Crash-Course No. 32: At the Drive-In, Rock Band Made Flesh

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.

Crash-Course, No. 20: I'm Not On Drugs, You're on Drugs!

Third image, first best.

Where’d I hear about On Drugs? No goddam idea, which is exactly the problem with moving fast. Then again, they committed to treading lightly onto the internet - and by choice - and it hardly helps their name gets buried under a bigger act like War on Drugs. On the plus side, I might finally know how Kurt Vile had that huge head start I missed…

As hinted at above, finding much of anything beyond bare-bones promotion is damn near impossible with On Drugs. You have to double-check every headline just to find the band members - Elias Avila, Derek Housh, Cameron Gates, and Steve Gartman, which I found on something like the third link I found (a San Diego Reader plug), and without any mention of who does what - so they really do live the brand. On the other hand, a whiff of novelty isn’t the worst selling point:

“From their experimental punk drone to their intentional lack of an internet presence, they're the band you may not have known existed until you saw them…”

Because they titled an album titled Uckhole Futah, I assumed On Drugs came out of Utah, but, nope, they started in Portland, Oregon. I have a loose sense they relocated to San Diego, California upon signing with Postmark Records - none of the entries on that site last real long - but, based on the venues they played on a 2019 tour, where they come from matters less than where they can play. (Something I mean in the best possible way, because that’s where I’ve found most of the bands - i.e., people who play off the beaten path, but not too far.)

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the “experimental punk drone” holds up because they have a decent range - included in the sampler - between something that fits that bill to circle-into-a-circle perfection like “Squish,” to a pure old-school punk number like “Tony Hawk,” to the dreamy lo-fi number “Scaredy Cat” (which gave me Modest Mouse with less distortion and gave my wife, “I don’t know, something 80s, but also boring”), to garage-rock tear/cover like “Tequila.” Even if those aren't the hardest genres, there’s some decent musicianship going on, basically, a band with the chops to build a live-set around a couple spins around the genre-wheel, only without using the internet for promotion.

Crash-Course No. 11: UltraVoxyCars, From the '70s Into the '80s

Behind the scenes, Sirens.

Another week, more tweaks to the format; the benefits of having a tiny platform never stops giving, really. Moving past that tiny pile of rubble...

Background
Learning a bunch of cool shit about Hall & Oates triggered a very specific and personal childhood memory. When that coincided with the recent passing of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer and public face of 1980s legends, The Cars, I decided to make this The Cars Week. Like most people, I comfortably karaoke at least a half dozen Cars songs, maybe even more, but I didn’t know much about them. There was the thing how googling “Ric Ocasek” reliably extends to “Ric Ocasek’s wife,” something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about either Mr. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova. (What so many failed to recognize: Ocasek had talent.) As for that memory…

Throughout my childhood, other kids, my older sisters, just society kept telling me that this band (e.g., Simple Minds for reasons I can neither recall nor explain) or that band (Split Enz?) started as a “punk band.” The angularity of The Cars’ sound (I borrowed that adjective, btw) made me wonder they fit that bill. The Cars arrived into the music world more or less fully-formed, as it turns out. Ocasek, along with the earlier departed Benjamin Orr, hit the ground running; some of their biggest hits – e.g., “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” – appeared on their debut album. While I’m sure they have more ins, outs and points of interest than my cursory dip into them turned up, the only ones that feel worth mentioning are, 1) Orr and Ocasek starting in a Midwest-based folk act called Milkwood; and, 2) does anyone still represent for the band’s third album, Panorama. (For the record, I didn’t, but I also only gave it one, semi-distracted listen.)

So, ruined as I was by that Hall & Oates experience, I shifted to thinking about other bands. The time spent on The Cars wasn’t a total waste: I kept “Bye Bye Love” from their debut for the playlist plus the title track and “Let’s Go” from the follow-up, Candy-O. And The Cars are one of those bands that no one else really sounds like, and that’s admirable. Just not what I was after...

On Finding What I Wanted Across the Pond
Because I watched MTV from the get-go, I associate The Cars with a bunch of bands from the same time that got lumped under the label, “new wave,” most of them English. As happens with genre labeling, the filing gets complicated from the get-go, but I stumbled across a nice key-word definition in the Wikipedia entry on “new wave” that lays out a good, broad outline: