http://www.elpasotimes.com/living/ci_10572056he Mars Volta: Band brings avant-rock back home Sunday
By Doug Pullen / El Paso Times
Article Launched: 09/27/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT
EL PASO -- Cedric Bixler Zavala said there's a good reason why The Mars Volta, the critically acclaimed and commercially successful avant-rock band he formed with fellow El Pasoan Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, was together three years before playing here.
"I think always the question I got back then was how come Mars Volta didn't play (here) sooner," he said of the band's 2001 formation after the controversial breakup of their previous group, At the Drive-In. "The reason for that is that not a lot know that when At the Drive-In broke up, unfortunately a lot of people took sides, and because we didn't live in El Paso (they moved to Long Beach, Calif.) at that time, everyone sided with the people that did live there. No one asked us what happened."
He said they parted ways over creative differences ("We were tired of the monotony of it.") and other "issues within the group," which, reportedly, ranged from chemicals to chemistry.
"A lot of people hated our guts for starting a new band. They had no idea why we did it. That's one of the negative aspects of El Paso. It can be so small. People feel like they own you," the one-time El Paso High School student said from a tour stop in Atlanta. That helped fuel TMV's creative fires, but also made them delay plans to play the hometown.
"We had no interest in going to play El Paso. Any time we did at the beginning (of ATDI), no one cared about it. Then, when we broke up, they hated us for it. Why go to a place where you're hated," he asked.
They didn't make their El Paso stage debut until March 27, 2004, at the Don Haskins Center, opening for A Perfect Circle. Armando Guerrero, who's followed them since ATDI, was there.
"You could just feel the energy and the fact that they knew they were in their hometown and how much harder they played," said Guerrero, 25, a sales manager for a Hoy Fox dealership.
That was three years, one album, two EPs and several tours after TMV was born.
"We wanted to let the music speak for itself," Bixler Zavala said. "We came back full force."
Boy, did they. They not only returned for a sold-out show a year later at the Abraham Chavez Theatre (where they perform Sunday), TMV has released four critically acclaimed studio albums, one live album and two EPs. Three of them -- 2005's "Frances the Mute," 2006's "Amputechture" and this year's "The Bedlam in Goliath" -- debuted in Billboard's Top 10 best-selling albums. Their studio albums typically sell more than 500,000 copies, impressive for a band whose complex, impressionistic songs can stretch up to a half-hour and aren't exactly radio-friendly.
Their concerts are even more intense, allowing the octet -- which includes Rodriguez-Lopez's brother Marcel on percussion; Adrian Terrazas on sax
former ATDI/Sparta guitarist Pablo Hinojos-Gonzalez; Isaiah "Ikey" Owens on keyboards; bassist Juan Alderete; and new drummer Thomas Pridgen -- to flex its experimental muscles.
"Every show is different," said Guerrero, who's going Sunday. "I'm expecting the unexpected."
Their creative self-indulgence isn't for everyone. One reviewer described the lengthy psychedelic jams on their 2005 live album, "Scabdates," as "sonic meandering which some regard as genius and others find to be a futile exercise in pretentious instrumental masturbation."
Call it what you want, the boys from the Borderland have carved out a niche. Their influences include Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Fugazi and Christian Death, roots that were planted when the almost sibling-like singer and the Puerto Rican-born guitarist, both high-school dropouts, met as teenagers in El Paso.
"All that stuff that seems different for the ears is what makes us feel normal," Bixler-Zavala said.
Their first two albums, 2003's "De-Loused in the Comatorium" and "Frances the Mute," are built around themes. "De-Loused" was inspired by friend, artist and fellow El Paso musician Julio Venegas, who committed suicide in 1996. "Frances" was based on a diary found by band member Jeremy Ward (cousin of Jim Ward, the former ATDI guitarist who formed Sparta and Sleepercar), who died of an overdose in 2004.
"Amputechture" was their first collection of thematically unrelated songs. "Goliath" was inspired by their bizarre experiences with a Ouija board, which Rodriguez-Lopez buried after a series of mishaps.
It's pretty heavy stuff, dense with images, made-up words, symbolism and cryptic meanings, drawing from the literary, cinematic and visual art worlds.
"For us, we throw it on the canvas and later on say, 'Yeah, that's what it meant,' " Bixler Zavala said. "All our favorite writers and directors have done the same thing. It just happens that way. We don't know how or why we're doing it."
The singer, whose voice is often compared to Rush's Geddy Lee, described his younger self as an attitudinal punk-loving kid whose parents (his father is Dennis Bixler Marquez, a professor of Chicano studies at the University of Texas at El Paso) were supportive. His aesthetic elders -- among them, artist Hal Marcus, musician Ed Ivey, promoter Mike Jennings -- opened his eyes and his ears to a bigger world.
"I realized all these different, supposed sides of the tracks, musical sides that aren't supposed to like each other, were all a farce. Whether it's Poi Dog Pondering, the Bodeans, Dylan or Christian Death. It's all the same, as long as they're pushing buttons," he said.
Those mentors taught him that the punk rock he loved "is not some costume" and the 1984 punk rock documentary he studied, "Another State of Mind," taught him "everything becomes one thing." You can hear that in the music, which incorporates jazz and Latin elements.
At 33, Bixler Zavala sounds as musically restless and opinionated as ever, but at peace with what his bands have been able to do.
"I don't think ATDI was going to make another interesting record. It's just me, but we did everything we could have done. I loved my time with that band. I got to see the world with that band. I grew up in that band. I wouldn't have it any other way."
It's a book he's willing to reopen. "I wouldn't be opposed to doing some sort of reunion thing with it," he said, "but only because the time is right, not for financial reasons." 
