CITAZIONE
Eight Days A Week
From beginnings as a failed salsa pianist, The Mars Volta mainman Omar Rodriguez-Lopez has gone on to create some stunning music with cohort Cedric Bixler-Zavala. "It's all shapes," he explains to Philip Wilding.
For those that want to solve the knotty enigma that is The Mars Volta, founder, songwriter and guitarist, Omar Alfredo Rodriguez-Lopez (he drops the Alfredo for his solo work, possibly because it might not fit on the CD sleeve) suggests you take in Werner Herzog's [i] Fitzcarraldo. Tellingly, it almost did for its director as his partnership with leading man, Klaus Kinski ended in disarray, Herzog entertaining murderous thoughts about the actor. Succinctly put, the film deals with the dream of a man who struggles to bring opera to the remote city of Iquitos deep in the Peruvian rainforest. In doing so, and in a pivotal moment, he has to drag a three-story steamer over a muddy hillside with the help of the local natives.
"It's Herzog's greatest accomplishment, and the film itself mirrored Herzog's life; this guy who wants to bring the opera to the jungle so in order to do it he has to go through these crazy things, some people think he's mad for wanting to get this boat over the hill, all these people abandon him and then the natives help, but at the end the dream is something else to what he thought it was. The same thing happened to Herzog while he was making the film, his crew abandoned him, certain people believed in him, others didn't..."
An animated Omar is dwarfed by the blue parka coat he's wearing, his mop of curly hair just visible about the faux-fur hood, his glasses - think Geddy Lee circa Moving Pictures making him look inexpressibly young. Onstage later, dressed not unlike a well-heeled snooker player, he looks indomitable and gritty, off it, it's hard to imagine this is a man who took off in his teens and went hitchhiking for a year alone never once letting his family know where he was or that he'd struggled to overcome a major drug problem. The tiny back room at Dingwalls in North London reverberates as the support band thump through the wall. At one point, a security guard comes to check something and mistakes Omar for the band's manager, so innocuous does the guitarist look.
"So with Herzog, you know," he continues, "I think it's something that people have to understand, that people who create, who are really into this expression and not just trying to entertain or make money, people who are expressing themselves through writing or music or anything else, it always reflects their life... it really is a mirror of your life, even if you're coming up with fake characters, somehow something's happening in your brain that you're trying to work out subconsciously."
It's not easy to pin down which part of Omar's life is reflected in the willfully daring and sometimes eccentric music of The Mars Volta. As consistent a solo artists as he is a part of his band, his drive is unrelenting. When ...Prog bring up one of the three albums he's already released in the last six months, the excellent Old Money, he happily admits that he made it in 2006 and that it's pretty much sat at home since then. Like reclusive author JD Salinger is said to have a vault in his New Hampshire filled with unpublished manuscripts, so Omar has a similar set up in his Mexican home, hoarding completed albums that may or may not see the light of day either as the work of The Mars Volta or under his own name.
"I have around 16 albums in the vault, they're all pretty much finished," says Omar, as ...Prog's eyebrows shoot up in surprise. "That's where a lot of my energy goes now. I'm grateful to do this for a living, what I've been doing since I was 12 years old in my dad's house, and in that way I've never really grown up. And of course, when you take something as destructive as hard drugs away, you have all this extra energy that was sort of feeding off something else. I think of my albums as just Polaroid shots, just those moments in my life of things I'm going through, so some of them just better stay in there, others are too personal, then others are just fun and that'd be cool to put out.
"In-between every Mars Volta album there's another Mars Volta album that I didn't put out. The reason being, for instance, after Amputechture, I wrote that and I had written this other album (Old Money) and then I thought they're too similar, I like things to be a jump. For our fans it can maybe not be such a good thing. They say things like, oh, I like this one, but not the other one - they want the thing that made them feel good over and over again... unfortunately for them, my life doesn't work that way. As a person who creates, you want to try different stuff and to explore and pull out different feelings. So what I thought sounded on the mellow side of what Amputechture was, I sort of put it in the vault and went in a whole different direction with what became The Bedlam in Goliath, which is really aggressive and over-the-top."
Omar's distinctive approach to making music, whether it be with his former band, At the Drive-In, ("Returning to that would be like going to back to an old girlfriend you're happy you got away from."), solo or with The Mars Volta can be traced back to one thing: Omar's inability to play salsa piano, much to his chagrin.
"I started on bongoes and congas and percussion, with the rudiments of music, the rhythm section. It's the part that... if you have that foundation and it's right then the rest is just the icing on the cake, the melodies and stuff, it's still how I write now. I moved on to salsa piano after that, but I wasn't good enough, it's what I still listen to the most and I always wanted to play in my father's band. If you're a Puerto Rican, the joke is that you either play music or become a baseball player. My dad was a big influence on me musically, even before I was born, while I was in the womb he'd rest his guitar against my mother's stomach and play, and the song would resonate through me."
By the time his family moved to El Paso, Omar was a teenage skater and a keen musician, even if his enthusiasm did initially outweigh his skill. He was singing with the hardcore band Startled Calf at 13 ("I was just screaming and shit") and revelling in punk and heavy metal.
"I was sneaking out of the house and going skating with my friends and they were all smoking dope and listening to Slayer," he says. "It was all heavy, over-your-head stuff and like most people who hear punk rock for the first time who want to express themselves, I thought, I can do that! It made me feel as alive as salsa music, it made me feel that same fire and same passion. I looked at my dad's band and they were versatile and they'd played for years, they were really skilled musicians, and I thought, fuck, I can never do that so I'll just skateboard or paint. But when I heard Black Flag, it gave me the same charge as salsa, and I knew it was for me.
"Later, I got the same thing with King Crimson. It was Starless And Bible Black, our friend Julio (Venegas) who was sort of the older guy who played in bands and showed us a lot of stuff, he played it to me. The first Mars Volta record is sort of about Julio (2003's Deloused In the Comatorium, the central character, Cerpin Taxt is loosely based on Venegas who committed suicide in 1996), he was a really great artist and he took us aside and told us that punk rock was an idea, a mindset, not a haircut or dressing style, so he turned us on to Fela Kuti, King Crimson, Lenny Bruce and these things that he considered punk, people who were doing stuff, writers, counter-culture, whatever you want to call it."
Though it was El Paso that Omar fled at 17 to go hitchhiking ("I didn't really know what I wanted to do, I didn't know what my identity was outside of the music..."), it was where he'd meet and being working with Mars Volta singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala. It's a relationship that's endured through various hardcore band - that became more experimental with each incarnation - to At The Drive-In and ultimately, The Mars Volta. They've been friends and workmates for 20 years, they're still only in their 30s.
"Cedric and I have only had three arguments in all those years of working together and two of them were over food!" Omar laughs. "The other one is because I have such a fast pace when I work, sometimes he gets overwhelmed by it, but he doesn't want to be the one to hold up the boat, I make records, I make 'em, make 'em, make 'em and then I'm like, you've got to write lyrics. So sometimes, and I never realised this until later, it was pressure for him because for me it was just my excitement. So I've had to learn over the years that I have a different metabolism to other people. I can't expect other people to stay up 16 hours and make stuff up all the time. So it wasn't even an argument, it was more growing pains.
"It's just on ongoing stream, I'm just recording all the time and eventually I go, you're going to be a Mars Volta record. Then I focus on that. There's been plenty of stuff where I've been mistaken, 'oh, put that back!'. There are even songs that have been on my solo records that I realise I'm mistaken and it becomes a Mars Volta song..."
Although second nature to the guitarist, his approach to writing and recording can cause bemusement at best. When not harrying Cedric to complete his part of the catalogue of the songs he's written, Omar's given to handing bandmates and recording engineers drawings and graphs to get his point across.
"Cedric understands them," says Omar, sounding surprised that some people might not, "If they don't then I have to find another way to express what I'm trying to say, but for people who are trying to work with music I think they naturally have a lot of images in their heads when they're hearing things so they associate music with blocks, most of them use letters, but even letters have line, you know what I mean? It's a shape so I try to associate everything with shapes and waveforms; I really love that."
Strange to think now that for a guitarist who was once embarrassed by his inability to play well should now be so insistent on conveying precisely how he wants his songs to feel and sound that he will even revert to using a sketchpad to communicate.
"I was anti-guitar in a way, I admit it," he says. "I used to read guitar magazines and there would always be this, Oh man, I want to get that sweet, warm tone. But I really liked it when people would do this at a concert (puts fingers in ears and pulls a face). I have to admit, it started from insecurity as I wasn't a good guitarist so I used effects to cover my sound and then grew attached to it. I now have a sort of union that was borne out of insecurity and noise and I made it mine."
Typically, even though the next Mars Volta album is released in June (a European tour follows in July) it was finished sometime last year. Which must mean that Omar's already written and recorded at least one more album that might see the light of day or simply be destined to collect dust in his vault.
"Octahedron?" he says of the next band album, "That feels like it was done so long ago now. People ask me what I do on my days off, they say, you just work and work and work. What they don't realise is that to me is all I do is play, play, play..."
