At The Drive-In are a Texas-based band who have what could only be described as a pretty interesting history with Australia. Just a few months ago they released their first record in 17 years, Interalia, and struck while the iron was hot by landing some massive festival slots at the likes of Reading and Leads.
For the most part now I see people taking care of each other
To keep the ball rolling, the band are now heading down here for a headlining slot at Yours and Owls festival, and their appearance is sure to stir some pondering regarding their last festival extravaganza at Big Day Out way back in 2001. In conversation with the BRAG, frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala reminisces on that fateful show, and in particular, how drastically he thinks things have changed since then. For a start, he reckons that live music festivals are now frequently safer spaces.
“For the most part now I see people taking care of each other,” he says. “Everything’s a lot more relaxed. I see women now being like, ‘If you touch me in a certain way I will have you for dinner’, which is great!” That, Bixler-Zavala says, is a fry cry from shows he attended in the mid ’90s. “The hardcore men could not handle a woman up in their face and challenging their ideas, telling them how they can’t tell her what to do with her body.”
After all, it was that infamous Big Day Out show in which Bixler-Zavala took his own stance on the issue of poor crowd control. “Big Day Out was like one gigantic stage, and you’re separated by a bunch of equipment separating the bands so two bands can fit on it. We had some face-painted nu metal band to the right of us, so that crowd shifted all the way to our end when we started playing. So it just got really ugly. I didn’t want any of our fans being hurt so I was just thinking, ‘Aw man, can those bands just go away?’
“I remember getting mad at the audience because it wasn’t even our audience; it was the face-painted nu-metal audience being outwardly aggressive, and like, ‘Yeah let’s kick some ass.’ I remember a dude on a raft crowd-surfing, and it was just like… Yeah you guys suck. I wasn’t berating our audience; I was just berating the kind of mindset of ‘sports’ crowds.”
Not that Bixler-Zavala is some kind of straight-laced member of the party police. He is, at his heart, a punk, and despite the illustrious and versatile back catalogue he boasts as a member of with various projects, he is consistently driven by the mentality of anti-establishment thinking.
“I grew up watching bands like Fugazi, and they would call out jock dickheads in the crowd, so I was young and was like, ‘Yeah I’m going to do that too.’ You don’t want to spend your life preaching to the converted: you need to go do uncomfortable shit, make yourself the brand new kid at school where everyone is like. ‘Let’s kick his ass.’ That is what I learnt in punk rock: it’s essential to have that because once you have that and you have your own audience that means you’ve worked hard for it.”
At The Drive-In play Yours And Owls ,which runs from this Saturday September 30 to Sunday October 1.
