|
Authority Zero is a band that doesn't give a lot of thought
to product placement. Just ask AZ guitarist Bill Marcks. "A
lot of bands would ask us, 'Where you gonna put your disc
in the record store-is it gonna be punk or reggae or ska?'
And that's not what we're about."
Straight outta Westwood High School-the same Mesa, Arizona,
institution responsible for Jimmy Eat World-Authority Zero
started kicking out the jams in 1994 when Marcks met vocalist
Jason DeVore and quickly learned that the Wyoming native "could
write catchy songs in fifteen minutes with really sticky hooks."
Next, the pair recruited bassist Jeremy Wood, who had actually
taught Marcks how to play guitar (Stone Temple Pilots' "Plush"
was his first lesson). A drummer or two later, Los Angeles
transplant Jim Wilcox was a fixture behind the kit. "We're
all from different musical backgrounds," Marcks offers.
"I'm a Chili Peppers, Buddy Guy kind-of-dude; Jason's
into SoCal punk; Jeremy's all about Metallica and Slayer,
and Jim's into hardcore and Hip Hop."
After a best-selling local EP recorded between cigarette
and skateboarding breaks, Authority Zero hooked up with Lava
Records and released their full-length debut, A Passage In
Time, in 2002. Loaded with nods to musical entities as disparate
as Sublime, Bad Religion, Dick Dale, and Manu Chao, the album
put AZ on the road for the better part of two years, thanks
to the success of the singles "One More Minute"
and "Over Seasons."
Tours with punk stalwarts Guttermouth and H2O ensued, "which
was cool, because those are the bands we listened to growing
up," DeVore enthuses. Stints on Warped Tour, the No Use
For A Name/Starting Line tour, and Sum 41's "Sum On Your
Face" extravaganza followed. "Our audience has grown
a lot as we tour more," Marcks explains. "It's good
to see our efforts pay off-sleeping for four hours a night,
driving for six to get to the gigs, partying all night afterward."
The Warped Tour was especially gratifying for AZ. "We
loved it, because that's our crowd," Wilcox beams. "That's
what we grew up on. That's what we based our band around."
Remember the days before wireless Internet, Friendster, and
email-when people used to talk to each other? AZ's fans certainly
do. "Whenever we go back to towns, we're playing bigger
shows," Marcks confirms. "We don't always have a
lot of radio support everywhere, so it's been word-of-mouth.
It's pretty cool…like alternative communication,"
he laughs.
By the time the band landed back in Arizona, the word-of-mouth
had taken on a life of its own. The group wanted to be sure
and stay close to their local scene, so AZ began playing under
aliases in their hometown. Bills featuring bands called the
"Irish Car Bombs" or "Hurley Bro Dogs and The
Pop Bitches" would occasionally surface in and around
Phoenix. "There was this shit-talker on our message-board
who said all our fans were Hurley bro-dogs and pop bitches.
So we kinda wanted to irk him by calling ourselves that,"
Marcks explains. An Authority Zero song even turned up on
Playstation 2's Tony Hawk Underground. "We think it's
because Tony Hawk watched our set out in Aspen at the Winter
X-Games," Marcks offers.
Before AZ could catch their collective breath, it was time
to record a new album. They enlisted famed Fat Wreck Chords/NOFX
knob-twister Ryan Green and unofficial Sublime member Mike
Happoldt (a.k.a. Miguel) to co-produce. "We pretty much
wrote the album in a month," DeVore says. "It all
happened pretty quickly," Marcks adds, "but I think
the short amount of time added to the intensity."
Authority Zero has dubbed their second album Andiamó.
"It's the Italian equivalent of 'we go,'" Marcks-the
band's resident linguist-explains. "Jeremy is of Italian
descent, and he's always saying it to us. We've always had
Irish and Spanish influences in our music, but we haven't
had any Italian yet. Also, if you say it out in English, it
reads, 'And I am zero.'"
Andiamó was recorded at Steve Smith's SJS Studios
in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Marcks had a run-in with the
local wildlife. "Instead of putting our garbage in a
can, we were putting it in a bag outside the door of the studio,
and it attracted a family of Javalinas [the Mexican name for
the Southwest's indigenous peccary, or wild boars],"
the guitarist laughs. "I went outside one night to use
the phone, and we scared the shit out of each other. One of
them grunted at me, so I ran back inside, but he ran after
me, and I had to slam the door on him."
It's these kinds of brushes with maiming that provided AZ's
creative inspiration. From the strident Bad Religion wail
of "Painted Windows" to the taut Dead Kennedys velocity
of "1000 Years Of War" to a cover of Wall Of Voodoo's
"Mexican Radio," Andiamó is the sound of
a band that has honed their far-flung influences to a surgical
strike. "It's all really new, but at the same time, we
went back to the roots of what we played originally,"
Marcks says. "There's a song on there, 'Society's Sequence,'
that we wrote back in '96, and we have this old recording
of it that we did with three mics that we clipped and put
on the beginning of the new track." Former Sublime DJ
"Field Marshall" Goodman even lent a Long Beach
all-star hand to Andiamó, mixing a recording of the
Bill Of Rights into "PCH-82" (Pacific Coast Highway-82
beats per minute).
As with A Passage In Time, Authority Zero maintains their
Portuguese and Spanish tendencies on Andiamó. From
Marcks' flamenco guitar fills to the occasional song title
("Siempre Loco"), the members of AZ are always looking
to give the musical gyroscope a healthy twirl. It might confuse
the shit out of the genre police, but that's the local record
store's problem.
"People are no longer taking what's being fed to them,"
Marcks says. "It's forcing the world to become more contemporary.
The borders are starting to get blurred; there are more influences
involved-and we've been doing that for ten years. Good music
is universal-anyone can dig it."
Band description courtesy of Luckymanonline.com
Back
|
