Tripping Daisy

About Tripping Daisy

Tripping Daisy came out of Dallas in 1990, which already made them outliers in the alt-rock landscape. While Seattle was getting all the attention, this quartet was cooking up something weirder—a day-glo collision of psychedelia, power pop, and noise rock that felt like someone spiked your Beatles records with drain cleaner.

Tim DeLaughter formed the band with Wes Berggren on guitar, Mark Pirro on bass, and Bryan Wakeland on drums. They signed to Island Records after building a solid local following, releasing their debut "Bill" in 1992. It was promising but scattered, the sound of a band still figuring out how to bottle their live chaos. Their second album, "I Am an Elastic Firecracker" in 1995, showed more focus. The production was deliberately messy in that mid-90s way, all distortion and buried melodies, but songs like "I Got a Girl" proved they could write hooks that stuck.

Then came "Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb" in 1998, and suddenly Tripping Daisy made sense. The production was cleaner, the ambition was bigger, and they'd figured out how to make their psychedelic tendencies serve the songs rather than obscure them. "I Get High" became an alternative radio staple, one of those late-90s hits that lived comfortably next to both Britpop and post-grunge without really sounding like either. MTV picked it up. The album went somewhere. For a minute, a genuinely strange band from Texas was breaking through.

They were working on a follow-up when guitarist Wes Berggren died of a drug overdose in October 1999. He was 28. The band tried to continue briefly but disbanded by early 2000. It was an abrupt end right when they'd figured things out.

DeLaughter moved on to form The Polyphonic Spree, which took Tripping Daisy's utopian psych-pop impulses and amplified them through a 20-person choir-and-orchestra situation. Pirro and Wakeland eventually formed MURS with DeLaughter, then Wakeland joined The Polyphonic Spree as well. The Tripping Daisy sound—that particular blend of sunshine and distortion—kind of scattered into these different projects, each taking a piece of what the band had been.

They've reunited a few times since, first in 2007 for some one-off shows, then more substantially in the 2010s with a rotating cast filling in for Berggren. In 2020 they put out a box set collecting everything, the kind of archival project that happens when enough time has passed that people can properly assess what a band actually meant.

Tripping Daisy never became huge, but they were genuinely weird at a time when alternative rock was big enough to let genuinely weird things slip through occasionally. They made pop music for people whose brains were slightly melted, and "Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb" remains a solid case study in how strange you could get on a major label in the late 90s.

Their shows lean into controlled chaos. Mallman's vocals command attention, the band locks into hypnotic rhythms, and there's a genuine sense they're slightly unmoored in the best way. Crowds lean in rather than losing it—this isn't a thrash venue. People actually listen.

Known for I Got a Girl, Piranha, Nightmare Hippy Girl, Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb, Untitled

See Tripping Daisy Live