Don't Act Like You Don't Care: Interview With The Mars Volta's Cedric Bixler

Words By Jeff Meyers
Photos By Andrew Parks

For all the indie dorks out there, you must know who The Mars Volta is by now. Everyone got on the At the Drive In bandwagon right before they decided to break up. ATDI broke into two bands: Sparta is 3/5 of ATDI and focuses on a heavy rock sound, and The Mars Volta features Cedric Bixler and Omar Rodriguez , the two infamous afros of ATDI. This band focuses on the more experimental side of ATDI. The Mars Volta is compromised of the most talented musicians in the music scene today: Flea, from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, is the bassist on the LP. Through all that has happened in Cedric's life he has been able to move on and forge ahead.

What was your idea when you first started Mars Volta?

We wanted to cut our teeth on woodchips as long as possible and get a personality developed. We wanted to do a tour with the Locust but our first drummer didn't work out real well. We canceled the tour. We got Jon Theodore to come down from Baltimore because Golden wasn't doing too much. We needed to figure out our personality all over again. We wanted to keep the certain style of drumming that we needed to keep. He's been playing super softly for a long time. It wasn't the Jon Theodore I knew. We spent a lot of time trying to get something small out of the way. I think a lot of bands when they first start they like concentrate on cosmetic things like websites, t-shirts and stickers. We wanted to work on our music. I know that sounds cliché. We took shitty tours with The Anniversary so there weren't any expectations and we would be playing for people that we knew wouldn't understand it right away. A lot of Vagrant Records' crowd is stereotyped that way. We wanted to play for linear, Warped Tour kind of white kids.

It would be easier to play for people who want to hear us but those people didn't have a clue as to what we were doing. It was good to humble ourselves and start over. We just got in the van and had no merch. We just had our songs and figured out who works in the band and who was attracted to the band simply because Omar and I were from At the Drive In and wanted a steady project and notoriety and to use the band as a stepping-stone. Sure enough, that is why we don't have the same people from the EP.

You knew that this band was going to be a challenge?

This is the main reason we did the Red Hot Chilli Peppers tour. It would be really easy to cash in from the notoriety of At the Drive In. We decided to go out in an even weirder audience that wouldn't understand what we were doing. There are bands that tour all 5 boroughs of New York City and think they work really hard so they can get a tour bus on their first tour. We wanted to build character and eat shit for a while. Every band should learn to do that or else your band is going to be known as the band that got famous [because] his dad is an owner of a modeling agency and that's why they are popular. Who cares about the music if we are good looking? It's surprising because [there are a] lot of people now that have hot, kinky hair. That's sort of a recurring thing that happens with bands: everyone wanted to look like Sid Vicious and that kind of killed the momentum and the impact of what they talked about. Then again, the rest of the Pistols really [weren't] that smart, [it was] just one person, John Lydon. Monkeywrenches in the system always make better art.

How come you didn't put the lyrics in the CD booklet?

That deals mostly with the fact of being on a major label and working with the big machine. I wrote a really lengthy story that goes with the lyrics. It was so long that I had to edit it and we spent so much money making the record. I didn't want to edit it for an interior CD format. I figured that there [are] a lot of young people who come to our shows and a lot of these young people do come from a Warped Tour mentality. A lot of people that we attracted at the end of [At the Drive In's career] were people glued to TV and they were used to that short facet of information and they have severe ADD problems as far as pop culture goes. It's my way of having little faith in the attention span of 14 year olds so I figured I didn't want to edit anything but if they want the lyrics they have to get the story.

Most of my time I would have to spend my free time on tour in interviews explaining the whole issue with the lyrics. This time around as [opposed] to At the Drive In, the lyrics aren't left up for interpretation. There is total meaning behind [them.] As cryptic as people might make it to be or as obscure as they think it is, everything has a meaning. I know the CD came out but the record isn't done because the vinyl isn't out yet. We are in the process of getting the artist to get the vinyl specs ready.

It took me awhile to get the story finished because in a way I was still writing it after it was "done". I was filling the cement in between the bricks (bricks meaning the music.) Instead [of including my story] I put different quotes from different characters in the CD and it makes you wonder what it is about. I want this band to have fans that really want to get to the heart of the matter. You have to get the vinyl if you want to know the art [behind] it. It will force people to take a step [and] go buy a record player if anything [else], and buy vinyl and support that. It shouldn't be just DJ culture that's trying to keep that medium alive. It's our way of trying to keep [a] certain medium alive. It's better to hold something larger than smaller.

The story is based on a true story?

It's influenced by a true story about a friend of ours who killed himself. I didn't want to tell the story black and white because there would be too [much] finger pointing going on and a lot of names being dropped, especially years after the fact. It would [be] better if we did something that was fictional, like a present for the character because he was a good friend of ours. A lot of things that are based on this true story I fictionalized and directed it to a different situation. There is a lot of symbolism going on. It's a personal present for someone who died. Hopefully, it's my romantic way of thinking that [in any one] place that [this album] would an auditory homing beacon, so if he is stuck in such a place called purgatory (because supposedly when you kill yourself you go to purgatory)…I am not necessarily a practicing Catholic but I like to think if he is stuck somewhere, when the vinyl spins, it will be a beam of light for him.

Do the lyrics fit with the music? Does the dramatic part of the story correspond with the dramatic part of the song?

Yeah, some parts, like in "Cicatriz ESP" when it drops out and it's nothing but modulate guitar riffs, like a soundtrack. Every sound in the record really does represent certain characters in the story and certain clips in time. He travels from place to place while he is in the coma so in order to represent the sound of his travel, the sounds are used to amplify the dramatic parts. Every sound you hear is something going on in the story. You should read the story when you listen to the record. It's not going to ultimately sync up like Pink Floyd and the Wizard of Oz, it would just make more sense and [the story] answers the question of why certain noises are in certain places.

When is the story coming out?

Should be coming out in August or maybe pushed back to September. GSL does the vinyl. Any kind of success for this band will benefit GSL.