On the evening of February 21, 2001, mid-way through At The Drive-In's show at The Vera, in the Dutch city of Groningen, guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez took off his guitar mid-song, and walked off the stage.
"I look over and Omar is just standing there," remembers his best friend and long-time bandmate Cedric Bixler-Zavala. "I was like, Oh shit, that's not good."
"I was just so mad, and I just didn't want to be there," Rodriguez-Lopez recalls in Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, the award-winning 2023 documentary film charting the life-long friendship and fascinating, fearless creative journeys shared by the two El Paso-raised musicians. "I felt like I'd cheated myself somehow. and I felt like all my hypocrisy was just in my face all of a sudden... I felt that it was my own corruption staring back at me that put me in the situation."
Rodriguez-Lopez was in tears when his bandmates found him in the venue's dressing room.
"It kinda seemed like fucking for fucking's sake," he said of the gig, trying to convey the lack of connection and hollowness he felt onstage.
While such emotions may not be uncommon among weary, jaded artists as they slide inexorably towards irrelevance, but at this point At The Drive-In were arguably the hottest 'new' band in the world, thanks to the acclaim heaped upon their Relationship Of Command album, released the previous year.
Recorded by Ross Robinson (Slipknot, Korn, Limp Bizkit), and released on the Beastie Boys' ultra-hip Grand Royal label, the quintet's third album took inspiration from Washington DC hardcore icons Fugazi and Bad Brains, and San Diego's Drive Like Jehu and Swing Kids, and positively vibrated with energy, attitude and almost tangible excitement.
Previewed by stunning bolt-from-the-blue single One Armed Scissor, performed live on British TV's foremost music programme Later... with such passion and ferocity that fellow guest Robbie Williams was visibly awed, the 11-track collection emerged to blanket hyperbole-laced reviews, uniting music critics from broadsheet newspapers, the metal press and self-regarding 'serious' music publications in unanimous praise in a manner not witnessed since the 1991 release of Nevermind. The influential British weekly NME duly hailed the Texan group as “The New Nirvana”, a bold comparison which instantly thrust the somewhat bewildered young musicians into mainstream consciousness, and raised expectations for those newly introduced to the band sky-high.
"They put a lot of fucking stupid hype on us that wasn't necessarily fucking true," Omar reflected in the 2023 film. "You don't call a bunch of kids from El Paso 'The Next Nirvana'. We were not that."
While the band's frustration here was understandable, they should perhaps have looked closer to home to identify the original source of this hype.
“This band can save rock,” stated Grand Royal's director of marketing, Kristen Welsh, in the September 2, 2000 issue of respected US music industry 'bible' Billboard,.
This was a bold, eyebrow-raising assertion, not least because, from a commercial, business-related viewpoint, rock music, in the US was in rude health at the time, with Rage Against The Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Creed all landing number one albums on the US Billboard 200 chart the previous year, and Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne's newly-launched Ozzfest emerging as 1999's most talked-about hit tour.
But the comment would have found favour among those in the entertainment media who regarded nu metal as the 'wrong' sort of rock music to champion, just as they had sneered at the global success enjoyed in the mid-'90s by pop-punk artists such as Green Day and The Offspring. For their part, echoing the dismay and frustration expressed by Kurt Cobain when Nirvana gate-crashed the mainstream a decade earlier, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala made no secret of their disdain for the macho posturing and casual misogyny exhibited by some of the rock and metal artists with who they now shared stages, and even less respect for the more aggressive elements among those bands' fanbases. One of the most memorable scenes in the Omar and Cedric documentary finds the pair calling out overly-physical "slam-dancing" fans watching their set at 2001's Big Day Out festival in Australia as "robots" and "sheep", horrified at the dawning realisation that their mounting popularity would be reflected in changes to the make-up of their audience. "The bigger your audience, the dumber it gets" they conclude in their film.
"When you're hot," Omar reflects, "your management is telling you, 'You gotta hit it now. You worked so hard and so long to get to this actual moment, now is the time not to take your foot of the gas.'
'[But] we were tired man, we were tired of the road, tired of each other, tired of the bullshit we were dealing with."
Something had to give, and in Holland, on February 21, it did. Footage filmed in their dressing room post-gig that night shows a distressed Rodriguez-Lopez telling his sympathetic bandmates, "The machinery beat us."
This, however, was not meant to be the end of At The Drive-In. Collectively, the five musicians had always agreed that if the pressures and strains of being a working rock band ever proved to be overwhelming, they would simply hit 'Pause', and take a six month time-out to reset. Backstage at The Vera, they agreed to honour this pledge in order to prioritise their mental health and save their band, and informed their management, label, publicists and booking agents of their decision. Unsurprisingly then, Omar and Cedric were outraged when, nine days later, their management contacted them to say that their three bandmates had withdrawn their consent to the agreed hiatus, out-voted the pair in a new group ballot, and signed up for a new batch of shows - an extensive US headline tour, European festival appearances, 10 gigs in Canada, trips to Mexico and Japan - stretching from March through to September.
"At the time, I was like, I don't want to play with those motherfuckers anymore," the guitarist states bluntly.
On the day following Jim Ward's spring wedding, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala informed their band-mates that they were quitting the group, and launching a new venture, The Mars Volta. "We made a lot of people angry," they acknowledge in their documentary, recalling Ward telling them that he would enjoy watching the pair fall flat on their faces with their new band, and predicting that they would soon "come crawling back."
In fact, it would be 11 years before At The Drive-In re-grouped, and by the time they hit stages again, Ward had been dismissed from their ranks. This time around, older, wiser and happier, Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez were determined to enjoy the ride on their own terms.
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird will be released on DVD on February 21.
