My All-Timers: 8. At the Drive-in — In/Casino/Out

I saw At the Drive-In live more times than most people got to. I saw them four times between 1998 and 2000. But not until the final time, months before they broke up, was I fully on board with them.

When I saw them in August of ’98, they were opening for a friend’s band at Hairy Marys. With no more than 15 people in the crowd, they cranked up their amps and gave a blistering, frenzied performance that shook the building. And I didn’t like it. They were too abstract, too weird, and all I really liked at that moment was straight-forward punk rock. I left before they were done.

Then they opened for Fugazi later that year (I know, Fugazi and ATDI on the same show, which is insane). I liked them a little more, and I was especially intrigued by a song that would later become one of my very favorite songs ever, but I didn’t buy their CD, and I moved on.

I saw them again in August of ’99, and it was finally starting to click. The musicianship made a little more sense, and they were still performing like their lives depended on it.

So I borrowed In/Casino/Out from a friend, and it all came together. I had matured enough that I was ready for music that didn’t have a basic punk beat, that wasn’t furiously distorted, that just felt different. I was ready for something different, and At the Drive-In came along for me at just the right moment.

I almost wrote this piece about Relationship of Command, ATDI’s major-label release produced by the same guy that did Korn and Slipknot. It’s a beefed-up version of emotional punk/hardcore/rock, and as brilliant as most of it is, it sometimes gets lost in its own sound, as if the production and ambition weighs the songs down too much, diminishing its power.

In/Casino/Out does not suffer this fate because it was made at a time when At the Drive-In had pretty much found themselves, but they had no lofty goals of being famous. In fact, because money was a little tight for them from Fearless Records, they had to make the record in just three days. This meant that all of the performances on the record are live, with the whole band being recorded at once, and with very few overdubs after the fact. The live fury which they had cultivated to perfection was able to live and breathe fully, coming through the speakers with no smothering production. This is probably why it appealed to me so much — it had the energy of punk rock, while not needing to sound like much of anything that came before it.

The song that got me obsessed with At the Drive-In, “Napoleon Solo,” is nothing like traditional punk rock. It starts with Omar Rodriguez and Jim Ward playing a high-pitched riff together in 3/4 time — pensive and dark, slow but anxious. Cedric Bixler speak-sings in a lower register than usual, in his beat poetry language, but then drops the pretense: “A hint of suspense when that telephone rings. This is forever.” What you wouldn’t know unless Bixler explained, which he did at the Fugazi show, is that they wrote this song in tribute to friends of theirs from an El Paso band who died in a car accident. Though this accident is never explicitly referenced, the emotional toll runs all through the song, especially the chorus, which feels larger than life. They definitely did a couple guitar overdubs on that one, because goodness gracious, it is thick.

Further evidence of At the Drive-In’s genius comes on “Chanbara,” a noisy freakout with tinges of Latin rhythm. The guitars have a weird filter on them when they’re not exploding with feedback, and a bongo is being played in a manner that avoids all hippieness. Bixler shouts words in the chorus that you can barely understand: “Tour de force, tour de force, de facto, ayachuco, ayachuco, ayachuco.” A friend of mine thought Bixler was saying, “I hate you, God! I hate you, God!” He wasn’t, but he might as well have. Bixler’s uncontrollable spasms of live energy came through on record, especially on that song.

“Chanbara” might brush off any accusations of ATDI being an emo band, whatever that really meant at the time, but elsewhere, their more sensitive skinny-guy side couldn’t help but show. “Lopsided” has a jangly, melodic riff and a pretty lead line in the chorus, as well as some of Bixler’s best singing on the record. Conversely, though their emo side showed here, they still structured it so that a pretty melody has a harsh rhythm that hits hard at the beginning of each measure, and the end of the song allows the band to freak out, as you can see in the attached video.

That video of “Lopsided” is pretty much what happened every time I saw At the Drive-In play. In an underground scene where they were unspoken rules about looking cool and fitting a stereotype, ATDI, especially Bixler and Rodriguez, did away with all rules and let their hair down (literally). They flailed about the stage, threw the microphone in all directions, and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe what made me fall in love with ATDI is that they proved that you could be a weird freak and still attract a fanbase. You didn’t have to do everything you were told. You could write strange music that didn’t conform to a genre and still convey your angst with precision.

I might understand if you were to make the case that Relationship of Command or even the Vaya EP are better, but I have In/Casino/Out ranked so high because it is one of the precious few records that quite literally changed my way of thinking about music. Those records don’t come along too often.