AT THE DRIVE IN
The splenetic Latino punkers look back on a history of spats, splits, label shenanigans and producer weird-outs. Somehow, they’re friends again. Or mostly…
The most ferocious American band of their generation imploded due to endless internal warfare and narcotic excess. Seventeen years after that initial collapse, At The Drive In are reunited and ready to face down their past. “We’re lucky to be here,” they tell Stevie Chick.
it’s close to four decades since Washington dc’s 9:30 club first opened its doors as a 200-capacity venue, becoming home to the city’s burgeoning 1980s hardcore scene and a regular stop on the us punk touring circuit. these days, the venue is capable of holding six times as many people as its initial backroom incarnation, but it remains a hallowed space to members of el Paso’s at the drive in. sitting backstage, frontman cedric Bixler-Zavala is reciting his favourite between-song ad-libs from dc heroes Minor threat’s 1983 concert at the 9:30, immortalised on the live video, a cornerstone of any self-respecting punk’s collection. tonight’s show sees the band making up for their blow-out at the club last year, when the show was cancelled minutes before stage-time due to a problem with the singer’s vocal cords. You could call it defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory – a recurring motif of the atdi story. in fact, their 2000 album Relationship Of Command seemed poised to drag the ethics, the energy, the ferocious creativity of the entire post-hardcore punk scene into the 21st century, offering up an alternative to the homogenised nupunk pap of the time. a mere 18 months later, however, at the drive in were dead and almost buried… their story begins in early-’90s el Paso, a mostly Hispanic, mostly working-class texas border town. el Paso’s main punk hangout, the dead end, is a warehouse running on stolen electricity, putting on shows by crust-punk bands like scherzo and antischism. it’s here that guitarist omar rodriguez-lópez, a scrawny Puerto rican kid with dreams of becoming a salsa musician, has been dragged by his buddy, Paul Hinojos. He sees fights, he hears bottles breaking, and he befriends cedric BixlerZavala, two years his senior and as skinny as he is. omar decides he loves the dead end and that he loves punk. “that place was so full of life,” he grins today. cedric’s own conversion to punk rock came via skateboarding and cable tV screenings of another state of Mind, the commendably grim 1984 rockumentary of a disastrous social distortion tour that climaxed with the band’s break-up in dc. “it made me want to do this,” says cedric. “My aunt said, ‘Why?? they get paid in pennies!’” undaunted, cedric formed numerous punk bands: foss, los dregtones, at the drive in. this last band was his most ambitious, uniting him with local guitarist Jim Ward. “i couldn’t understand it,” remembers omar, who at that time was a dropout hitchhiking across america. “Jim was college rock, not punk rock; we used to call him ‘the Young republican’.” But Ward was driven, and cedric wanted atdi to be more than mere “weekend warriors”. omar returned to el Paso to join the fledgling group as they undertook their first tentative tour, heading to oakland, california. typically, the shows they booked fell through. “there’s an art to failure,” reflects omar. “We soaked up the energy of the scene there. We got to see where dead Kennedys played, we stayed up all night, talking until the sun came up. it was romantic. We were seeing this life we’d only read about in [fanzines] Book Your own fucking life and Maximum rock’n’roll.” further “disastrous” tours followed; at one la show, the audience consisted solely of three writers for punk ’zine flipside and Mudhoney drummer dan Peters.
“The Mudhoney guy bought our 7-inch, though,” smiles Cedric. “Didn’t pay the bills, but I was spiritually rich.” Meanwhile, Flipside writer Blaze James became their manager, and the group cut their debut album, Acrobatic Tenement, for Flipside’s label at the end of the tour. Then, as would happen on various occasions, the band fell apart, and Jim Ward left. Tony Hajjar, a metalhead Chemistry genius about to complete his degree, deferred his studies to play drums; along with incoming bassist Paul Hinojos, this new rhythm section took on the organisational duties. With renewed impetus, they headed back out in a death-trap tour van with no insulation, icicles forming on the ceiling as they slept. A shared bottle of tequila kept them warm at night. Struggling to shift their records at the merch stand, they instead sold Mexican wrestling masks and lethal Faro cigarettes they bought cheap in Juarez. Jim Ward was invited back into the ranks, only to leave again – something he would do repeatedly during the band’s history. Despite their internal volatility, a series of low-budget recordings – in particular, 1998’s In/Casino/Out LP and 1999’s Vaya EP – saw the group’s sound take shape, foregrounding their complex-but-compelling riffing, intricate rhythms and Cedric’s declamatory holler. Out of step with the mid-’90s pop-punk scene, their constant touring began to pay off as they escaped the cycle of 17-band ska-punk all-dayers, touring instead with the likes of the Make-Up, Karp and AFI. “We knew what it was like when your van skids on black ice and you think you’re all going to die,” says Cedric. “We were serious.”
AS THE ’90S DREW TO A CLOSE, AT THE DRIVE In controversially began talks with major labels, correctly surmising that as many sharks lurked within the indie scene as in the big league. They signed with dotcom start-up Digital Entertainment Network, who paired them with ross rob- inson, the maverick producer who’d cut landmark nu-metal albums by Korn and Limp Bizkit. ATDI disdained those records but, says Omar, robinson “got the closest anyone had to capturing our live sound.” robinson was known for creating a concentrated environment in which artists were invited to wring out their emotions in order to capture the intensity in their performance, and, initially, the sessions at Indigo ranch in Malibu progressed at lightning pelt. Then, several days in, the mood changed. “ross says he wants to start the album over,” Tony Hajjar says. “Then he says I’m not playing right, makes me re-track over and over.” The presence in the studio of Dave McClain, drummer with San Francisco thrash metal outfit Machine Head and Hajjar’s hero, unsettled Tony further. Other band members also expressed their uncertainty at the progress being made, as the atmosphere darkened. Eventually, the sessions stretched to three bleak months, immediately after which the band hit the road. At the first date, robinson approached Tony backstage and apologised. “He said he’d got some bad news about a relationship during the sessions, and wanted to keep us there for as long as possible, as he couldn’t face it,” the drummer alleges. “I broke down in tears. I told him that day, I better never fucking see you again.” The experience didn’t augur well. Neither did Digital Entertainment Network’s collapse during the sessions, though the group swiftly signed to Beastie Boys’ Grand royal record label. Nevertheless, with its feral intensity, its articulate chaos, when released in late 2000, Relationship Of Command was lauded as an inarguably great record by the media, with the anti-anthem One Armed Scissor even garnering airplay. The praise came at a cost. “We were overworked, over-interviewed,” says Hajjar. “The
“We knew what it was like when your van skids on black ice and you think you’re all going to die,” Cedric Bixler-Zavala
media were dividing us up into Omar-and-Cedric, and the rest of us.” The singer and guitarist, with their skinny frames and haywire hairdos, cut an iconic swathe amid the big-shorts grimness of turnof-the-millennium rock. Tony remembers turning up to an Italian TV interview alone and being asked if he’d wear an afro wig. An American rock magazine told Omar and Cedric to pose at the front while Jim, Tony and Paul were meant to pretend to be a three-man mosh-pit. They refused, only to be told: “We asked Korn to wear monkey suits, and they did it.” Hailed as ‘the next Nirvana’, the demands placed upon the band seemed to be willing them on to the same grisly end. “The repetition of it all caused a certain amount of insanity,” says Omar, recalling the increasingly bleak mood. Their more intimate live shows offered little respite, often grinding to a halt amid violent slam dancing. Adding to their increasing sense of alienation, Cedric and Omar had begun using cocaine and heroin, winning Jim Ward’s enmity. One rare bright spot came when they played Australia’s Big Day Out festival in early 2001. “It was the first time we all had hotel rooms of our own, yet we all ended up in the same room,” says Omar. “Nobody could have appreciated this more than we could, to have a balcony overlooking the ocean. We came from nothing. We’d worked so hard.” The joy was short-lived. A month later, after a dire show in Holland, they cancelled their forthcoming US tour. “We made this rule: take six months off, don’t even mention the band, get some time away,” says Omar. He and Cedric toured Europe with their dub side-project, DeFacto. The others went home. “Soon, wrongly, I thought I was ready,” says Tony. “Instead of sticking to the sixmonth rule, I said, ‘Let’s do this.’” Tony Hajjar chalks it up to bad communication. Omar blames bad management, alleging that there was an attempt to force them into a series of two-week ATDI tours. But when Omar quit the band and formed a new group, The Mars Volta, with Cedric while in Europe, ATDI’s hiatus became indefinite. A chance meeting between Jim Ward and Omar at a gig in San Francisco signalled the end. “Jim said, ‘You’re starting a band, eh? You and Cedric? With you in charge? This I’ve got to see. It’ll be good to watch you fall on your face.’” Omar’s soft features toughen. “I got sober that day. I couldn’t run The Mars Volta while I was still partying. It was like a challenge.”
aS THE MARS VOLTA SET OFF ON THEIR AVANTprog odyssey, Jim Ward, Tony Hajjar and Paul Hinojos formed Sparta; bad feeling crackled between the two camps. When Paul left Sparta for The Mars Volta in 2005, Tony stopped talking to him and they fell out. Hinojos, however, was determined to heal the rift. “He’d call me every week,” remembers Tony. “Early 2009, I finally took his call. We talked for hours.” The bassist’s emotional maturity won over the rest of his former bandmates, and later that year they met at Omar’s home in Guadalajara. “It went from tears, to yelling, to laughing, to talking, to ‘let’s go eat’,” remembers Tony. In 2012 a 10-date reunion tour was announced. Tragically, a week before the tour, however, Omar’s mother passed away. “I put my physical body on-stage for those shows,” he says, “but I was not in my body.” Omar’s muted performances won criticism from fans, while his reluctance to curtail his mourning and return to The Mars Volta afterwards caused conflict with Cedric. “I could have handled it a shit-ton better,” Cedric says now. “The birth of my kids [in 2013] really made me grow up.” The real rapprochement came at a songwriting session in 2014, organised by Hinojos. “He said, ‘Let’s just make some music, the conversations will come easily then’,” says Cedric. He looks over at Omar. “We’re soulmates. We hugged it out.” Jim Ward, however, was reluctant to commit to new material, forcing the band to split again for almost a year. “It was too painful,” says Hajjar. “I was going to have a heart attack.” “Jim was holding up the healing process, invalidating it,” says Omar. As a result, the band opted to move on without the guitarist. A tour was booked for March 2016. “It was like, ‘Who wants to be in the band? A show of hands?’,” says Cedric. Jim declined; exSparta guitarist Keeley Davis stepped in, learning the setlist in days. At The Drive In were back up and running.
sPrINGING Across THE Drum-kit, WIELDING his mikestand about the 9:30 stage with righteous authority, the Cedric Bixler-Zavala of 2017 is every bit as restlessly incendiary as 17 years before. The rest of the band are tightly drilled, yet frenetic and mesmerising. At The Drive In’s brand new album, in*ter a*li*a, meanwhile, conjures the artfully frenzied attack of Relationship Of Command with eerie perfection. Few bands, you’d imagine, could recapture such mercurial magic, especially with the emotional scars involved. But it’s these very tensions, plus the friendship that bonds them, that make in*ter a*li*a such a satisfying resolution to this particular hardcore soap opera. “The record wouldn’t have been what you hear without all that hard work,” says Tony later, backstage with his bandmates after the show. “We’re all lucky to be here. And at the end of each show, we still hug each other like we haven’t seen each other for six months. Every night.” “We knew what we wanted to honour with the album,” Cedric says, of reuniting this band of brothers. “Gang mentality. The fucking train’s rolling!”