Something in the Room / NO. 001 · An October series

An antique talking board, a troubled recording and the friends who helped The Mars Volta finish The Bedlam in Goliath.

By Margin Tone

The story around The Mars Volta’s fourth album, The Bedlam in Goliath, began with a gift between old friends. Guitarist and composer Omar Rodríguez-López brought singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala an antique talking board from Jerusalem. Cedric needed lyrics; the board seemed to supply them. By the time the record was finished, Omar had buried the gift somewhere Cedric couldn’t find it.

A talking board is the kind of thing often called a Ouija board: letters, numbers and “yes” and “no” laid out on a surface. People rest their fingertips on a small pointer, the planchette, and watch it spell out what they take to be messages from spirits. The arrangement leaves plenty of room to wonder who is moving whose hands.

Omar and Cedric had formed The Mars Volta in 2001, building a changing band around their partnership. On tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they spent evenings on the bus with the board, which they called the Soothsayer. The lights stayed on. Cedric remembered looking at Omar and asking, “Are you pushing this thing, or am I pushing this thing?”

Cedric wrote the messages down. In his account to Westword, he’d been struggling for inspiration, and the music needed words. Now he had material that excited him. Even as the messages became frightening, he kept going back. He later compared the repeated attempts to recover that first excitement to chasing a high. Omar had chosen something his friend would love, and found it difficult to get him to leave it alone.

A story emerged about a woman and her mother trapped under a man’s power. Cedric called the oppressive presence, or the voices gathered together, Goliath. He believed these people had reached him through the board and wanted their story heard. The commitment outlasted the sessions with the pointer: after the album’s release, he was still telling interviewers that the board had helped him find a way to write about violence and oppression.

While they worked, Omar’s home studio flooded and equipment failed. Recorded material was damaged or disappeared. Bill Murphy’s February 2008 production feature describes corrupted session files being pieced back together and flood damage to vintage pedals and microphone power supplies. Omar came to believe the spirits were responsible. Cedric thought the board had aggravated his foot trouble, even though he also knew the condition was hereditary and made worse by touring.

The work had become punishing regardless. Omar described fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. Because the studio was at home, leaving work offered no easy change of surroundings. He told The Georgia Straight he went thirty-seven days without seeing sunlight: work until exhaustion, sleep, begin again. “There was no escaping the record,” he said. Later he could hear the melodrama in his fear that he would lose his sanity unless he finished. At the time, he meant it.

Omar ordinarily wanted some unease in the studio. Cedric told OC Weekly that the guitarist liked catching musicians’ anxiety and anger on tape, and usually kept them from preparing the material elsewhere. Even Cedric could take only some compositions home. Omar valued the initially wordless, improvised takes before everything was settled. The band’s way of working deliberately left people without much time to get comfortable.

There was a firm limit to who could decide what happened next. Omar and Cedric had the final say, an arrangement musicians were told about when they joined. Yet when Omar was asked whether the group could fall apart, the departure he couldn’t contemplate was Cedric’s. “He’s my childhood friend,” he told The Skinny. He wouldn’t want to continue this music without him. When damaged recordings and a dispute over the material made Omar consider starting again, Cedric argued for finishing what they had. They’d put too much into it; beginning again could take years.

Engineer Robert Carranza helped them find another pace. A June 2007 studio report placed the band at Ocean Way in Hollywood, still expecting an autumn release. Carranza’s account of recording Cedric is refreshingly unhurried: they would try a vocal, hang out, take a shot of Jägermeister, loosen up and try again. A performance that had eluded them could then arrive.

In his August 2007 EQ interview, Carranza described a rule he’d recently adopted: “no more than three whole takes an hour.” He wanted time to listen to what had changed. Digital recording made it possible to keep correcting without stopping; he missed the pauses once imposed by rewinding tape. He admired the freshness Omar’s late instructions could produce, but he also valued the interval before another attempt.

New drummer Thomas Pridgen brought a different kind of readiness. After long phone conversations, he and Omar met in Ohio and played backstage for about half an hour. Omar then told him they would play that groove for the audience that night. Pridgen was up for it. Cedric remembered the band laughing and joking onstage again with him, feeling younger. Making the record had become miserable, but playing together could still be fun.

The talking board, however, had to go. Cedric told The Marquee that Omar buried it without telling him where, knowing he would be tempted to return. They also put protective images into the album artwork. Cedric described saints for good luck and compared parts of the vinyl package to the traps in Ghostbusters. He could talk about these precautions with humour without withdrawing his belief in what had happened.

Finishing the recordings still allowed for sudden experiments. On “Goliath,” Murphy reported, Omar manipulated the effect on Juan Alderete’s bass while Alderete played, committing the sound during the take. Mixer Rich Costey described Omar asking, late in the process, for a whole passage to come out of the left speaker for ten seconds. Costey went along with him. Even under the pressure to be done, the record remained something they could change.

Released in January 2008, Bedlam carried the haunting into its publicity. The band commissioned novelist Jeremy Robert Johnson to write the release story. He gave listeners a part in it: circulating the music might disperse whatever had attached itself to the musicians, or spread the trouble. This was a story written to promote the record, with buying and playing it made into another encounter with the board.

Omar was willing to leave more than one explanation open. Perhaps they had contacted spirits, as they believed; perhaps the board had given them access to the subconscious. He told The Georgia Straight that either possibility interested him.

For the next album, Octahedron, Omar returned to gentler material he’d initially worked on alongside Bedlam, before the troubled sessions took all his attention. In a 2009 Village Voice interview, he said he was tired of the unbroken assault; even the live show needed room to breathe. Distance had changed his feelings about the earlier record, too. “As much as I hated making that record, I fell in love with it at the end,” he said.