Jennifer Herrema

Jennifer Herrema: at a Weird War show in the fall of 2003. She crawled on stage in the middle of a song called "If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Bite ‘Em," and began rapping the refrain in a hoarse, smoke-cured rasp that made the beer bottles dance on the counter. She had a crazy tan and overgrown peroxide bangs from behind which peered the cutting amber eyes of a shewolf. Her eyebrows were bleached albino blond and her eyelashes weighed down by thick white goo. ("Liquid paper," a friend guessed with a shudder; I later discovered she uses Chanel lash conditioner).

The overall effect was unnerving. She looked fierce, alien, and terminally sexy. Those in the know have long been acquainted with Herrema and are mindful of the role she played in the ‘90s indie music underground. At the tail end of the ‘80s she formed the coed punk blues duo Royal Trux with guitarist Neil Hagerty, and in the process created the blueprint for current buzz acts the White Stripes, the Kills and the Raveonettes. As far as boy-girl rock & roll conspiracies go, Herrema and Hagerty were the real deal: a damaged Bonnie and Clyde pair with a truly dangerous vibe. They’d met in D.C. when Herrema was barely 16, and moved to New York together. They developed an intense artistic partnership, discovered junk, and wrote harrowing songs that drew as much from punk, rock and blues as jazz and primal scream therapy.

Herrema’s androgynous style pretty much set the cannon for the heroin chic aesthetic that ruled the NYC fashion scene at the time; she was cast alongside Kate Moss in CK One perfume ads and starred in fashion pictorials. Virgin Records was wowed enough to extend Herrema and Hagerty a three-album deal, but lore has it that the corporate wigs grew so horrified at the music the band kept turning in that they paid them a third of a million dollars to nullify their contract. Royal Trux slipped back below the radar and trucked on until 2000. Then, while on tour, Herrema found out that her father had terminal cancer. She moved to West Virginia to nurse him and stayed by his side for the following four years.

Drugs reentered the picture; the band fractured permanently. It was only last fall that she emerged from the ordeal with a new record, a new band, and a renewed lust for life. She now lives in Huntington Beach, where she bought a house minutes away from the ocean and took up surfing. Since September she’s been touring and performing under the moniker RTX—a collapsed spelling of Royal Trux. ("I took the letters RTX and gave Neil OYALU," Herrema says.) The band includes two young musicians, Jaimo Welch and Nadav Eisenman, who have been helping her engineer her comeback.

The fruit of their musical partnership came out last year on indie imprint Drag City: it’s titled Transmaniacon (after a Japanese comic and a Blue Öyster Cult song) and bears the dedication "in loving memory of my dad." It’s a classic rock record as warped and dark and tantalizing as only Herrema could muster. Her low, nasally growl is uniquely suited for the pagan stomp of tracks like "Low Ass Mountain Song" and "Heavy Gator." Live, she remains a total sensation. The way she stalks the stage in her shit-kicker snakeskin boots, a cigarette burning close to her lip at all times, is pure outlaw rock & roll bravura. She could well bottle it and sell it, for there would be many takers.

I recently met with Herrema for an interview at a little Mexican joint down the street from her house. It was a lovely, warm winter day and entire families were sunning themselves on the beach. Parking my car, I spotted her graceful elongated silhouette slinking against the azure sky.
Up close she’s six feet tall and every inch as striking as you’d expect. She’s 35 now, which means that there are tiny spidery lines under her eyes, but she otherwise has the allure of a slender adolescent punk: long fingers, long legs in skinny beat-up jeans, lean torso wrapped in a fur-trimmed hoodie. Animal fangs worn on a string around her neck, animal pelts, silver, denim, turquoise: the getup of a Western outlaw.

Though she continues to model—she recently shot a print campaign for L.A. jeans couturier Henry Duarte—I personally would love to see her act in a mad, operatic Werner Herzog movie, preferably opposite a young Klaus Kinski.

"I’m sorry if I’m being a little incoherent," she apologized at the top of our talk. She explained that she’d had spent the previous night in San Diego, working on a photo shoot for Britain’s I.D. magazine, and pointed to her bottle of Dos Equis: "I woke up with a monster hangover and this is my hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you remedy." Over Mexican beer and fish tacos, we spent a couple of hours talking about her latest album, Royal Trux’s legacy, the origins of her inimitable sense of style, and her views on marriage, feminism, rock & roll and sex appeal.