The Mars Volta’s Dark Muse
Thursday, January 31st, 2008This is going to get weird. Not just any weird, either — obsessive weird. Occult weird. Rock 'n' roll weird.
The Mars Volta, a California rock band that's plenty strange on its own, attributes much of its forthcoming album, "The Bedlam in Goliath," to the influence of sinister communiques from a Ouija board the musicians dubbed "The Soothsayer."
They insist they're not joking.
"I felt like I was fighting for my life, if that makes any sense, or for my sanity," guitarist and songwriter Omar Rodríguez-López says by phone from Los Angeles, before starting a tour that comes Friday to New Haven. "I felt like I wouldn't be normal or well until I finished the record and had it completely out of my life."
Finishing became a hellish odyssey. Mixing the songs stretched from the few weeks Rodríguez-López had expected into months, and he once spent 37 straight days in the studio trying to untangle the dense, claustrophobic mp3 music the band had recorded. The tracks seemed almost to resist the process, which resulted in a nervous breakdown for the audio engineer who had been involved before Rodríguez-López took over. Call it the latest episode in a career that has rarely wanted for drama.
Rodríguez-López and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala formed the Mars Volta in 2001 after splitting from the influential post-punk band At the Drive In. Their full-length debut, 2003's "De-Loused at the Comatorium," featured Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass and was inspired in part by a friend who had committed suicide. The follow-up, 2005's "Frances the Mute," was inspired by another death: The band's sound technician, Jeremy Ward, overdosed on heroin in 2003. Ward's death prompted Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala to curtail their own drug use, and his personal effects yielded a diary he had found while working as a repo man. Many of the songs on the album were based on characters from the diary.
Maybe drawing inspiration from a Ouija board isn't so far-fetched after all.
Rodríguez-López was on vacation in Jerusalem when he bought the board for Bixler-Zavala, and he says his friend took to it right away.
"He had brought it on tour when we were touring with the Chili Peppers for [the 2006 album] 'Amputechture,' " Rodríguez-López says. "Out of curiosity, we started messing with it. Cedric seemed to get really attached to the thing and started immediately, after every session we had, writing down every piece of information that was told to us. Or we were telling ourselves, At all you want to see it."
The Soothsayer, the band says, related a dark tale of romantic betrayal and murder, yielding details that became fodder for Bixler-Zavala's lyrics on "The Bedlam in Goliath," due Jan. 29.
"This record has more of the straight-ahead lyrics he's written, because generally those are terms that came to us straight from the talking board, or from the poetry we found inside it," Rodríguez-López says.
Wait — inside it?
"The board was coming apart, and there were papers inside, and we had them translated, and he took the liberty to use a lot of these words and names and locations and themes and consider it some sort of form of automatic writing," Rodríguez-López says.
When the details turned dark, though, the board became an object of obsession, almost addiction, for the band, and the negative energy the musicians felt became a concern.
"Not that Cedric doesn't take this stuff seriously. We both come from similar backgrounds," Rodríguez-López says. "But mine is much more deeply rooted in Santeria and hidden things. Being from the Caribbean, I grew up with that sort of stuff and horror stories about it. My family warned me never to mess with that, and if I played with what the world refers to as magic, to play with white magic and always make it something positive. And early on, it seemed like the story we were being told in general was very negative, and I was able to distance myself from it and sort of bow out. Cedric, on the other hand, was just very attached to it."
Eventually, the musicians disposed of it for what felt like their own well-being, though they're vague on the details.
"I keep comparing it to addiction because it's a frenzy," Rodríguez-López says. "I'm able to talk about it now and have a sense of humor about it and accept other people's explanations or perspectives on what happened. At the time, though, I felt like I was high."
Despite the bad vibes and, well, flat-out weirdness of making "The Bedlam in Goliath," Rodríguez-López says the resulting album is a statement of triumph and perseverance despite adversity.
"Now, it sounds like a very positive record to me, a record full of light," he says.
THE MARS VOLTA performs Friday at Toad's Place, 300 York St., New Haven. Tickets are $27.50; doors open at 7 p.m. Information: 203-562-5589
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