Mars Attacks!

This is no dream – this is really happening!”

That’s what Mia Farrow cried out during the diabolical impregnation fantasy sequence in Rosemary’s Baby. I was thinking the same thing when The Mars Volta hit the On stage at Witnness back in July.
Their live show is a sort of sonic heart attack that inspires out-of-body detachment, Jungian kung-fu. To stand in front of the speakers and watch them go at it is to be jarred into a kind of adreamalized state. Singer Cedric Bixler Zavala’s skinny body eel-whips in a James Brown-meets-Iggy shimmy as he swings the mic, and to his right, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez looks like he’s constantly trying to keep the guitar from wriggling out of his grasp as it bucks and jumps around his tiny frame, sometimes all the way round his back. But when he grabs the thing by the neck, the fluid ribbons of noise he wrings from it suggest Hendrix and Santana being channelled by Greg Ginn. Behind these two principals, Ikey Owens churns up Hammond foam while drummer Jon Theodore hits like Roberto Duran.
Consider it a form of hard rock shock therapy that happens somewhere between ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and Free Jazz, Funhouse and Un Chien Andalou.
A week after the Witnness show, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez sounds low-key but confident about his band’s worth.
“What we were setting out to accomplish is pure expression,” he says. “It’s one thing to know how to play an instrument, how to play notes and be good at it, but it’s a completely different thing to be able to transfer your personality onto your instrument, onto what your saying.”
The language used to express what they’re saying combines the primal energy of hardcore with the virtuoso demands of jazz, progressive, krautrock and indigenous Hispanic music, incorporating sacred clave rhythms, the guaguanco and the merengue, and the melodies of the guajira. Ask Omar about the Spanish factor and he says this:
“It’s probably the most essential element, for me it’s not really a choice. Like, that is my culture, that is what I come from and that’s what I listen to on a daily basis. Our personalities come through; they must, because most of the people in the band are Hispanic. I’ve always aspired to be a salsa musician and I’m only on a small detour because of bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat when I was 13, and eventually some day I’ll just be playing salsa. I was born and raised in Puerto Rico and moved to America in the late ’80s, we moved to South Carolina and then El Paso, I must’ve been 10 or 11.”
Omar and Cedric met and hung out together as teenagers, a pair of Afro-haired black-jeaned freaks who drew regular beatings from the local rednecks. By the mid-’90s they had formed At The Drive-In, probably the only band of their generation to match the incendiary fury of Nirvana or Rage Against The Machine. That band split after a European tour in 2001, six years after their debut single ‘Hell Paso’, just as the Relationship Of Command album looked set to break them worldwide. While the remainder of the group formed Sparta, Omar and Cedric moved to Long Beach, experimented with the ongoing progressive dub project De Facto, then put together The Mars Volta, and released the Tremulent EP last year, in the process making valuable allies of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who brought them out on tour.
“To me The Mars Volta is proof that rock ’n’ roll is alive and well and going in a beautiful direction,” Anthony Kiedis told me last summer.
The band recorded their debut album with Rick Rubin and Flea played bass on the sessions.
“I had fired our bass player right after tracking, and I was just gonna play the bass parts myself since I know all these songs in and out,” Omar resumes. “And then in a dream it came to me that it was so obvious and right under our nose – all we had to do was call our friend who was a big fan of the band, who already knew some of the songs because he was such a fan and had learned them, and who was a wonderful spirit and definitely had a feel for what we were doing. So we called up and he crammed all those songs in three days and we had a huge exorcism. It was random yet it was precise.”
Rodriguez-Lopez is equally fulsome in his praise of Rick Rubin.
“I think he just understands the importance of spirits, the fact that the energy will have a direct transference into a record, it involves a lot of elements that are being captured on the tape that are far beyond our own recognition and our own perception. As humans, as deep as we wanna get with philosophy and blah-blah-blah, we still exist on a very shallow plane and there’s so many layers and levels happening all the time that we’re completely unaware of, and it’s so extremely complicated.”
De-loused In The Comatorium was conceived as a testimonial to the band’s friend, El Paso artist and musician Julio Venegas. Venegas was by all accounts an extreme individual – he attempted a morphine overdose after his mother’s death, went into a coma, and when he came out of it had lost the use of the right side of his body and had to learn to walk again. On another occasion he shot up a dose of rat poison that shrivelled his arm. By the time he died in 1996, jumping off a freeway overpass into rush hour traffic, his body was so covered in scars, cut marks, bruises and bumps that some of his closest friends called him Frankenstein.
“Y’know, people would talk to us in interviews and say, ‘I couldn’t find anything on this artist Julio Venegas,’ not realising there’s nothing to find, that’s the whole point,” Omar explains. “He was a close friend of ours, a family member, someone who never got the chance to show the world how talented he was, just like I’m sure many, many other artists in many countries around the world. We played with him and he recorded my first band and he was a mentor of sorts, he opened our minds to all kinds of other writers and other music besides what we were listening to at that age, being 13 and 14 and stuck in the whole punk rock thing.”
What kind of stuff did he introduce them to?
“Like, King Crimson or Allen Ginsberg or Aldous Huxley or Pink Floyd. We were very much in the mindset of only listening to punk rock bands that were on tour in the underground, that was our whole world at the time, what was happening in the early ’90s, Operation Ivy or Anti/Schism.”
Death struck the band’s inner circle again this summer just before the release of De-loused, when Jeremy Ward died of an apparent drug overdose in his LA home, shortly after returning to the US from a European tour supporting the Chili Peppers. Presumably it was extremely difficult to go out on tour with their bandmate’s absence so present?
“He’ll always be with us in spirit, but it’s hard as a human to get used to the physical aspect of not having him here, y’know,” Omar admits, his voice choking up a little. He pauses, takes a deep breath and goes on.
“We all have very strong views on death, and it’s definitely a positive thing, he’s just reached a new beginning in his life cycle, and we haven’t yet.”
Is that a typical Hispanic attitude to death?
“I dunno, I think so, I think most Puerto Ricans believe in reincarnation. I just think you constantly have to be deconstructing things; you have to leap from one body to another. Death is only new beginning, and our whole thing is about beginning, finding a new form of expression.”

De-loused In The Comatorium is out now on Universal