Rock Royalty: Her Highness Jennifer Herrema

Words: Molly Kincaid
Photos: Brooke Nipar

Jennifer Herrema is taller than I’d expected. Skinny-legged and rough, with her head swaddled in a gargantuan fur hood. She’s androgynous and weird looking. She’s also indisputably and overwhelmingly sexy. Unnervingly sexy. Decades of partying are written on the 36-year-old’s face. Not that she looks old per se, but there’s a hard edge that speaks to experience. The lady has lived, and the history and accompanying visage is a little intimidating. 

Herrema is a model, artist, writer, and music god—she’s known for fronting the old-school and highlyexperimental rock outfit Royal Trux with then-husband guitarist Neil Hagerty. And the dedicated cult following that she culled from those days remain loyal to her new band, dubbed RTX. Despite her hefty scene cred, and even though she looks sorta mean, Herrema is very chill and easy-going. 

On the morning of our interview, however, there is a little drama to contend with. Herrema and her band are running late. Really late. RTX has missed the entire photo shoot that was to be shot at their friends’ place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the very location they were staying (pretty convenient, you’d suppose). But earlier this afternoon, hours after their call time, we received a confounding email from Herrema simply stating, “We are nowhere near where we need to be.”

 t’s not an existential crisis or vanity tantrum. After last night’s rowdy show at Knitting Factory, they woke up and physically don’t know where they are. Hours later, amidst the bedlam of setting up for their next show in the Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn, we caught up with Herrema and crew. “When I started RTX,” Herrema exhales huskily, coolly surveying band members as they set up, “I was looking for untainted people. People who had no history but had skills.” Upon visiting California (from her then home in Virginia), she met Nadav Eisenman, who’d eventually become RTX’s drummer. “He wanted to talk gear and that’s not my thing—tweaking too heavy on the micro stuff,” she says. “I like the cerebral side. We kept talking and he sent me some music. It was the perfect yin to my yang.”
That was about five years ago, shortly after Herrema divorced Hagerty, her longtime other half who she’d met in D.C. at the tender age of 15. They were quickly inseperable and started making music. Royal Trux was the kind of prolific, ballsy band that bona fide music nerds worship. Their early work was hailed as dissonant, lo-fi, experimental, and very challenging. But the evolution of the sound is undeniable. On the 1999 album Veterans of Disorder (on Drag City, the indie label Hagerty and Herrema helped start a decade prior), there’s a nuanced backwoods feel transposed with their usual brashness that hints at a future  richness and complexity that might have been achieved had the two not broken up.

RTX takes musical cues from her former band—both are uncompromising in their vitriolic, hard and loud tunes. And despite the inevitable comparisons or the critics who rue the disbanding of Royal Trux, Herrema herself does not regret the split. “It was a hard decision to make,” she admits. “Royal Trux was doing so well, but I had never really explored being alone. Everything was intertwined, the music and the personal. I’d known him and had been living with him since I was 15. Everything was so enmeshed—we owned property together, we owned a studio together. I loved Neil and Royal Trux was my life. I could have stayed there and been safe, but I felt unsatisfied. I had to tear it all down.”

So while some fans may get nostalgic for Royal Trux’s duet style—think Sonny and Cher on very hard psychotropics—most are overwhelmingly receptive. RTX still turns out raucous tunes that reverberate through you like no commercially adored, contemporary shoe-gazing indie band ever could. Band members Nadav Eisenman on drums, Brian Mckinley on guitar, Jaimo Welch on guitar, and Kurt Midness on bass, bring an anthemic, audacious sound that serves as a springboard to Herrema’s epic vocals.

Despite Herrema’s hardass quotient, she actually talks like a damn hippie. Her mellow California drawl meanders and her words bump into sentences—occasionally without subjects or objects. It’s as if she’s peacefully tripping. “I want people to feel pumped up but relaxed, not aggro, just having fun,” she says of her music’s effect on her audience. “I’m a product of things I’ve taken in. If I like it, it gets buried within me, so my life is just actions and exposure to people and sounds and the times.”

What she’s no longer a product of, despite her dreamy cadence, is the drugs. She, along with her husband, have the requisite drug-addled past of any respectable rockstar duo. Notoriously addicted to heroin at the height of Royal Trux, Herrema’s enigmatically angular face was scouted by Calvin Klein in his heroin chic heyday to appear in his grungy advertising campaign. Shot by Steven Meisel, Herrema was the movement’s poster child. To her credit, Herrema hasn’t touched the hard stuff in years. “I started young, and went through five different rehabs over the course of seven years,” she recalls of her partying past. “When I finally quit, I had been through enough. I’m not around it that much anymore. When I am, it’s really easy to walk away because at this point, I know exactly where it takes me.”With that, she takes a slow swig of Budweiser and makes her way onstage.

Herrema swaggers to the mic for sound check. Puzzling onlookers (various employees and opening bands), she mutely squats low, looking like a ball of fur, and then begins to growl. Even without a warm-up, fresh from several cigarettes, Herrema lets loose and instantly dominates the room. RTX plays some tunes from RaTX, the band’s second album which was released originally as Western Xterminator in 2007. The singer’s screams fill the space up to the high ceilings—the moment is pure gutter- scraped insolence. She looks beautiful.

A few bands and several beers later, it’s time for RTX to perform. They set up and while in position, their frontwoman can be seen fiddling and dawdling backstage. Suspense. Suddenly, Herrema’s onstage and skulking around, still wearing her fur pelts, belting and taking swigs from a giant champagne bottle. They play a few songs from JJ Got RaTX, to be released this July, charging the already-sardine-packed crowd with electricity. Someone in the audience yells “Black Bananas!!!” The band obliges. “I’m the garbage collector,” she howls. “Take my trash and goooo-woah!”

Herrema’s voice isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t need to be. She’s communicating, which isn’t necessarily pleasant. The band rips. She roars. Herrema is irresistably arresting as she crawls around the floor. The set is over before the crowd expects it to be.

Herrema is anything if predictable. While she seems eager to get back to her home in Sunset Beach, California, she also has an unmitigated wanderlust. When they were married, Neil’s fear of flying kept him from a Japanese tour, so she went to greet their following there, alone. Amidst the “hai, hai, hai’s,” she admits that she had a great time. She even went on to Germany without him, where she randomly bought a $1800 cat to keep her company. So it seems that despite the drugs, the undoubted heartache, and the headache of splitting a band and starting a new one, Herrema, wherever the hell she ends up, will probably be fine. Even if she finds herself “nowhere near where she needs to be.”