“My totalitarian rule might not be cool, but at least we’ve made interesting records. At least we polarise people”: It took The Mars Volta three years and several arguments to make Noctourniquet
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez challenged himself to stop aiming for perfection, and challenged old friend Cedric Bixler-Zavala to write direct lyrics. It wasn’t easy for either of them
Ten years under Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s benign dictatorship almost destroyed The Mars Volta – but the Texan zonk rockers’ wild ride got back on track with 2012’s Noctourniquet. That year the leader told Prog about the trials and tribulations of making their sixth album.
“Baaa… baaa…” The man with the hair like a sheep leaning into the breeze is making suitably ovine bleating noises at his audience. And not in a good way. “I think it’s a very, very sad day when the only way you can express yourself is through slam dancing,” he accuses. “Are you all typical white people? Look at you: you learnt that from the TV; you didn’t learn that from your best friend. You’re a robot, you’re a sheep. I have the microphone and you are all sheep.”
It’s January 2001 and Cedric Bixler-Zavala is of the “chauvinistic macho brutality” of the rapidly growing crowds he’s playing to. Tired of reading that his seven-year-old band At The Drive-In are the best ‘new’ thing in rock music. Tired of the conformist rules and regulations of the underground punk and hardcore scenes that spawned him.
He doesn’t even listen to that type of music any more. The rented Los Angeles space he shares with guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and their collection of old stereos, reel-to-reel tape machines and a wall of 16 televisions – always tuned to the same channel – resounds to the tones of prog and jazz, Latin American music and dub reggae. They listen to Syd Barrett, Can, Kraftwerk and Captain Beefheart while gorging on the mind-expanding films of Federico Fellini and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
On that stage at the Big Day Out Festival in Australia, At The Drive-In’s angular and explosive 21st-century punk is no longer something Bixler-Zavala or Rodriguez-Lopez want to be part of. The two old friends have been discussing it more and more: they haven’t been seeing eye-to-eye with their bandmates. Their music feels neither pioneering or remotely progressive.
So they know what they need to do: they split up At The Drive-In, just as the world is finally cottoning on to them. The Mars Volta – the most far out, wig-flipping sonic explorers to win a Grammy and the only ones named after an obscure Fellini reference – are born. And so a new, vastly different, journey begins.
Eleven years is a long time in music, but it seems like The Mars Volta have filled every second of it with noise. Right from the beginning they painted from a different sonic palette to At The Drive-In – or indeed any of their rock contemporaries. They are arguably the biggest prog band in the world, without ever tagging themselves as such.
And if their previous outfit was about righteous ire, skewed melodies and energy over ability, then The Mars Volta have been about breaking musical moulds with an amorphous maelstrom of mind-blowing musicality.
There’s probably a view of us as people who burn through others… but if you want a perfect working vessel you get perfect working people
Even the approach to the band dynamic is different. Longstanding fans will know The Mars Volta is the music inside Rodriguez-Lopez’s head, augmented by the linguistic and vocal gymnastics of Bixler-Zavala. They make no bones about the fact everyone else is just there to help the cause.
That’s why at the last count there have been 17 members of The Mars Volta, including former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, drum prodigy Thomas Pridgen and sound technician Jeremy Ward – whose death from a heroin overdose in 2003 prompted Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala to curtail their own dalliances with opiates. The Mars Volta’s revolving door is well greased and continually spinning.
“There’s probably a view of us as being people who burn through others because we’re assholes, but if you want a perfect working vessel you get perfect working people,” says Cedric Bixler-Zavala. “You don’t get slackers. If they’re some loud asshole who embarrasses you, or a shitty LA person just interested in making money and being famous, then they’re not for us. And that’s exactly why we got rid of the people that we got rid of earlier on.”
The Mars Volta v1.0 came together in 2001 during extended jams in Monkey Island, the communal warehouse/rehearsal space that Cedric and Omar shared in Long Beach, California. A potential member would arrive, a bedroom would be built for them to live in, and practice would begin the next day. “Living around someone, you soon realise whether they’re right or not,” says Bixler-Zavala.
With an initial line-up in place, they hit the road and debuted with the Tremulant EP in 2002, a glorious mix of prog/jazz fusion, breakbeats, backwards masking and hints of the thrusting, Zeppelin-esque riffs which would follow on their half million-selling debut album Deloused In The Comatorium.
Early shows mixed the chaotic energy of The Mahavishnu Orchestra with the complexity of prog’s first generation. On their first UK tour they dazzled audiences by playing like they were on crack. Because they were on crack.
A lot of ‘musicians’ are in love with the idea of being in a band… being seen to be a rock star
“We weren’t doing it all the time but we would find places... Technically it was freebasing,” Bixler-Zavala later confessed. “Crack and ether together. We’d only do it occasionally on tour, and when we got home. And sometimes during practice. When we smoked freebase I’d like to think we made a lot more interesting music than other bands. The effect it had on us was we played faster; but some people didn’t understand and it caused rifts.”
Such drug explorations are now a thing of the past. In the intervening years all energies have instead been channelled into albums that meld high concepts – stories woven around rediscovered diaries, the suicide of a friend – with the acid-soaked musical intensity of Santana or King Crimson. It’s all made unique by Rodriguez-Lopez’s idiosyncratic guitar style, as his love/hate relationship with the instrument pushes him to make it sound like something else entirely.
The Mars Volta’s new album Noctourniquet is their sixth. Add to this a live album, four dub records with side band De Facto, Omar’s 22 solo records and a half dozen collaborative albums, plus production work and filmmaking, and you have a vast body of recorded work, matched only in quantity and variation by improv-jazz greats such as Miles Davis or Sun Ra.
“I’m not doing this for the purposes of major success and I don’t have anyone telling me what to do,” Rodriguez-Lopez explains. “I think people have this idea of me always working, but that’s not strictly true. There’s plenty of time in the day to go to the movies, have lunch, hang out with friends. But ultimately what I enjoy most is going home and playing with my toys. Making music.”
It’s a work ethic that puts many bands to shame. “A lot of ‘musicians’ are in love with the idea of being in a band!” he laughs. “It’s a lifestyle thing; it’s all about being seen to be a rock star. Also the industry aspect of music is promotionally driven. That’s why I’m talking to you now: to help promote my music.
Cedric wanted time to do it at his own pace… it took him three years to write the lyrics. And that caused further arguments
“However, as an artist, during the actual creative process you have to keep away from all that stuff, otherwise you get distracted – you get sucked in. We don’t have an A&R guy dropping by. I have complete control over it all. We record the album, then we present it to the label. I’m really very lucky to still be doing what I love, every single day.”
Still, the creation of Noctourniquet has not been without its troubles. Recording of the music was completed three years ago, straight off the back of making previous album Octahedron. But after a decade of frantic activity, Bixler-Zavala admitted he was struggling to keep up with the creative pace. Crisis talks were conducted and creative issues aired.
“We had an argument at the time,” Rodriguez-Lopez says, “in which he told me that after 10 years of The Mars Volta being my project, my baby – my totalitarian rule – he couldn’t keep up with that rhythm. He wanted time to sit with the record and do it at his own pace. So it took him three years to write the lyrics. And that caused some further arguments.”
So it’s fair to describe The Mars Volta as a benign dictatorship? “Yeah. For better or for worse, for all my faults and all that might not be cool about that approach, we have at least made some interesting records. People might not like them, but at least we polarise people. There is nothing else out there that sounds quite like this band and I’m very proud of that.”
Noctourniquet fits neatly in The Mars Volta’s colourful canon of work, yet also explores new avenues. While lead single The Malkin Jewel is less a sprawling prog opus and more reminiscent of the jarring time signatures of Captain Beefheart or the twisted blues of The Bad Seeds, a song such as Empty Vessels Make The Loudest Sound sees Bixler-Zavala delivering his most direct lyrics yet.
“The artist has to keep changing,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “I love the way Cedric writes lyrics. He’s built a whole body of work where everything is cryptic, open to interpretation and shrouded in metaphor. So I challenged him to do the opposite this time. I tried to change my approach too, and move away from methodical perfectionism. That song, Empty Vessels, I wanted to try and do in one take.”
The release of Noctourniquet also arrives at a time when the duo have finally confronted the lingering animosity of At The Drive-In’s split by reforming the band a decade on. But The Mars Volta’s mad musical carnival continues.
“I think the fact I still feel like the kid playing with his toys in his dad’s garage enables me to produce so much work,” says Rodriguez-Lopez. “When I was kid I absolutely loathed school and all I could think about all day was getting home to the garage to play. To create. To make music. And I still have that spirit in me today.”
