Don’t Tempt The Devil, Mama Said | The Mars Volta’s arcane hobbies almost landed them in Bedlam.
The Mars Volta
May 22 (8pm). Edmonton Event Centre (WEM). Tickets: $39.50, available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca).
A phone call to Omar Rodríguez-López inevitably finds the guitarist-producer and creative impetus behind neo-prog juggernaut The Mars Volta hard at work. Even in a hotel room in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the midst of the band’s headlining North American tour, Rodríguez-López is mapping out the music that will constitute the followup to the band’s most recent album, The Bedlam in Goliath, as well as material that could land on a solo album or perhaps one of his soundtrack projects.
“I write every day on the off-days and I have my own portable recording rig that I set up in my hotel room,” he says—without a trace of mirth. “I don’t have a life.”
It’s easy to believe there’s a solid work ethic behind The Mars Volta’s dense, epic studio work, but The Bedlam in Goliath required an especially stalwart level of devotion, at least according to the legend that’s grown up around its birth pangs. The trouble started when Rodríguez-López bought a Oujia board for his longtime creative partner, vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, at a curio shop in Jerusalem. Initially a source of fun among band members while on tour, the Soothsayer, as the board became known, allegedly started to exercise a pernicious influence upon them, giving prophecies and suggestions and making demands. Soon after, a series of misfortunes befell various band members: drummer Blake Fleming quit in the middle of a tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Rodríguez-López’s home studio was nearly destroyed by a flood; Bixler-Zavala needed foot surgery and had to relearn how to walk; tracks recorded for Bedlam suddenly vanished without a trace; and the studio engineer working on the album had a nervous breakdown, leaving Rodríguez-López with an incoherent mess of recorded material that required months to untangle.
In an effort to undo the apparent curse brought on by goofing with the dark forces embodied by the Soothsayer, the guitarist buried the board in an undisclosed location and forbade band members to talk about it for the remainder of production.
Rodríguez-López says time has given them some perspective on matters. “This record now is a year old for us, so that’s plenty of time for things to change and grow and develop and become something else and look back on it and have a different idea about it. And also my head is somewhere else now, since I’ve been working on the new record and everything.”
And though he’s elbow-deep in writing material for the next album and whatever other projects his current work splinters into—he’s currently at work on 23 new songs, some of which the band has included in their live show—Rodríguez-López says he has no problem going onstage every night and revisiting the music that arose from such a dark period and nearly tore the band apart.
“The music in its live form is exactly that—it’s live, it’s living, it’s something completely different from the stale, cold, boring representation that it is when you make a record,” he says. “It’s two completely different worlds. Right after I was done mixing and mastering, I didn’t want to play it, I just wanted to move straight into record #5. I didn’t want to talk about it or have anything to do with it. And then time passes—what’s the cliché saying? ‘Time heals all wounds’—and you just sort of pull the stick out of your ass and get on with it.”
