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I didn't grow up with rock music. I don't come from that rock sort of mentality... rock music is very limited in its format. It's limited in its music, it's limited in its approach, and it's limited in the way people perceive it. People go to see a rock band, they perceive the singer. He's up front. He must be the leader. He must be the person who does everything. They forget the frontman is there for a reason. He fronts the group. There's someone else, you know, behind the curtain, there's the Wizard of Oz somewhere. -Omar Rodriguez Lopez |
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"During the time of At The Drive-In, I was still a drug addict, so I was very much under the spell of not liking yourself and not believing in yourself, hating yourself and trying to destroy yourself at all costs. So, what that did was hinder my true self, to hinder what it is I'm capable of. I was constantly putting myself down and limiting my role," explains Omar. "I think a lot of that came out of fear, out of saying, 'I'm not good enough to... I'm not smart enough to... I couldn't possibly... So I'm just...,' and once I quit doing drugs and once I started The Mars Volta it started flipping and it became the opposite, it became, 'Wait a minute, I can do anything I feel like doing. I'm only limited by my imagination.' And all of a sudden there was this big realization that, 'Wow, that applies to everything in life.' So, if I want to grab control of our business and if I want to grab control and have it be my band and not have it be this fake democracy we had in At The Drive-In then I can do that, too."
 Omar Rodriguez Lopez |
And that's exactly what he's done. Omar has taken control of everything and it's not just The Mars Volta and all that goes along with it (the producing, writing, touring, etc), he records and tours under a dizzying array of monikers making it difficult for even the dedicated fan to keep track. In addition to The Mars Volta, there's the simple solo recording name Omar Rodriguez Lopez, the Omar Rodriguez Group, Omar Rodriguez Lopez Quintet (which can shift from a quartet to a sextet) and the latest addition, El Grupo Nuevo De Omar Rodriguez Lopez.
Certainly this seems a bit excessive - aren't these all really just Omar side-projects? Well, not so much side-projects but extensions, and like any gifted artist blazing at the peak of his creativity, it's always changing, shifting, pouring over the rim, busting out of the faucet. And when a new project is formed with new musicians playing new/original material, Omar gives them a new name.
"People have to remember, too, I didn't grow up with rock music. I don't come from that rock sort of mentality, like you're in Kiss and that's it. I grew up with salsa music and my heroes were Eddie Palmieri, Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe. And it's just this whole different thing. These are records like jazz music. These are records where the bandleader, for all you know, is the guy playing the two sticks, you know? Not the singer," he says. "And rock music is very limited in its format. It's limited in its music, it's limited in its approach, and it's limited in the way people perceive it. People go to see a rock band, they perceive the singer. He's up front. He must be the leader. He must be the person who does everything. They forget the frontman is there for a reason. He fronts the group. There's someone else, you know, behind the curtain, there's the Wizard of Oz somewhere."
But this Wizard isn't smoke and mirrors; Omar is the real deal. And this is it, folks, this is perhaps the single defining kernel of what makes Omar's music so "important" – and if you aren't yet willing to go that far, then at least compelling, entertaining and original. He ain't from this part of town, and he didn't grow up on American rock radio. Born September 1, 1975 in Bayomón, Puerto Rico, Omar came from a house where – like most Latin families – salsa music was a cornerstone of everyday life. He isn't limited by four chords and power moves. Omar is definitely operating on the rock landscape, utilizing such visceral, psychedelic brutality that at times it's often too heavy for new ears, but instead of being rooted in the blues it has grown out of Latin soil, and that changes everything. The rhythms are different, the tempos, the way it flexes, the heart and the soul. By taking all that and plugging deep into heavy psych, post-punk and experimental waters Omar is truly adding pages to the modern rock history book - scratch that - he's adding chapters.
The latest additions, the 2009 Chapters if you will, thus far include the Volta album and four solo ones with the majority of the non-Volta work being recorded around 2006 while Omar lived in Amsterdam. It may seem odd that we are just now hearing the stuff recorded in 2006, but this is how the man works. He loves the process. It's about creating music, not creating product. And because of the velocity with which he operates, he's always moving forward, only stopping to actually release albums when the "craving" strikes him.
This process of constantly making music borders on obsessive and you might say it's his new drug, with guitars and sheet music replacing needles and balloons, but there's more to it, a very tangible goal to the proceedings. "Think of it as if I've been running," he says. "I've done enough jogging and running that I'm very fast, or I've been lifting enough weights to where I'm really strong by the time I get to the Mars Volta record."
However, it's not that the solo work is a disposable exercise or the songs are all that different than what eventually makes it onto a Mars Volta album. "When it's actually happening, when the material is being written, there is no separation; I don't ever sit down and go, 'Now I'm writing a Mars Volta song. Now I'm writing a solo song'," he explains. "But that having been said, definitely anything that I do – whether it becomes a solo record or what not – anything I do ends up being an exercise for when I do get to quote-unquote focus on a Mars Volta record."
The material is always broken up after the fact as Omar looks it over and finds groups that work together, the core idea being that he's always refining ideas leading up to his yearly Mars Volta masterpiece. The five to ten solo albums he'll release in a year on his own label are ways of fleshing out ideas so that when the major label (read: big money) production (and we must always remember Omar is the producer as well as guitarist and bandleader) arrives he's 100-percent ready with laser-lock vision.
Continue reading for more on Omar Rodriguez Lopez...
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