Left to right: Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez
“There’s a misconception that we’re so serious, and we’re so artsy, and we’re trying hard to be tortured,” says Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, lead guitarist and founding member of The Mars Volta. “We have that part, but we have the whole other side too.”
Their music is so consistently ambitious and challenging that one might picture them brooding quietly offstage between shows, working out complicated time signatures or perusing ancient texts. They’re not. They’re just as likely to be listening to Badfinger or watching Reno 911.
This side of them, the unpretentious enthusiasm for ideas, music, art, and life itself, is the most striking thing about Omar and lead singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala in person. They’re more like passionate college kids than rock stars; they’re eager to bounce ideas back and forth and get at the truth.
They’re also happy just to talk — they touch on Luis Buñuel, Big Star, Pier Pasolini, Family Guy, Radiohead, Drive Like Jehu, and Frida Kahlo. They recommend a series of obscure British comedies; they tell stories from the road. The rapid-fire profusion of ideas should be no surprise to anyone who’s heard their mazelike albums. But they’re also open and down to Earth in a way that’s difficult to reconcile with their onstage command.
Cedric and Omar have been playing and touring together since the early nineties, many of those years as part of El Paso’s influential hardcore band At the Drive-In. The minimal press coverage they enjoyed during their first few years was usually centered on their championship-caliber afros. The band’s reputation has grown since their 2001 breakup, but it was a long time coming.
“We played to five people for ten years,” is how Omar put it. At the Drive-In would eventually release Relationship of Command, an album hailed by many as one of the masterpieces of the genre. Omar and Cedric don’t remember it fondly. The band dissolved soon after.
“Now we look at that band, we look at all the material we presented, and we think, ‘God, it could have been so much better,’” says Omar. “And people think it was so great and blah blah blah, but we were dying inside the whole time. Those records we can’t even listen to anymore. I can’t listen to Relationship of Command. That mix sounds so horrible. It sounds so much like a toy.”
“There’s a misconception that we’re so serious, and we’re so artsy, and we’re trying so hard to be tortured.”
Without second thoughts, Omar and Cedric left a band with newfound success to start something wholly new. Walking away from At the Drive-In, they knew they didn’t want to be stuck with compromises again.
“We said, ‘From now on, we don’t want to be dicks about it, but we’ll make it clear to everybody once they walk in that this is a dictatorship,’” says Omar. “And when we finish this band, we can say, ‘That was great.’ And if we don’t feel that it was great, we can know it was because of us.”
Omar brings this kind of levelheaded, practical intensity to most decisions. The recent decision to close down Gold Standard Laboratories, Omar’s co-run independent label, was made largely because it became too much of a headache, too much of a distraction from the primary goal of creating his own music.
He explains, “It’s hard enough as it is to say, ‘Yes, I will manage a business as well as a creative thing.’ For a creative person, that’s a really hard step to take, to say, ‘I’m going to divide my brain into two parts, and I’m going to tend to one and then the other.’ You lose a part of yourself.”
When the business got too crazy, he shut it down. “We had a great run where we just put out our records and we had complete creative freedom. The only things we had to think about were simple things: let’s get the ads into the magazines, let’s get the bands on the road — the old-school approach, the approach that we come from. Now it’s turned into this thing of, ‘No, you need MP3 players, and you need a little keychain thingy, and you need MySpace.’ That’s what the business has become.”
Tags: At the Drive-In, Badfinger, Big Star, Drive Like Jehu, Elvis Costello, Gold Standard Laboratories, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Slade, Suicidal Tendencies, Suicide, The Cars, The Mars Volta, Yes