The Mars Volta, Kerrang! July 2, 2005
YOU’D NEVER find El Paso’s Smeltertown Cemetery unless you knew where to look. Its several hundred graves are barren and dry, their coffins not surrounded by soft earth but packed down with rubble, rubbish and rocks. A few have crosses jutting from them at crooked angles, crosses made from bits of fence post or old water pipes. The flowers here aren’t fresh but plastic – anything else would wither under the unbearable sun and heat, not that it looks like anyone has tended to these hostile resting places for a long time.
Standing over one of the graves are Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of The Mars Volta. They look lost in thought, as if remembering old times, feeling powerful emotions. This is where they would come as teenagers and, by day, they’d drink beer and steal crosses; by night they’d do acid, heroin and anything else they could get their hands on. “Some places they have gang-bangers, we were the coffin bangers – that’s what we called ourselves,” says Cedric. “I took a cross home once because it had this really cool skull on it. I hid it in my cupboard and when my dad found it, he went crazy. I guess he probably had a point…”
Their only view when they were coffin banging was an ominous one – one that would give them the creeps when they were stood here. Bixler-Zavala points out the tall crosses looming out from the top of the spiky peaks of the mountains along the Rio Grande – the natural border between El Paso and Mexico. A little further along the river, painted in 20 foot high letters onto the mountainside, there’s a huge slogan: “La Biblia es la verdad. Leela.” – “The Bible is the truth. Read it”. “That’s quite a heavy thing to have watching over you,” he says.
Overhead, trains roll past on juddering iron bridges and nearby criss-crossing rail-lines, whistles humming mournfully, bells clattering spookily behind. On the ground, all that lives here now are the ants. Everywhere the ground seems to vibrate to their hum as they rush from grave to grave, digging down among the skeletons below. The expression ghost-town loses its metaphorical meaning here. It’s literal in this place.
“Night-time here was like nowhere else on earth,” says Bixler-Zavala. “There was the faint whisper of the highway, the occasional train and the rest was silence. Doing acid up here made things very strange… not always in a good way.”
In fact much of their childhood here and in nearby El Paso was a little strange. As Bixler-Zavala says, not always in a good way.
THE MARS Volta haven’t been back to El Paso very often since the break up of their former band At The Drive-In. It’s not hard to see why. Flying into the city is an eye-opening experience. Desert stretches for miles around, a seemingly endless vista of dust, tumbleweed and nothingness. The town emerges out of this wilderness, seemingly clinging to a landscape that barely tolerates it.
On the ground, it’s faceless. The roads are long, empty and only inhabited by drive-thrus, car dealerships and churches with neon billboards offering wisdom such as, “Collect your get-out-of-hell-free card here”. The centre of town is a Mecca of thrift stores that sell clothes by weight, rather than individually pricing each garment. If you want a pack of cigarettes after six pm, you may as well forget it unless you’re willing to brave the illegal basement bars hiding beneath the closed up town.
Bixler-Zavala says he’s got mixed feelings about being back here. “It’s a very lonely place,” he says. “The desert just goes on for miles and miles. It’s a hard place to come back to. Every time I’ve been back recently it’s been for deaths and funerals. Also, you don’t have to look very far to find people that hate us.”
The reason they are back though is to play their first ever headline gig. Since the break-up of At The Drive-In, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala have challenged the very concepts of what that band was supposed to be about, replacing the scything punk and strict underground ethics of ATD-I with the freeform, neo-prog futurism of The Mars Volta. Their debut, ‘Deloused In The Comatorium’ sold over 500,000 copies – an astonishing feat for such a wilfully uncommercial project.
The follow-up, ‘Frances The Mute’, sold over 100,000 copies within its first week of release, debuting at Number Four on the US Billboard Chart. This, remember, was a sprawling prog/salsa/jazz concept album sung half in Spanish and containing bonkers song titles like ‘Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus’. Radio friendly unit shifters they are not. Yet The Mars Volta <<are>>, against all the odds, an improbably huge band.
And, despite Bixler-Zavala’s misgivings about being back here, the town is buzzing at their arrival. Waiters in restaurants talk excitedly to out-of-towners about the gig, porters in hotels – straight looking in ties, pressed shirts and razor-creased trousers – approach Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala nervously, telling them how excited they are about the show. It’s a strange thing for the band to deal with.
“These are the people that never took us seriously before,” says Bixler-Zavala. “Now they’re all proud of us. Growing up here and playing music meant people looked at you like the scum of the earth. Now they all respect us – we’re just successful scum of the earth now.”
IT WASN’T just the music that made people wary of the pair when they were skinny teenagers though. Sat in the back of their friend Ralph’s van at the moment – on the side is a sticker saying, ‘Support Our Troops’ and on the dashboard is a bible, “So the police don’t stop us,” according to Ralph – Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala are rehashing old times. At the moment they’re pointing out new skate-parks along the way to an old hangout and Bixler-Zavala, for one, is excited to see them.
“It’s great,” he says. “There were hardly any when I was here, now they’re all over the place.”
“Yeah, but they’re full of dumb kids now,” says Ralph, perhaps forgetting that he, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala were once called that by the older skaters a few years ago.
The van stops near one at the corner of Ochoa and Seventh Street and Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala climb out to look around. They talk to each other, pointing up at a looming block of flats. “That was the look-out post,” says Rodriguez-Lopez.
Look out for what?
“It’s where the gang would look out from,” he says. “This is gang territory – the Ochoa Creeps. They were a punk rock gang we used to run with occasionally. We’d also score drugs from them.”
It’s a tough looking street, a dusty city-scape of cheap housing, broken down fences and mean looking Mexicans.
“They won’t fuck with you now,” says Ralph. “It used to be really rough here but now they’re more scared of me than I am of them.”
Still, it’s hardly on the tourist trail. Bixler-Zavala begins to talk about Mondo, their old drug-dealer. He was at the show the night before, a huge Mexican with a long pony-tail, shaved at the sides, and a glint of murder in his eye.
“He’s a pretty tough guy,” says Bixler-Zavala. “He’s always ready to step in if there’s trouble. He was good to us though. We’d come down here and ask for Mondo and, if he was here, we knew we’d be able to score. The other times we weren’t so lucky. You’d pay your money over this side of the street and then you’d go over the other side to pick up the drugs. Most of the time, there’d be nothing over the other side of the street. We got burned so many times…”
This was the world in which Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala grew up – one of gangs, guns and drugs, of starting trouble, fighting and being the toughest on the block.
“There was a certain element of being in awe of the danger of it,” says Bixler-Zavala. “I thought all that stuff was cool – all the running around with knives and guns, thinking it was cool to sell coke at my high-school, thinking I had everyone’s respect because of it. It was far from cool but I’m not ashamed or embarrassed by it because it helped me change and I wouldn’t be a better person if I hadn’t been a shitty person at some point.”
“I was very destructive at that age,” adds Rodriguez-Lopez. “I had all this anger inside me. What do you do when that happens? You break windows, throw bottles and then, after a while, hopefully you channel that anger elsewhere.”
They say they were tolerated by the gangs at first because they made them laugh. Then, as they became more and more immersed in them, they began to take on their ideals.
“The people I was hanging out with didn’t like gay people and didn’t like black people and it got to a point where I thought, ‘I don’t really agree with this’,” says Bixler-Zavala. “But I was willing to go along with it because I thought they were my friends.”
Both were playing separately in various local punk bands at the time, some lasting a while, some not. Bixler-Zavala says Rodriguez-Lopez’s band was the rowdiest – the one most likely to start riots and hurl flour and eggs at their audience. Punk was where the rest of their energies were ploughed and the pair would live for virtually nothing else. Even at 14 years old, Bixler-Zavala was well known to the touring bands – he’d offer them floors to crash on and then act as a guide, showing the travelling musicians the delights of Juarez, the Mexican town just over the border from El Paso.
“There were all kinds of nasty things going over there,” he says, with a glint in his eye. “There was a guy who had these two live electrical wires; you’d pay him for the privilege of seeing how long you could hold onto both wires before you got electrocuted. It was mad, stupid jock stuff.” Then, warming to his theme he remembers the one thing that would always ensure no band ever forgot Juarez…The Donkey Shows. “There’s not much to explain,” he says. “It was a donkey, a girl and sex. Pretty brutal.”
AT LEAST some of the appeal of the gangs was the same as that of punk rock. “Because punk was all about confrontation,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “It was about doing whatever you wanted, taking risks, not asking questions and just acting on your impulses.”
Yet more appeal came from wanting to be accepted, wanting to feel part of something because, in a town like El Paso, if you’re different then you can get lonely very fast. They couldn’t find people who shared their musical vision – most of the local bands were either churning out watered down Red Hot Chili Peppers rip-offs or were aping the Madchester scene that was being cycled endlessly on MTV. They had no-one to offer them any approval and, stuck on the very edge of America, in a staunchly conservative town, they felt adrift and in need of support.
“It may have been just for my own self-confidence but being in a group of people or a gang helped justify my existence,” says Bixler-Zavala. “When I was younger I felt the need to be part of this violent culture of beating people up and only accepting one kind of person.”
“Most people go through that sort of thing,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “It’s a different colour for everybody – whether it’s joining a gang or being in a fraternity. Everyone gets to a certain point where they feel like their environment defines them. We thought those people around us were defining us. It’s very twisted because we were trying to act like we didn’t need anyone’s approval. We were saying, ‘We don’t care what anyone thinks!’ Inside we were thinking, ‘…Except our rowdy friends who we look up to.’ It’s a crazy paradox.”
EL PASO is also a contradiction. Resting on the border with Mexico ought to give it a cosmopolitan air, one tolerant or embracing of different cultures. However that’s not the case. Rodriguez-Lopez talks with bitterness about the illegal Mexican immigrants who are shot down, beaten up by the border patrols or hit by trains on the railroads running along the border. He also says that the police have been turning a blind eye to the ever increasing abduction of women. “One of the gang’s initiation rituals is for the new member to kidnap a girl, rape her and then bury her in the desert. The police don’t care anymore. They stopped counting in 1996. The number was up to 600 then.” Hauntingly, he says this while stood next to a telegraph pole littered with Missing notices, all of them show hazy photos of Mexican girls who ‘disappeared’ on their way back from work.
It’s a town without identity: faceless, sprawling and empty, forever denying its roots, desperately trying to ignore the clash of Hispanic and American society. Rodriguez-Lopez felt that clash strongly when he was growing up here.
“It’s true that there’s no identity here but there’s an underlying theme of violence here too. If you listen to any of our records you can hear that old violence. The Hispanic culture and the barrenness and the never ending feeling of the desert all blend here.”
As is so often with Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala, when one starts talking about something, the other picks up on it immediately, reinforcing the point.
“El Paso shapes you because it doesn’t have anything to shape you with,” says Bixler-Zavala. “You have to figure yourself out because it’s so barren here. It forces you to work out what you want to do with your time and what your influences are. You end up really relying on yourself. If you dislike living here, it’s because you’re not creative enough to occupy your time with something.”
Rodriguez-Lopez found this tough growing up. He admits his father – Marcelo Rodche – was, and still is, a dominant influence in his life. At Mars Volta’s show, Rodche wanders around easily and talks to everyone, beaming with pride at his son’s achievements. “My dad’s great in a room full of strangers,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “He has the ability to be immediately comfortable with people he’s never met before. It’s not something he passed on to me. I was always in the shadow of my father and I looked up to him immensely as a kid. He always played music, he raised me as vegetarian and taught me yoga so my whole life was dominated by his ideas.”
It meant that Rodriguez-Lopez felt he had to rebel against him in order to find himself, he thought he would find his own personality once he’d proved himself to be his father’s opposite. He set out on a journey of self-discovery across America, hitch-hiking, selling drugs and living with the homeless. Eventually he ended up in Baltimore at breaking point, shooting heroin and desperately wishing he was home. He called Bixler-Zavala – the only person he’d been in touch with while he was away – who was in the process of setting up At The Drive-In and decided to come home.
“I tried to go the other way [than my father’s] to find out what there was,” Rodriguez-Lopez says. “He planted a very strong seed in me and I always wanted to rebel against it as much as I could. The person I’ve become as result of it is very close to what he taught me as a child and I realised that it’s always been there.”
WHILE HE was away Bixler-Zavala felt adrift. Though the pair talked frequently on the phone, he felt like he’d lost an ally.
“That was the loneliest time I ever had here,” he says. “I had to resort to playing music with people I wouldn’t even hang out with normally and that was the basis and formation of At The Drive-In. It was slim-pickings. When he came back, it felt like I had a partner in crime again.”
That band was to put them on the map musically but, despite the allied public front they put up, relationships weren’t harmonious. They still talk bitterly about Jim Ward – “He had all these fucked up, conservative, Republican views on gay people and other things. It was completely off the wall to me,” offers Rodriguez-Lopez – so, retrospectively, it was no surprise that At The Drive-In broke up. Their spectacular rise and, at the time, surprising implosion took many by surprise but it had always been a mill round the neck of Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala. They’d already started working on an early template for The Mars Volta as an opportunity to expound their love of jazz, dub and “music the rest of the band didn’t want to or couldn’t understand,” says Rodriguez-Lopez.
It led to a sense of freedom, one born from removing the tight reins of that band and one that harked back to the days when they would charge round town doing exactly as they pleased.
It’s a freedom that is still readily apparent in the band as they blitz El Paso’s Abraham Chavez Theatre. You might expect a small-town crowd not to understand the oblique creativity and expressive freeform nature of a Mars Volta show, but every moment is cheered – even the flute solo – as the band, for a couple of hours, instil that same sense of freedom in their crowd.
In their music now you can hear their lives, lives that aren’t so filled with anger and rage as they were in At The Drive-In, but now filled with experience. Those that see The Mars Volta as self-indulgent are missing the point. This is music that comes from freedom, from forcing themselves to the edge, over-reaching and seeing where they land, from bravery, hardship and, most of all, from life. It doesn’t get any more punk than that.
© Tom Bryant 2010
Standing over one of the graves are Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of The Mars Volta. They look lost in thought, as if remembering old times, feeling powerful emotions. This is where they would come as teenagers and, by day, they’d drink beer and steal crosses; by night they’d do acid, heroin and anything else they could get their hands on. “Some places they have gang-bangers, we were the coffin bangers – that’s what we called ourselves,” says Cedric. “I took a cross home once because it had this really cool skull on it. I hid it in my cupboard and when my dad found it, he went crazy. I guess he probably had a point…”
Their only view when they were coffin banging was an ominous one – one that would give them the creeps when they were stood here. Bixler-Zavala points out the tall crosses looming out from the top of the spiky peaks of the mountains along the Rio Grande – the natural border between El Paso and Mexico. A little further along the river, painted in 20 foot high letters onto the mountainside, there’s a huge slogan: “La Biblia es la verdad. Leela.” – “The Bible is the truth. Read it”. “That’s quite a heavy thing to have watching over you,” he says.
Overhead, trains roll past on juddering iron bridges and nearby criss-crossing rail-lines, whistles humming mournfully, bells clattering spookily behind. On the ground, all that lives here now are the ants. Everywhere the ground seems to vibrate to their hum as they rush from grave to grave, digging down among the skeletons below. The expression ghost-town loses its metaphorical meaning here. It’s literal in this place.
“Night-time here was like nowhere else on earth,” says Bixler-Zavala. “There was the faint whisper of the highway, the occasional train and the rest was silence. Doing acid up here made things very strange… not always in a good way.”
In fact much of their childhood here and in nearby El Paso was a little strange. As Bixler-Zavala says, not always in a good way.
THE MARS Volta haven’t been back to El Paso very often since the break up of their former band At The Drive-In. It’s not hard to see why. Flying into the city is an eye-opening experience. Desert stretches for miles around, a seemingly endless vista of dust, tumbleweed and nothingness. The town emerges out of this wilderness, seemingly clinging to a landscape that barely tolerates it.
On the ground, it’s faceless. The roads are long, empty and only inhabited by drive-thrus, car dealerships and churches with neon billboards offering wisdom such as, “Collect your get-out-of-hell-free card here”. The centre of town is a Mecca of thrift stores that sell clothes by weight, rather than individually pricing each garment. If you want a pack of cigarettes after six pm, you may as well forget it unless you’re willing to brave the illegal basement bars hiding beneath the closed up town.
Bixler-Zavala says he’s got mixed feelings about being back here. “It’s a very lonely place,” he says. “The desert just goes on for miles and miles. It’s a hard place to come back to. Every time I’ve been back recently it’s been for deaths and funerals. Also, you don’t have to look very far to find people that hate us.”
The reason they are back though is to play their first ever headline gig. Since the break-up of At The Drive-In, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala have challenged the very concepts of what that band was supposed to be about, replacing the scything punk and strict underground ethics of ATD-I with the freeform, neo-prog futurism of The Mars Volta. Their debut, ‘Deloused In The Comatorium’ sold over 500,000 copies – an astonishing feat for such a wilfully uncommercial project.
The follow-up, ‘Frances The Mute’, sold over 100,000 copies within its first week of release, debuting at Number Four on the US Billboard Chart. This, remember, was a sprawling prog/salsa/jazz concept album sung half in Spanish and containing bonkers song titles like ‘Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus’. Radio friendly unit shifters they are not. Yet The Mars Volta <<are>>, against all the odds, an improbably huge band.
And, despite Bixler-Zavala’s misgivings about being back here, the town is buzzing at their arrival. Waiters in restaurants talk excitedly to out-of-towners about the gig, porters in hotels – straight looking in ties, pressed shirts and razor-creased trousers – approach Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala nervously, telling them how excited they are about the show. It’s a strange thing for the band to deal with.
“These are the people that never took us seriously before,” says Bixler-Zavala. “Now they’re all proud of us. Growing up here and playing music meant people looked at you like the scum of the earth. Now they all respect us – we’re just successful scum of the earth now.”
IT WASN’T just the music that made people wary of the pair when they were skinny teenagers though. Sat in the back of their friend Ralph’s van at the moment – on the side is a sticker saying, ‘Support Our Troops’ and on the dashboard is a bible, “So the police don’t stop us,” according to Ralph – Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala are rehashing old times. At the moment they’re pointing out new skate-parks along the way to an old hangout and Bixler-Zavala, for one, is excited to see them.
“It’s great,” he says. “There were hardly any when I was here, now they’re all over the place.”
“Yeah, but they’re full of dumb kids now,” says Ralph, perhaps forgetting that he, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala were once called that by the older skaters a few years ago.
The van stops near one at the corner of Ochoa and Seventh Street and Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala climb out to look around. They talk to each other, pointing up at a looming block of flats. “That was the look-out post,” says Rodriguez-Lopez.
Look out for what?
“It’s where the gang would look out from,” he says. “This is gang territory – the Ochoa Creeps. They were a punk rock gang we used to run with occasionally. We’d also score drugs from them.”
It’s a tough looking street, a dusty city-scape of cheap housing, broken down fences and mean looking Mexicans.
“They won’t fuck with you now,” says Ralph. “It used to be really rough here but now they’re more scared of me than I am of them.”
Still, it’s hardly on the tourist trail. Bixler-Zavala begins to talk about Mondo, their old drug-dealer. He was at the show the night before, a huge Mexican with a long pony-tail, shaved at the sides, and a glint of murder in his eye.
“He’s a pretty tough guy,” says Bixler-Zavala. “He’s always ready to step in if there’s trouble. He was good to us though. We’d come down here and ask for Mondo and, if he was here, we knew we’d be able to score. The other times we weren’t so lucky. You’d pay your money over this side of the street and then you’d go over the other side to pick up the drugs. Most of the time, there’d be nothing over the other side of the street. We got burned so many times…”
This was the world in which Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala grew up – one of gangs, guns and drugs, of starting trouble, fighting and being the toughest on the block.
“There was a certain element of being in awe of the danger of it,” says Bixler-Zavala. “I thought all that stuff was cool – all the running around with knives and guns, thinking it was cool to sell coke at my high-school, thinking I had everyone’s respect because of it. It was far from cool but I’m not ashamed or embarrassed by it because it helped me change and I wouldn’t be a better person if I hadn’t been a shitty person at some point.”
“I was very destructive at that age,” adds Rodriguez-Lopez. “I had all this anger inside me. What do you do when that happens? You break windows, throw bottles and then, after a while, hopefully you channel that anger elsewhere.”
They say they were tolerated by the gangs at first because they made them laugh. Then, as they became more and more immersed in them, they began to take on their ideals.
“The people I was hanging out with didn’t like gay people and didn’t like black people and it got to a point where I thought, ‘I don’t really agree with this’,” says Bixler-Zavala. “But I was willing to go along with it because I thought they were my friends.”
Both were playing separately in various local punk bands at the time, some lasting a while, some not. Bixler-Zavala says Rodriguez-Lopez’s band was the rowdiest – the one most likely to start riots and hurl flour and eggs at their audience. Punk was where the rest of their energies were ploughed and the pair would live for virtually nothing else. Even at 14 years old, Bixler-Zavala was well known to the touring bands – he’d offer them floors to crash on and then act as a guide, showing the travelling musicians the delights of Juarez, the Mexican town just over the border from El Paso.
“There were all kinds of nasty things going over there,” he says, with a glint in his eye. “There was a guy who had these two live electrical wires; you’d pay him for the privilege of seeing how long you could hold onto both wires before you got electrocuted. It was mad, stupid jock stuff.” Then, warming to his theme he remembers the one thing that would always ensure no band ever forgot Juarez…The Donkey Shows. “There’s not much to explain,” he says. “It was a donkey, a girl and sex. Pretty brutal.”
AT LEAST some of the appeal of the gangs was the same as that of punk rock. “Because punk was all about confrontation,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “It was about doing whatever you wanted, taking risks, not asking questions and just acting on your impulses.”
Yet more appeal came from wanting to be accepted, wanting to feel part of something because, in a town like El Paso, if you’re different then you can get lonely very fast. They couldn’t find people who shared their musical vision – most of the local bands were either churning out watered down Red Hot Chili Peppers rip-offs or were aping the Madchester scene that was being cycled endlessly on MTV. They had no-one to offer them any approval and, stuck on the very edge of America, in a staunchly conservative town, they felt adrift and in need of support.
“It may have been just for my own self-confidence but being in a group of people or a gang helped justify my existence,” says Bixler-Zavala. “When I was younger I felt the need to be part of this violent culture of beating people up and only accepting one kind of person.”
“Most people go through that sort of thing,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “It’s a different colour for everybody – whether it’s joining a gang or being in a fraternity. Everyone gets to a certain point where they feel like their environment defines them. We thought those people around us were defining us. It’s very twisted because we were trying to act like we didn’t need anyone’s approval. We were saying, ‘We don’t care what anyone thinks!’ Inside we were thinking, ‘…Except our rowdy friends who we look up to.’ It’s a crazy paradox.”
EL PASO is also a contradiction. Resting on the border with Mexico ought to give it a cosmopolitan air, one tolerant or embracing of different cultures. However that’s not the case. Rodriguez-Lopez talks with bitterness about the illegal Mexican immigrants who are shot down, beaten up by the border patrols or hit by trains on the railroads running along the border. He also says that the police have been turning a blind eye to the ever increasing abduction of women. “One of the gang’s initiation rituals is for the new member to kidnap a girl, rape her and then bury her in the desert. The police don’t care anymore. They stopped counting in 1996. The number was up to 600 then.” Hauntingly, he says this while stood next to a telegraph pole littered with Missing notices, all of them show hazy photos of Mexican girls who ‘disappeared’ on their way back from work.
It’s a town without identity: faceless, sprawling and empty, forever denying its roots, desperately trying to ignore the clash of Hispanic and American society. Rodriguez-Lopez felt that clash strongly when he was growing up here.
“It’s true that there’s no identity here but there’s an underlying theme of violence here too. If you listen to any of our records you can hear that old violence. The Hispanic culture and the barrenness and the never ending feeling of the desert all blend here.”
As is so often with Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala, when one starts talking about something, the other picks up on it immediately, reinforcing the point.
“El Paso shapes you because it doesn’t have anything to shape you with,” says Bixler-Zavala. “You have to figure yourself out because it’s so barren here. It forces you to work out what you want to do with your time and what your influences are. You end up really relying on yourself. If you dislike living here, it’s because you’re not creative enough to occupy your time with something.”
Rodriguez-Lopez found this tough growing up. He admits his father – Marcelo Rodche – was, and still is, a dominant influence in his life. At Mars Volta’s show, Rodche wanders around easily and talks to everyone, beaming with pride at his son’s achievements. “My dad’s great in a room full of strangers,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “He has the ability to be immediately comfortable with people he’s never met before. It’s not something he passed on to me. I was always in the shadow of my father and I looked up to him immensely as a kid. He always played music, he raised me as vegetarian and taught me yoga so my whole life was dominated by his ideas.”
It meant that Rodriguez-Lopez felt he had to rebel against him in order to find himself, he thought he would find his own personality once he’d proved himself to be his father’s opposite. He set out on a journey of self-discovery across America, hitch-hiking, selling drugs and living with the homeless. Eventually he ended up in Baltimore at breaking point, shooting heroin and desperately wishing he was home. He called Bixler-Zavala – the only person he’d been in touch with while he was away – who was in the process of setting up At The Drive-In and decided to come home.
“I tried to go the other way [than my father’s] to find out what there was,” Rodriguez-Lopez says. “He planted a very strong seed in me and I always wanted to rebel against it as much as I could. The person I’ve become as result of it is very close to what he taught me as a child and I realised that it’s always been there.”
WHILE HE was away Bixler-Zavala felt adrift. Though the pair talked frequently on the phone, he felt like he’d lost an ally.
“That was the loneliest time I ever had here,” he says. “I had to resort to playing music with people I wouldn’t even hang out with normally and that was the basis and formation of At The Drive-In. It was slim-pickings. When he came back, it felt like I had a partner in crime again.”
That band was to put them on the map musically but, despite the allied public front they put up, relationships weren’t harmonious. They still talk bitterly about Jim Ward – “He had all these fucked up, conservative, Republican views on gay people and other things. It was completely off the wall to me,” offers Rodriguez-Lopez – so, retrospectively, it was no surprise that At The Drive-In broke up. Their spectacular rise and, at the time, surprising implosion took many by surprise but it had always been a mill round the neck of Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala. They’d already started working on an early template for The Mars Volta as an opportunity to expound their love of jazz, dub and “music the rest of the band didn’t want to or couldn’t understand,” says Rodriguez-Lopez.
It led to a sense of freedom, one born from removing the tight reins of that band and one that harked back to the days when they would charge round town doing exactly as they pleased.
It’s a freedom that is still readily apparent in the band as they blitz El Paso’s Abraham Chavez Theatre. You might expect a small-town crowd not to understand the oblique creativity and expressive freeform nature of a Mars Volta show, but every moment is cheered – even the flute solo – as the band, for a couple of hours, instil that same sense of freedom in their crowd.
In their music now you can hear their lives, lives that aren’t so filled with anger and rage as they were in At The Drive-In, but now filled with experience. Those that see The Mars Volta as self-indulgent are missing the point. This is music that comes from freedom, from forcing themselves to the edge, over-reaching and seeing where they land, from bravery, hardship and, most of all, from life. It doesn’t get any more punk than that.
© Tom Bryant 2010
