Nobody hired Toby Element. He arrived—smelling of gin and tonic and gin, dressed like a monkey bellhop in an erotic nightmare, muttering hexes and punching tambourines. He joined The Get Quick not so much as a band member but as a traveling rift in consensus reality.

Brought in mid-Mammothgon to patch the bleeding edges left by Russolo’s tragic flame-out, Trace wasn’t so much a musician as a performance incident report. A “multi-instrumentalist” the way Rasputin was a “priest,” he approached every gig like an exorcism that had gotten far too personal.

On stage, he was a saboteur-savant: crawling on all fours, shrieking into mic stands, lighting setlists, posters and passports on fire, shouting mangled Nietzsche quotes through modulated megaphones. One night he played drums with a loaf of pumpernickel. Another, he tried to "bless the amps with lizard spit." Nobody stopped him. Everyone was too unnerved or bewildered.

Backstage, things were worse. There were the toad rituals, the invisible cigarettes, the philosophical duels with hotel mirrors. Element insisted on sleeping near power outlets, “to charge.” He left gifts: broken clocks, pages from lost books, a snake carved from cheese. After one gig, he handed a promoter a live mouse wrapped in tinfoil and whispered: “This is your conscience now.”

His legacy?
A trail of smoke, smudged backstage contracts, banned residencies, and rum-drenched hospital bills. But also: an untouchable reputation among The Get Quick’s most loyal believers. A proto-punk chaos engine who burned out fast but left a signature shimmer on everything he touched.

Coco once said of him: “Toby wasn’t in the band. The band was in Toby. It was a full-on possession. In the most dangerous way.”

He was deported, of course. Of course he was.

No one ever saw or heard from him again. No trace.