The Mars Volta: At The Drive-In Was "Kiddie Shit"

02/27/08 5:00pm

by Shehzaad Jiwani (CHARTattack)

After a couple of fan-friendly yet critically maligned albums, The Mars Volta have returned with The Bedlam In Goliath, which is easily their most focused and digestible record yet. ChartAttack recently spoke with guitarist, producer, co-founder and band leader Omar Rodriguez-Lopez about his band's newfound direction as well as their storied past.

ChartAttack: It seems like this record is going to win back a lot of fans who may have defected after Frances The Mute and Amputechture. It's a lot less excessive than the last two albums, and seems to go back to what you guys were doing with De-Loused In The Comatorium.
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez: What a lot of people refer to as "excess," to me, that's just environment-building. That's what I was into at that time. As you make each record, the one concept I start with musically is, "How I can make this completely different from the last?" By the time I was done with Amputechture, I realized I was doing more of the same. I asked, "What can I do to make myself uncomfortable and push myself into a new area?" So I got rid of environment-building and all that. If Amputechture had a lot of space, then this one should have no space. I want claustrophobia. I want it so that when you put the record on, it's just everybody going at the same time. There's no build-up. It goes and goes until it stops, then everybody stops at the same time and then it's over.

As much as I try to make the records different, a lot of people are saying this is a better, more potent, more together version of De-Loused. It's interesting to hear that kind of feedback.

A common reaction when listening to The Mars Volta is to write off a lot of the experimental moments as musical drug binges. How do you feel about the band being associated with drugs in that way?
To make one thing clear, I haven't done drugs since 2002. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't eat sugar, I don't drink caffeine. The most you'll see on our bus is the guys drinking. If I'm enticed to smoke something, I don't need it. I'm not searching for creativity when I do that. When I started smoking pot, when I was 16, it just helped to calm me down because I'm such a hyperactive person. I don't think of it in terms of, "I need something to be creative!" That's a big misconception. It's very funny, and it's nice that they want to bring gifts, but people will bring all sorts of drugs… LSD, cocaine, DMT, all these hardcore drugs. Cedric and I are recovering drug addicts. It's a nice gesture, but it's counter-productive for us. Our close friend Jeremy [Ward, the band's late sound manipulator] didn't make it past that period, and it's something we've chosen for ourselves to better ourselves.

Another thing you're almost perpetually linked with is At The Drive-In. How do you react to younger groups ripping that band off almost a decade later?
I can't even connect to it because that was a different person back then. I always tell people it's like seeing an old high school picture where you have a mullet or something where you're like, "What was I thinking?" Relationship Of Command was at the very end of our creative spurt. I was in that band from about age 18 to about 23 or 24. I don't regret it at all because we learn from all our experiences, but that was kiddie shit.

It's funny to see that people are, like you said, ripping it off now, but it's the way it happens. Once the mainstream gets a hold of something that means it's been dead for 10 years already. Even when we were doing what we were doing — and this is why it's embarrassing — we were really just emulating bands like Drive Like Jehu and Nation Of Ulysses. We were taking things from them, and that had already been done for 10 years. Rites Of Spring were done for 10 years. We were copying these things that were super old, and then when we realized it, it gives you idiot shivers. Now, we went away from it and did our own thing, and to see this fourth generation bastardized version of it… It's really god awful, but entertaining at the same time

Can you see people doing the same thing with The Mars Volta in 10 years?
That's hard to say. It's funny to think that people are even doing things that ATD-I was doing. It's hard to relate it to ourselves. It's hard for us to understand why we're as big as we are. It's what we would do in our garage anyway. Hopefully they'll just see our band as a gateway to broaden their own sounds. That's what would happen for me. I'd hear a band, like when I was 13, and I'd only listen to Black Flag or whatever. Loved Minor Threat, hated Fugazi. Then I picked the Fugazi record back up and it expanded my horizons. So I listened to it, and I said, "Where are they coming from? Oh, they like dub! This other band The Clash that I like, they were influenced by dub, too! So what's up with dub?" Then you start making all these connections and really getting into the music. There's nothing worse than being into a scene. The world is so great and big to just get into a scene. Being into music and culture, that's a completely different thing.