By Ryan J. Nim
DFW Legacy Series is a label whose mission is to make vinyl releases available for some of the bands active in the North Texas scenes from the 1990s to the 2000s. Course of Empire (CoE) was an influential post-punk band from Dallas that was active from 1988 to 1998. In addition to the standard rock music lineup of vocals, guitar, and bass, the five-piece notably had two drummers–Chad Lovell and Michael Jerome–playing one kit, after The Kodo Drummers of Japan.
DFW Legacy Series, which reissued CoE’s sophomore album Initiation in 2023, reissued the band’s third and final album from 1998, Telepathic Last Words (TVT Records) this month–within just a day of Chad Lovell’s passing after receiving care for a traumatic brain injury since 2019.
In a conversation with guitarist Mike Graff, he described the moment he received the vinyl records: “I woke up to the immense satisfaction of unboxing the two copies of Telepathic Last Words with my son Alex. The care and detail that GI Sanders and Jared McDowell with the DFW Legacy Series took in recreating the artwork and designing the package was just so perfectly conceived and crafted. I was in a moment of pure joy holding it in my hands.”
Graff received a call from Lovell’s mother Yvonne letting him know that Chad had passed away in the night. “It was so perfectly time-aligned that it felt like his spirit was aware that his work had been completed. And having been received by his friends, he left us. None of the band’s recordings existed on vinyl until Chad’s fall gave me a reason to try to create something to honor Chad’s time with the band as a fundraiser. That was Fields Of Discipline….Since then, the band’s three other proper studio albums have been released, completing our studio discography of works that involved him. And he left us within a day of it all being completed.”
Although Telepathic Last Words was finished in 1996, CoE’s label Zoo Entertainment dissolved and the band had to find a new record company, delaying the release for almost two additional years. During that time, they remixed some of the songs and recorded new tracks that were engineered and mixed by drummer Chad Lovell on the other side of the recording booth. Graff shared that, while Lovell played the drums for “Blue Moon”, Jerome played most of the drums on the album because Lovell was interested in moving into a production and engineering role and “was sitting next to [producer] John Fryer most of the time.”
Since the band dissolved after the album’s release in 1998, Graff and Jerome have been involved with ambient instrumental band Halls of the Machine. Jerome has also been the drummer for New Orleans band Better than Ezra since 2009. Bassist Paul Semrad works as General Manager, Marketing & PR for the Undermain Theatre in Deep Ellum. As far as Stevenson, Graff said that “Vaughan’s activities remain a mystery, although he did surprise us by appearing unannounced at a fundraising event [for Chad] that Michael Jerome and I hosted at Club Dada several years ago.”
In a conversation with GI Sanders, one of the principals behind DFW Legacy Series, he described how it all came together. “The entire idea…just fell into our laps. Myself and a few friends were discussing the absence of so many of our favorite local albums on vinyl, because they were released at a time when records simply weren’t being manufactured–the 90’s and early 2000’s–known as the ‘dark days of vinyl’–because most pressing plants shuttered and records stores shifted total focus to CDs.”
He went on to describe DFW Legacy Series works with artists: “We’ve worked directly with the artist on nearly all of our releases. This was certainly the case with Telepathic Last Words [and] Initiation. CoE band members Mike Graff and Michael Jerome were involved in every step along the way, from collaborating on artwork to approving test pressings. It’s one of the best parts of this entire project, getting to connect with so many great artists that we now call friends.”
During our conversation, GI Sanders shared what made the latest DFW Legacy Series release of Telepathic Last Words so special : “With each of these albums it feels like a dream. Months, sometimes years, of conversations and work go into each one. And [then] you’re holding it in your hands and it’s hard to believe it is real. Telepathic Last Words [is] a pinnacle album for the DFW scene and has aged so well. We did everything we could to make this release feel special….It’s an amazing package we could not be more proud of, and a fitting tribute to Chad as it lands on peoples’ turntables at the same time [that] he moved on to the next part of his journey.”
While more gothic than many of their DFW contemporaries, and less explicitly industrial than bands like Machines of Loving Grace or Nine Inch Nails, fans of these bands will probably enjoy what Course of Empire has to offer. Check out Beat Happenings every Friday at 6 p.m. on KOOP 91.7 FM if you’re in the Austin area or on KOOP.org anywhere in the world.