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| Oh, man. Memories... |
Who They’re For
On the most basic level, fans of hard rock, but it gets a little complicated from there. At the Drive‑In’s sound is aggressive, no question, but it possesses a subtlety that goes beyond the indie-rock, semi-traditional loud/soft/loud pattern; the vocals and instrumentation combine in melodies qualities that contrast against brash, staccato elements, as well as the ones that, for lack of a better word, crash or even collide. There’s a violence to it, on some level. Some more advanced descriptors - and from a couple places.
First a note: whereas you get “just the facts” on some Wikipedia pages (e.g., bare lists of album releases and tours), some editors give a little love, not unlike mash-notes from a doting fan. For instance, their Wiki-editor dished this helpful breakdown of At the Drive-In’s sound:
“The band's guitar-playing, in the majority of their songs, is characterized by unusual chords, a fast tempo, and a quiet-loud-quiet song structure. While Jim Ward and Paul Hinojos provided the rhythmic structure of the song, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez often played more experimental riffs and melodies over the top. Effects were heavily used by Rodriguez-Lopez, especially on Relationship of Command, while Ward used the keyboard to create melody, often switching between the guitar and keyboard such as in "Invalid Litter Dept.”
Or, for simpler name-drop description from a 2017 piece in The Guardian:
“...they looked and sounded like a post-hardcore version of MC5 crossed with Os Mutantes.”
If those names don’t ring a bell, here are some influences (from Wikipedia): Indian Summer, Swing Kids, Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate, Bad Brains, Nation of Ulysses and Drive Like Jehu.
A Little More
At the Drive-In "started in a ditch" in the mid-1990s when Cedric Bixler-Zavala met the first person in El Paso, Texas who took leaving El Paso as seriously as he did, a guitarist named Jim Ward. (Fun aside: Bixler-Zavala briefly played in a band with Beto O’Rourke…yes, that one, but decided he wasn’t serious enough; he still had very kind things to say about O’Rourke in a 2017 interview with Las Vegas Weekly). They added members piece-by-piece (which takes a bit, actually), and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez came in early, but, once they had enough members, that hit the road and just started going, show after show, EP after EP, tour after tour after tour. The process started with the Hell Paso EP in 1994, followed by the Alfaro, Vive Carajo! in 1995 and they took the songs, first, all the way around Texas, then all over the country, using a 1981 Ford Econoline van as their chariot.
Playing basements and small venues, they built a national name by word-of-mouth. When their “big moment” arrived, it couldn't have possibly looked the part on the way in. As the legend goes, they rolled up to a now-defunct bar in Los Angeles where an audience of nine greeted them. They played their usual set* for that dinky-ass crowd, not knowing employees from Flipside Records lurked among them; those employees signed them the same night. (* I saw At the Drive-In once at…think it was La Luna then, and that shit was straight-up fucking FIRE. Nothing before or since has come close to knocking it out of my all-time top 5 shows.) Flipside held up their side of the bargain when At the Drive-In returned to LA at the end of a 25-day tour of the American Southwest and recorded 1996’s Acrobatic Tenement, the band's first full LP, on a shoestring budget ($600). They finalized the line-up shortly thereafter by adding Paul Hinojos (bass) and Tonny Hajjar (drums); Rodriguez-Lopez shifted from bass to join Ward on guitar. After some more touring (I’m not sure they ever really stopped), they recorded another EP - 1997’s El Gran Orgo - and, to repeat, got back in the van two days later for a 35-day, 11,000 mile tour.
The big time (or their version of it) arrived after it looked like they’d hit bottom. After struggling to find a label when Flipside stopped producing records, At the Drive-In finally found a home at Fearless Records. That made getting out their second full LP possible, 1998’s In / Casino / Out. To that point, they’d struggled with a familiar problem (hell, it afflicted KISS): capturing the mega-wattage of their live shows in the studio. They addressed that on In / Casino / Out by recording the tracks live, direct, and with minimal overdubs. They went bigger for 2000’s Relationship of Command, for which they called in the duo of Ross Robinson, who had promised them “he was the guy who could get every ounce of them onto tape,” and Andy Wallace to handle the mixing. The album succeeded beyond anything they’d done to that point - they even turned out a single with “One Armed Scissor” - and it did something more: it set a benchmark:
“Relationship of Command is the high against which every post-hardcore record since 2000 has been measured.”
And, just about a year or so later, At the Drive-In disbanded. At some point during all that flat-out running around, tensions developed within the band. Some were creative - e.g., Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala wanting to take the band in a more “prog-rock direction” (toward the (first) end, one or the other let slip they wanted At the Drive-In’s next album to sound like Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn) - others followed from borderline epic drug use (Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez, again, which might explain the drift to prog), while others followed from simple exhaustion. The final break came while on tour in Europe, home of their original following, when they cancelled the last five shows on their tour. By early 2001, they’d called off a U.S. tour and took an indefinite hiatus. The two main factions on the band went on to form their projects - Ward, Hinojos and Hajjer to an alt-rock outfit called Sparta, and, after a couple attempts, Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez to the prog-rockier The Mars Volta (both of which I’ll get to during January).
I read another take on that first split in a (frankly fascinating) 2020 interview with Rodriguez-Lopez in The Line of Best Fit. In his eyes, as well as Bixler-Zavala’s, they weren’t doing anything more than invoking a kind of fail-safe they’d come up with “if shit ever gets weird.” The extended explanation:
“So the big misconception there is that people think we broke up in Europe because we cancelled that tour and everything, but in fact we didn't, we just cancelled the tour. I was fed up, and we always had a rule between the five of us that we called 'The Six Month Rule': if shit ever gets weird, if we can tell things are going wrong, we'll take six months off. So when we were at Vera, in Groningen, I was just lifeless, so after the show we as friends got together and I said 'This isn't fun anymore. I don't like this'. So Cedric said, 'That's it, let's call the rule'.”
The other three members wanted to get back to work, and immediately, and that’s how the split wound up extending for over a decade. It took them nearly seven years just to start talking again - something Rodriguez-Lopez arranged by inviting them to his place in Mexico (“We hung out for three days with nothing else to do but talk and cry about it, to ask for forgiveness and to forgive; all of those things that happen in a family”). They attempted a mini-reunion, but with no new music in 2012, but that fell apart (in part) due to Rodriguez-Lopez grieving the loss of his mother (Bixler-Zavala shared some wise, reflective thoughts on this in a 2017 interview with Dazed Digital). In 2017, the whole band tried once more - this time with new music - with the recording and release of inter alia (read some good commentary on process in this article). Ward only got as far as turning up, but, once he got wind of recording and potential tour dates, he backed out entirely. He’s the only one who never made it all the way back and, as he’s made clear before (from 2012, “I don’t think that I'll be answering any questions or doing any interviews anymore, thank you very much. I haven't got much to say about anything except with songs which I will continue to make and release”) he won’t be coming back. At the Drive-In returned to indefinite hiatus toward the end of 2018.
One thing that comes through in all the several interviews I read - most with Bixler-Zavala - is that, for all the fighting, these aren’t people who slag off on each other. These are men who wear their emotions on their sleeves and in vivid, flaming colors, but there’s a notable fondness and generosity in how they talk about one another, even after splits. And those seemed to have happened, like, a lot: even Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez went over a year without talking after The Mars Volta split in 2013 (or thereabouts). Hell, Sparta’s former guitarist, Keeley Davis, joined them for the 2017 reunion after Ward dropped out, so they can’t be awful to play with.
About the Sampler
I went with balance between the albums I listened to - e.g., Vaya, In / Casino / Out, inter alia, Acrobatic Tenement, and, of course, Relationship of Command, aka, the only At the Drive-In I ever managed to own, pre-streaming…which is why I went a little nuts on that one and wound up with a…frankly, stupid number of songs on the sampler, e.g., 22. (Also, for the record, Spotify doesn't provide Hell Paso, Alfaro, Vive Carajo!, or El Gran Orgo, which sucks because hearing their sound develop would have been fun.) With that, I may as well start with Relationship (which, as I see it, earned that sterling reputation), from which I brought in: “Pattern Against User,” “Mannequin Republic,” “One Armed Scissor,” “Sleepwalk Capsules,” “Invalid Litter Dept.,” and the delightfully creepy, “Enfilade.” Shit just tears through your speakers, and you don't regret it for a second.
It gets more even there, from the (damn good) rough drafts of Acrobatic Tenement (e.g., “Starslight,” “Ebroglio,” “Skips on the Record,” and “Ticklish”), through Vaya (hard-driving numbers like “Heliotrope” and “Proxima Centauri,” the positively Fugazi-esque “Rasuache” and the subtler “198d,” which has a nice preview of where Bixler-Zavala’s vocals would wind up) and In / Casino / Out (another Fugazi nod on the opening to “Alpha Centauri,” dynamic numbers like “Transatlantic Foe” and “Hulahoop Wounds,” and a buzzsaw of a number in “Pickpocket”). Even if it took a couple listens to take, inter alia grew on me enough by the end that I’m hoping that At the Drive-In comes back for one more album, and mostly due to what sound like Rush-style guitar work on “Tilting at the Univendor” and “Torrentially Cutshaw”; the other two numbers dropped into the sampler were “Incurably Innocent” and the nice-‘n’-shouty “Continuum.”
I’ve parked on revisiting At the Drive-In for quite a while - and not in a way any different from all the other stuff I bought or borrowed before giving in to streaming. Getting through the sense of “been there, done that” is a hard one for me to overcome. That said, I think I’ll find the same thing with a lot of those bands that I found with At the Drive-In - i.e., that I hadn’t done nearly as much as I thought I had. Till the next one
On the most basic level, fans of hard rock, but it gets a little complicated from there. At the Drive‑In’s sound is aggressive, no question, but it possesses a subtlety that goes beyond the indie-rock, semi-traditional loud/soft/loud pattern; the vocals and instrumentation combine in melodies qualities that contrast against brash, staccato elements, as well as the ones that, for lack of a better word, crash or even collide. There’s a violence to it, on some level. Some more advanced descriptors - and from a couple places.
First a note: whereas you get “just the facts” on some Wikipedia pages (e.g., bare lists of album releases and tours), some editors give a little love, not unlike mash-notes from a doting fan. For instance, their Wiki-editor dished this helpful breakdown of At the Drive-In’s sound:
“The band's guitar-playing, in the majority of their songs, is characterized by unusual chords, a fast tempo, and a quiet-loud-quiet song structure. While Jim Ward and Paul Hinojos provided the rhythmic structure of the song, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez often played more experimental riffs and melodies over the top. Effects were heavily used by Rodriguez-Lopez, especially on Relationship of Command, while Ward used the keyboard to create melody, often switching between the guitar and keyboard such as in "Invalid Litter Dept.”
Or, for simpler name-drop description from a 2017 piece in The Guardian:
“...they looked and sounded like a post-hardcore version of MC5 crossed with Os Mutantes.”
If those names don’t ring a bell, here are some influences (from Wikipedia): Indian Summer, Swing Kids, Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate, Bad Brains, Nation of Ulysses and Drive Like Jehu.
A Little More
At the Drive-In "started in a ditch" in the mid-1990s when Cedric Bixler-Zavala met the first person in El Paso, Texas who took leaving El Paso as seriously as he did, a guitarist named Jim Ward. (Fun aside: Bixler-Zavala briefly played in a band with Beto O’Rourke…yes, that one, but decided he wasn’t serious enough; he still had very kind things to say about O’Rourke in a 2017 interview with Las Vegas Weekly). They added members piece-by-piece (which takes a bit, actually), and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez came in early, but, once they had enough members, that hit the road and just started going, show after show, EP after EP, tour after tour after tour. The process started with the Hell Paso EP in 1994, followed by the Alfaro, Vive Carajo! in 1995 and they took the songs, first, all the way around Texas, then all over the country, using a 1981 Ford Econoline van as their chariot.
Playing basements and small venues, they built a national name by word-of-mouth. When their “big moment” arrived, it couldn't have possibly looked the part on the way in. As the legend goes, they rolled up to a now-defunct bar in Los Angeles where an audience of nine greeted them. They played their usual set* for that dinky-ass crowd, not knowing employees from Flipside Records lurked among them; those employees signed them the same night. (* I saw At the Drive-In once at…think it was La Luna then, and that shit was straight-up fucking FIRE. Nothing before or since has come close to knocking it out of my all-time top 5 shows.) Flipside held up their side of the bargain when At the Drive-In returned to LA at the end of a 25-day tour of the American Southwest and recorded 1996’s Acrobatic Tenement, the band's first full LP, on a shoestring budget ($600). They finalized the line-up shortly thereafter by adding Paul Hinojos (bass) and Tonny Hajjar (drums); Rodriguez-Lopez shifted from bass to join Ward on guitar. After some more touring (I’m not sure they ever really stopped), they recorded another EP - 1997’s El Gran Orgo - and, to repeat, got back in the van two days later for a 35-day, 11,000 mile tour.
The big time (or their version of it) arrived after it looked like they’d hit bottom. After struggling to find a label when Flipside stopped producing records, At the Drive-In finally found a home at Fearless Records. That made getting out their second full LP possible, 1998’s In / Casino / Out. To that point, they’d struggled with a familiar problem (hell, it afflicted KISS): capturing the mega-wattage of their live shows in the studio. They addressed that on In / Casino / Out by recording the tracks live, direct, and with minimal overdubs. They went bigger for 2000’s Relationship of Command, for which they called in the duo of Ross Robinson, who had promised them “he was the guy who could get every ounce of them onto tape,” and Andy Wallace to handle the mixing. The album succeeded beyond anything they’d done to that point - they even turned out a single with “One Armed Scissor” - and it did something more: it set a benchmark:
“Relationship of Command is the high against which every post-hardcore record since 2000 has been measured.”
And, just about a year or so later, At the Drive-In disbanded. At some point during all that flat-out running around, tensions developed within the band. Some were creative - e.g., Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala wanting to take the band in a more “prog-rock direction” (toward the (first) end, one or the other let slip they wanted At the Drive-In’s next album to sound like Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn) - others followed from borderline epic drug use (Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez, again, which might explain the drift to prog), while others followed from simple exhaustion. The final break came while on tour in Europe, home of their original following, when they cancelled the last five shows on their tour. By early 2001, they’d called off a U.S. tour and took an indefinite hiatus. The two main factions on the band went on to form their projects - Ward, Hinojos and Hajjer to an alt-rock outfit called Sparta, and, after a couple attempts, Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez to the prog-rockier The Mars Volta (both of which I’ll get to during January).
I read another take on that first split in a (frankly fascinating) 2020 interview with Rodriguez-Lopez in The Line of Best Fit. In his eyes, as well as Bixler-Zavala’s, they weren’t doing anything more than invoking a kind of fail-safe they’d come up with “if shit ever gets weird.” The extended explanation:
“So the big misconception there is that people think we broke up in Europe because we cancelled that tour and everything, but in fact we didn't, we just cancelled the tour. I was fed up, and we always had a rule between the five of us that we called 'The Six Month Rule': if shit ever gets weird, if we can tell things are going wrong, we'll take six months off. So when we were at Vera, in Groningen, I was just lifeless, so after the show we as friends got together and I said 'This isn't fun anymore. I don't like this'. So Cedric said, 'That's it, let's call the rule'.”
The other three members wanted to get back to work, and immediately, and that’s how the split wound up extending for over a decade. It took them nearly seven years just to start talking again - something Rodriguez-Lopez arranged by inviting them to his place in Mexico (“We hung out for three days with nothing else to do but talk and cry about it, to ask for forgiveness and to forgive; all of those things that happen in a family”). They attempted a mini-reunion, but with no new music in 2012, but that fell apart (in part) due to Rodriguez-Lopez grieving the loss of his mother (Bixler-Zavala shared some wise, reflective thoughts on this in a 2017 interview with Dazed Digital). In 2017, the whole band tried once more - this time with new music - with the recording and release of inter alia (read some good commentary on process in this article). Ward only got as far as turning up, but, once he got wind of recording and potential tour dates, he backed out entirely. He’s the only one who never made it all the way back and, as he’s made clear before (from 2012, “I don’t think that I'll be answering any questions or doing any interviews anymore, thank you very much. I haven't got much to say about anything except with songs which I will continue to make and release”) he won’t be coming back. At the Drive-In returned to indefinite hiatus toward the end of 2018.
One thing that comes through in all the several interviews I read - most with Bixler-Zavala - is that, for all the fighting, these aren’t people who slag off on each other. These are men who wear their emotions on their sleeves and in vivid, flaming colors, but there’s a notable fondness and generosity in how they talk about one another, even after splits. And those seemed to have happened, like, a lot: even Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez went over a year without talking after The Mars Volta split in 2013 (or thereabouts). Hell, Sparta’s former guitarist, Keeley Davis, joined them for the 2017 reunion after Ward dropped out, so they can’t be awful to play with.
About the Sampler
I went with balance between the albums I listened to - e.g., Vaya, In / Casino / Out, inter alia, Acrobatic Tenement, and, of course, Relationship of Command, aka, the only At the Drive-In I ever managed to own, pre-streaming…which is why I went a little nuts on that one and wound up with a…frankly, stupid number of songs on the sampler, e.g., 22. (Also, for the record, Spotify doesn't provide Hell Paso, Alfaro, Vive Carajo!, or El Gran Orgo, which sucks because hearing their sound develop would have been fun.) With that, I may as well start with Relationship (which, as I see it, earned that sterling reputation), from which I brought in: “Pattern Against User,” “Mannequin Republic,” “One Armed Scissor,” “Sleepwalk Capsules,” “Invalid Litter Dept.,” and the delightfully creepy, “Enfilade.” Shit just tears through your speakers, and you don't regret it for a second.
It gets more even there, from the (damn good) rough drafts of Acrobatic Tenement (e.g., “Starslight,” “Ebroglio,” “Skips on the Record,” and “Ticklish”), through Vaya (hard-driving numbers like “Heliotrope” and “Proxima Centauri,” the positively Fugazi-esque “Rasuache” and the subtler “198d,” which has a nice preview of where Bixler-Zavala’s vocals would wind up) and In / Casino / Out (another Fugazi nod on the opening to “Alpha Centauri,” dynamic numbers like “Transatlantic Foe” and “Hulahoop Wounds,” and a buzzsaw of a number in “Pickpocket”). Even if it took a couple listens to take, inter alia grew on me enough by the end that I’m hoping that At the Drive-In comes back for one more album, and mostly due to what sound like Rush-style guitar work on “Tilting at the Univendor” and “Torrentially Cutshaw”; the other two numbers dropped into the sampler were “Incurably Innocent” and the nice-‘n’-shouty “Continuum.”
I’ve parked on revisiting At the Drive-In for quite a while - and not in a way any different from all the other stuff I bought or borrowed before giving in to streaming. Getting through the sense of “been there, done that” is a hard one for me to overcome. That said, I think I’ll find the same thing with a lot of those bands that I found with At the Drive-In - i.e., that I hadn’t done nearly as much as I thought I had. Till the next one
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