delay between the
second album (1994's Initiation) and the third (Telepathic
Last Words), caused when their label, the major-minor Zoo
Records, folded, proved a chasm too enormous to cross. In
the end, Course was done in by dumb luck and bad timing.
"Why this happened is going to be one of the great mysteries to
me," says Q102 music director Redbeard. "[Telepathic Last
Words] is one of my favorite albums of the 1990s, and not
just local albums either. I'll be listening to this album into the
next millennium easily, and there were four radio-ready singles
on this album...I wish I could give you a succinct analysis of
why this happened, but I think the truth is kind of murky. It's a
shame."
It seems forever and yet not long ago that Course was one of
the biggest bands in town, a sellout every weeknight and
weekend; theirs was (or is, they have one more show, after
all) arena-rock made for the clubs, a post-punk-pre-industrial
pastiche that was at once danceable and overwhelming. Live,
the band was so in-your face, it was behind you. At their best,
say, on the single "Infested!" off 1994's Initiation, or in
concert, they proved a band could make metal-machine
rock and roll without losing the human touch; at their worst,
say, on their 1990 self-titled debut, they were self-serious
and pretentious, preachers with guitars.
When Course began in 1988, they were greeted with the
warmest of hometown hugs: Almost from the get-go, they were
press darlings and a booking agent's best friend. In these very
pages in January 1990, former music editor Clay McNear
wrote that this local "U2 with a Bauhaus hangover" was an "act
to watch"; a month later, he wrote of the buzz surrounding
Course, which was then caught in a weird sort of bidding war,
between local labels, no less. Fighting over the band were
Allan Restrepo's Carpe Diem Records, which to that point had
released only Rhett Miller's Mythologies, and David Dennard
and Patrick Keel's Dragon Street Records, which would go on
to release the debut records from Tripping Daisy and Hagfish,
among others. Restrepo won out, insisting at the time that he
would "make a big push on" Course of Empire and transform
them from a local phenom into a national act.
For a while there, Restrepo's plan looked real: In the fall of
1990, Carpe Diem released Course of Empire and sold
"somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 copies," Restrepo says
now. "It happened real quick and dropped off real quick." But
after shopping the band to various major labels, Restrepo
hooked up with Kim Buie, who was working in the A&R
department at Island Records. (It was Buie, now a
vice-president of A&R at Capitol Records, who came to town
and put together The Sounds of Deep Ellum collection in
1987 that featured the likes of the New Bohemians, Three on a
Hill, and Reverend Horton Heat.) But Island Records was in
the process of being bought by PolyGram and was in a state of
turmoil; Buie passed along the band to Anna Loynes at Zoo
Records, who eventually signed Course to the label. "We got
Zoo's attention," Restrepo says, "but I wish we hadn't."
In 1992, Zoo Records (then home to Matthew Sweet and
myriad artists no one has heard of or heard from since)
re-released the Carpe Diem debut with a few insignificant
modifications; none but the hardcore noticed the difference.
The national release got the band a little extra press here and
there, but from the get-go, no one really seemed to know what
to make of Course of Empire: Were they industrial or Goth or,
for that matter, new-age metal? And more to the point, was
this band, with its vegan sloganeering and into-the-mystic
lyrics ("I flew to the summit in the mountains of the spoken"),
for real?
"We're the aftermath of industrial," Stevenson told the El Paso
Herald-Post in 1992 (getting press in such minor markets as El
Paso might have been one of the reasons the record didn't sell
too well). "We're a post-industrial, anti-rock and roll band."
(Or it could have been statements like that.) In the end, Zoo's
rerelease of Course of Empire didn't do as well as the band or
label had hoped: "I was looking at Zoo's reports," says
Restrepo, "and they didn't sell much more than I did."
But there was no way Zoo could have been expected to sell a
record like Course of Empire: It was too scattered, too
schizophrenic, and often too silly. It was the antithesis of their
live show, which was enormous even in the smallest setting.
"The record turned off a lot people who liked the live show,"
Restrepo says. "The band got slammed for being pretentious,
but I think some of their best songs are on that record, like
'Coming of the Century.'" (The band probably agrees:
Telepathic Last Words features a remake of "Coming of
the Century.")
Tellingly, the band would distance itself from the debut
when it came time to release the stripped-down, unhewn
Initiation in 1994. During an interview with the Observer in
January of that year, band members seemed to apologize for
the first record's excesses. They weren't ashamed of their
ambition, but embarrassed it had failed to make the transition
from stage to studio.
"After it got done and we listened to the first record, it was
like, 'Well, maybe we shouldn't have tried that,'" Mike Graff
said at the time. "We should have just played music instead."
Which is what they did on Initiation, and the record was
significantly better than its predecessor, louder, faster,
funnier. It didn't need to prove how smart it was, only how
rock it was, and for a while, "Infested!" found its way onto
MTV and the playlists of not a few modern-rock stations
across the country, in San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver,
Atlanta, and a few other major markets. But it never became
much of a hit in Dallas, Jaffe says, garnering only a little airplay
on the Edge and Q102, and then, it was often during the
late-night shift. To make matters worse, "Infested!" was, for a
few weeks in 1994, among the top five most-requested songs
added to radio, until it just disappeared.
"'Infested!' was almost a novelty," says Redbeard. "It wasn't
representative of the band, but for some reason, people made
'Infested!' a minor hit in the world of industrial dance-rock
music, and this is a perfect case of how a tag can be stapled to
your behind and how it's damned hard to get rid of it.
Sometimes a hit, if it's a novelty, can be a bane and not a
boon."
The song "collapsed," says Jaffe, who blames the band's
inability to score a hit single on the fact that Zoo Records never
offered any big push behind Initiation. In fact, Course had
nothing but bad luck at the label, he says. "At the height of
'Infested!,' the head of promotion at Zoo had a heart attack
and went from Los Angeles to Atlanta," Jaffe explains. "The girl
who was the head of alternative promotion at Zoo moved to
Radioactive Records, and there was never any replacement
made. They had a small field staff at Zoo, and when you cut off
the head of a midget, you have two stumps, not two legs."
But that didn't stop Course from building a studio near
downtown Dallas and beginning work on its third album for
Zoo. The only problem was, come 1997, there wasn't a Zoo
Records to deal with, the label folded its Los Angeles offices
at the beginning of the year and died a quick, ugly death. Jaffe
knew it was coming and, in the fall of 1996, set up a couple of
showcase gigs, trying to sell the group to a new label. He says
that he wrangled at least nine A&R reps from various majors
for a show at Trees, but that it wasn't one of Course's best
outings, "the kids loved it," he explains, "but they weren't in
fighting trim," and he had no takers. A show at Rick's in
Denton the following week convinced TVT's Tom Sarig to sign
Course, and in February 1997, it was a done deal.
A year later, Telepathic Last Words was released, and
then...nothing. All the momentum (a word industry insiders so
love to bandy about, as though it means anything) from
"Infested!" disappeared after four years; Course of Empire
might as well have been a new band even as far as local radio
was concerned. Jaffe says it was a "fucking crime" that Course
couldn't get played on local radio. More likely, Course's time
had come and gone at corporate-controlled,
lowest-common-denominator radio.
Redbeard says that at the beginning of the year, TVT brought
radio programmers from all over Texas to Dallas to hear
Telepathic Last Words and see the band perform. He recalls
that during a dinner, music directors from such cities as El
Paso, San Antonio, Austin, and Lubbock were complaining
that they couldn't play Course because the band was too
industrial.
"And I said, 'Have you seen them in the last year or heard the
album?' and of course it was like, no," Redbeard recalls.
"There was this preconceived notion of what Course of Empire
was before people got to the music, and in my experience,
preconceived notions are hard to dispel."
And so the band disappears for good on July 18. Jaffe and
Jerome both hope some "miracle" happens and "Captain
Control" becomes the hit single this band has always craved,
forcing them to hit the road again and support Telepathic Last
Words, which TVT publicist Carleen Donovan says has sold
19,400 copies since its January release.
But Stevenson says that even if the single breaks at radio,
don't hold your breath, this is the end of Course of Empire.
"I thought they would be a platinum-plus band," Jaffe says, the
unhappiness creeping into his voice. "I think they have more
talent than 99 percent of the other bands out there. They were
writing smart songs in a genre not known for that...I thought
they could cross over to a far more mainstream audience and
had a really good live show. It was interesting, it was different,
they were musical, and they were entertaining. What more did
they need?"
Apparently, they needed label and radio support they never
received. Apparently, they needed a fan base that existed
outside of Deep Ellum. Apparently, they needed more than just
a great live show and two good albums. They needed
everything they never had.
"I'm proud of the records we've made," Stevenson says.
"We've made mistakes like everyone else, and it took us longer
to get stuff out than I would have liked. I'm proud of the music.
But I'm frustrated we didn't have a little more success so we
could continue to do it without the day-to-day of the financial
problems of it. I am sure everybody wants to have done better,
but I'm not disappointed. Not at all."
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