Check out part two of a short film by Steve Pedulla on the recent reunion by Texas Is The Reason for the upcoming 25th Year Anniversary of Revelation Records. The band last reformed in 2006 to mark the 10 year anniversary of their landmark album "Do You Know Who You Are?".
Norm Arenas (guitar), guitarist for the hardcore Hare Krishna band Shelter, formed Texas Is the Reason with friend and then fellow Hare Krishna devotee Chris Daly (drums), formerly of the band 108, which played music of a similar kind to Shelter's, some time in the early 1990s in New York City. They both desired to leave the macho attitude and religious preaching of their former projects. With former Fountainhead bassist Scott Winegard (bass), the three recruited one-time bassist for Buffalo's Copper, Garrett Klahn (guitar/vocals), to round out the quartet.
The name "Texas Is the Reason" is lifted from a Misfits song, entitled "Bullet". It also makes reference to a conspiracy theory about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in which the president was killed in a plot arranged by Texas Democrats in order to give Lyndon B. Johnson control of the White House. Releasing three songs on an EP, Texas Is the Reason became an underground smash and helped usher in an era of similarly motivated and styled emo bands. They then released a split single with The Promise Ring through Jade Tree Records. The following year (1995) they released another split single with Samuel through British record label Simba.
What followed was their first and only full-length album, Do You Know Who You Are?, named after the last statement John Lennon supposedly heard. Produced by Jawbox's J.Robbins and released on Revelation Records, Do You Know Who You Are? brought a lot of major-label courtship to Texas Is the Reason, who were being hailed as the "next big thing" in the growing punk explosion on MTV. Song titles from the album, such as "The Magic Bullet Theory" and "Back and to the Left", continued the allusion to one of the Kennedy assassination theories.
In 1997, on the eve of signing with Capitol Records, the band flew overseas for a European tour. Ongoing intra-band tensions arising from the major label attention reached their apex. The night of the final stop of the tour in Bielefeld, Germany, Daly and Arenas agreed before the show that if the show was "awesome", it would be their last. Arenas later related, "I walked on stage and we opened with 'Antique' and when Garrett started singing, there were eight hundred Germans singing along with us. I looked at Daly and knew that this was over."