Since forming out of the ashes of At the Drive-In in 2001, The Mars Volta have cut a lithe, genre-less swathe through modern music. Over the course of three acclaimed long-players, the LA-based group – tied to the creative pairing of prolific composer-producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala – have visited anything from psyche and progressive rock, to free jazz experimentalism, Latin and forward-thinking metal.

Nonetheless, the making of The Mars Volta’s fourth and most accomplished record to date – this year’s The Bedlam in Goliath – was anything but straightforward. The product of disgruntled drummers, nervous breakdowns, cursed recording spaces and a blatant creative dictatorship, the epic 80-minute opus will go down as one of the more oddly fruitful rock misadventures of recent years.

We spoke Cedric Bixler-Zavala about the record, his purely improvised approach to lyrics and becoming a mere pawn in Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s creative game.


The Bedlam in Goliath seemed a lot more intense and unyielding, at least sonically, than the last couple of records. Would you say that was the case from your angle?

Yeah, I’d say it’s a lot more aggressive than the other ones. But the aggression and the intensity probably had a lot to do with the fact that it took us two years to find a drummer and a working band…well not two years, but about a year to get everything going again after we asked our other drummer to leave.

So there’s that kind of intensity and Omar is really, really exercising the idea of not letting anyone rehearse anything; you learn it five minutes before he records. So that’s another sound that comes off as a little aggressive, because we’re all kind of pissed off that we have to learn such complicated stuff right away (laughs).

Sometimes he’ll let me take some stuff home and work on it and that’s good in that respect too, but mostly the gibberish and the first reaction and the stuff that’s not even in word form, he likes to keep that a lot too.

Speaking of that, do you ever self-edit or are you much more interested in that purely expressive response?

Sometimes I like to edit, you know. I feel that I can do both. It just depends on how he might view it as a producer. He’s got his different way of looking at the picture from the back of the room, you know.

Sometimes I’m not that comfortable because it’s kind of naked, you know, having my first reaction to the song go on record. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that sometimes it’s necessary and sometimes it’s unnecessary.

In the context of your work generally being an immediate response, tell me about you do outside the studio creatively. Do you write for yourself or have a creative means outside of that immediate expressive moment?

Sometimes I do, but I’ve been realising that the more I exercise the immediateness of adlibbing right then and there – I guess what, in hip-hop, they just call freestyle – I’ve been having so much fun with that, that I feel like I should just stick to that. There’s a part of the football game when they bring out the field kicker, you know what I mean (laughs)? I have fun knowing that that’s my job and it can fail miserably or it can be a lot of fun, you know.

I guess that’s the most punk-rock thing about it; you could look like an idiot and sound like a fool, but that’s what humbles you and reminds you that you’re human.

You and Omar’s process kind of sounds much more like hip-hop, where the producer gives the rappers a beat to work with and then they come back with their verses…

I actually drive around listening to Madlib’s instrumental stuff and sing to it…

I love that guy…

It keeps me on my toes because he’s got a lot of great melodies and a lot of great rhythm. He’s a really interesting drummer too. When we did ATP, he was there with the Stones Throw people and he took a drum solo. He kind of sounded like the way certain filmmakers want to come off as if it was the first time they’d picked up a camera – it’s really innocent and they’re not actors, but real people – and it’s really cool. His drum solo was kind of like that. He looked like a little kid who had just discovered the drums and he sounded like that and it was just so fresh.

The making of this record together sounded like an absolute freak show. Did the record end up sounding anything like you guys had originally thought when you first started tracking it?

I’m not really sure, because I’m not sure what we wanted it to sound like. It just ended up being that way. I’m just along for the ride, really. I don’t like to classify it as anything while I’m doing it, because to me, it just becomes like a Hallmark card – this redundant, kind of rhetorical slogan – and takes away form what it could really be.

If you just pretend you can’t see the big, pink elephant in the room, but you know it’s there. It’s fun like that. You always try to reiterate that mission-statement to the people in the band. It’s cool that there’s a big pink elephant in the room. Don’t scare it off by giving it a name. Admit to it being there… The results of that can be really, really cool and kind of beyond what we could have ever conceived.

I can’t really imagine how this kind of loose, expansive approach would go down well with a major label. You and Universal have always struck me as odd bedfellows…

We have our little running joke that the well has run dry because we haven’t written another ‘Widow’, you know. We always joke around, you know, that the money was plentiful when ‘The Widow’ existed… I don’t know how we’ve survived on there. I’m knocking on wood and hoping that this next one will be the last contractual obligation and we can just pick and choose from the big machine and do what Radiohead are doing.

Not everyone can do what Fugazi does. It’s a really great, romantic, socialist way of doing things, but having five people in the band and having everyone relegated to a certain task – you book the promoter, you book the shows, you deal with the food – I just want to play, man! The ideas are so over-the-top that I just can’t do it all DIY. But I figure, the way Radiohead have done it, they’ve got their foot in the door, they’ve played the game, they know what they hated about it, they know what they liked about it, and now they’ve playing by their own rules and people will always buy their records now. It just took OK Computer, which spawned a whole bunch of imitators and forged their career for them in a way.

Looking at what you guys have been through as a group, and just in the process of making this album, so many bands would have just given up. What’s held you together?

The fact that one day Omar put his foot down and said ‘Enough talk, I’m in charge’. Because if he hadn’t of done that we would still be a bunch of method actors arguing over what they fucking motivation for the fucking song is, which gives you nothing but grey hairs.

I’m really glad he did that; I’m really glad that one day he just put an end to all that kind of stuff and just made it easy. And hopefully it’s a template that more people can follow and understand and maybe even try to emulate. A lot of the time, the romantic notion of a band having total democracy is just like lying to yourself in the mirror. And you compromise art that way – you really do – because not everyone’s put on this earth to make strong decisions like that, you know.

Dan Rule

The Mars Volta play Sydney’s Horden Pavillion on Thursday, June 19; the Brisbane Convention Centre on Saturday, June 21; Melbourne’s Forum Theatre on Monday, June 23 and Tuesday, June 24.    

The Bedlam in Goliath is out through Universal

(Pic: Ross Halfin)