Feature Presentation

At the Drive-In is from El Paso, so playing a gig in 100-degree temperatures is nothing new. But this is the Reading Festival, an internationally renowned three-day concert in the English countryside, where the thermometer reads just 60 degrees. On this breezy day the band is supplying the additional heat. The Carling Premier Stage—actually a tent meant to accommodate no more than 700 of Reading's 55,000 fans—is a sweatbox of blokes, beer, and body temperature. The fans who can't get in stand twenty rows deep outside, adding another 700 to the throng. Mindful of the cramped conditions, At the Drive-In's lead singer, Cedric Bixler, lays down the law. "You can do that slam-dancing and crowd-diving stuff some other time," he says in a gentle, high-pitched voice. "Let's do something different and respect each other. Save that kind of stuff for different music, because we are a different breed of band! Thank you for hanging out with us."

Then—thwack! pow! screech!—the five boys from El Paso make it impossible for anyone to stand still as they depth-charge the room with thirty unrelenting minutes of savage, angry, heartfelt rock and roll animated by an acrobatic blur of jumps, scissor kicks, and Afros in perpetual motion. A legend is born. The U.K.'s most influential rock magazine, New Musical Express, described the group as "This year's impossible to see band in a tent barely big enough for their hair." If that description seems like a mouthful, this one is more direct: The magazine's cover anointed At the Drive-In "the best new rock band on earth."

Despite that success, At the Drive-In is not so far removed from the nights when the musicians outnumbered the audience (including the bartender and the sound guy). A year ago Bixler, guitarists Jim Ward and Omar Rodriguez, bassist Paul Hinojos, and drummer Tony Hajjar, all of whom are in their mid-twenties, lay hidden in the grass roots, well known in underground punk circles but nearly invisible otherwise. They were on the verge of being on the verge. Then, in November 1999, Rage Against the Machine, the highly politicized metal-hip-hop band, brought them out on tour. Grand Royal, the label owned by the Beastie Boys, offered them a record deal with an affiliated company run by two music business veterans who played a role in the marketing of Nirvana. With the September release of Relationship of Command, the band's fifth CD, America caught up with its British brethren in the hype department. Spin calls At the Drive-In "this year's most buzzed-about rock group," and Rolling Stone says they're "rock's latest saviors." Conan O'Brien had them on for Halloween. Letterman will follow suit this month.

It's the kind of attention that can kill a band just as easily as it can make one. As Jeff Ward, Jim's father, puts it, "The press has been amazing. I sure hope the band doesn't read that stuff." Still, Jeff knows that At the Drive-In is well equipped to fend off any nonsense. Levelheaded, self-sufficient, ambitious, and idealistic, At the Drive-In may or may not be the next big thing, but the band is in it for the long haul. As with any overnight success, the group has been at it for years.

What sets At the Drive-In apart is not just its talent but its commitment, not just its vision but the tenacity with which its vision is executed. In an age in which bands expect a record deal two weeks after forming and teenagers can be dot-com millionaires, you rarely hear the expression "paying your dues" anymore. The members of At the Drive-In have paid theirs. "We've toured our asses off," Jim Ward says. "Five, six, seven hundred shows—nobody has any idea how many." Ward, Rodriguez, and Bixler have been together in one band or another since high school. Bixler and Rodriguez had already chosen lives of disposable day jobs punctuated by constant touring, and in 1995 Ward matched their fervor, swapping his college fund for a 1981 Ford Econoline and the manufacturing costs of a debut seven-inch single, "Hell Paso." "It was a tough decision," Ward says. "I did really well in high school, so I had opportunities."

The current rhythm section came together in 1997. Hinojos and Hajjar had already played together in several local punk bands and joined At the Drive-In a month apart. Hajjar had to make a choice even more difficult than Ward's: He was a semester away from his chemistry and math degree at the University of Texas at El Paso. "When I joined the band, something clicked," he says. "Like, 'This is it. Give up everything now.'" Hajjar dropped out of school, gave up his job, and moved out of his apartment because he couldn't pay the rent. "I remember writing in my journal, 'My life is completely going to change.' A month later we went out on a four-month tour, playing to two or three people a night, making two dollars a day."

And how does someone make it on the road with two bucks a day? The group learned just how far their money could go at America's Taco Bells. Otherwise, they'd hit the supermarket, and Rodriguez would whip up something with noodles or beans on his hot plate. A good night meant they would cook dinner for local punkers in exchange for a floor to sleep on. Yet those sacrifices made them part of a community and a way of life, one that began with early inspirations like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and fellow El Pasoans the Rhythm Pigs and would come to include dozens of like-minded, similarly marginalized bands. Another inspiration was Fugazi, the Washington, D.C., band known for espousing an egoless, fan-first, anti-corporate philosophy. Following in Fugazi's footsteps, At the Drive-In has always tried to play all-ages shows, and the list price of the new record is $9.98, about 50 percent less than what most companies charge. The band has also chosen to transcend and challenge certain orthodoxies, which, if you think about it, is the only punk-rock thing to do.

"Punk has become a bunch of rules and fashion," Bixler says. "It's like an unwritten Koran. To me it was always about not following rules." That's why the band members discourage stage diving, which they consider a media-dictated stereotype. That's why they worked with producer Ross Robinson, whose résumé (commercial metal and alternative bands like Korn and Slipknot) prompted some fans and critics to cry "sell-out." At the Drive-In recorded its first album, Acrobatic Tenement, for $600 in a matter of days in March 1998; making Relationship of Command with Robinson over seven weeks allowed the band's music to grow and change. And Grand Royal, though affiliated with a larger corporate parent in Virgin/EMI, is still an artist-run, medium-sized label. The band gets to call the shots about what it does and how it is sold. "We have the right to say no to anything we want to say no to," Ward says. "It's way more important to have control than money, 'cause the money goes away."

At the Drive-In brings a much-needed dose of showmanship to an alt-rock scene that's littered with artists who seem to think that standing still is a sign of integrity and that actually enjoying yourself is wrong. The band members rock like maniacs. Bixler wields his mike like numchucks, takes frequent leaps off the drum riser, and has knocked down a kit or two. They have drawn each other's blood numerous times.

"It wasn't like we jumped around and acted crazy to get noticed. It's just the way we've always done it, and now people are noticing," Bixler says. "It kind of works against us." For example, when the band members kicked off their 42-city tour after a three-week break in September, they weren't necessarily in game shape. "It's kind of hard when the cover of New Musical Express calls you the best rock band in the world and you've been sitting around eating for three weeks," Rodriguez says. (Never mind that he is so skinny he looks like he hasn't eaten in three weeks.)

Bixler and Rodriguez are equally tired of the media's love affair with the hair. It's hard to deny the Afro's visual charm, but they're starting to think it gives people the mistaken impression that they're the two most important members of the band. Suffice it to say they won't be selling souvenir Afro wigs, the way some people peddled Ricky Williams' dreadlocks (though the occasional fan has been known to don one at a show, not always with the band's approval). But the look evokes the image of seminal White Panther garage rockers the MC5, Bixler says the look is mostly laziness. "We're just hippies who listen to punk," he says. Adds Rodriguez: "This is our long hair. No thought goes into it."

Indeed, it would be a shame if the band's image overshadowed its music, because Relationship of Command's artistry proves that At the Drive-In is a whole lot more than the emperor's new 'fros. At the Drive-In is the antidote to a pop climate that's mostly bubblegum and inarticulate range. It is a band of substance, its members observers with a social conscience, their sensibilities very much a product of El Paso's poverty, violence, border tensions, and culture clashes. "This place is unique, man," Rodriguez says. "We've been to twenty countries now, and there's really nothing like it. It stands on its own."

Bixler is an oblique, impressionistic writer—he cites William Burroughs as an influence—but the meanings of lines like "this is the way I roll my R's," "pucker up and kiss the asphalt," and "the obituaries showed pictures of smokestacks" are unmistakable. That last lyric appears in "Invalid Litter Department," which happens to be one of the catchiest rock songs of the year, a discomforting statement since the track is about the unsolved murders of women in Juárez, with its elegiac piano and irresistible hook line of "dancing on the corpses' ashes."

Given the band's connection to El Paso, it came as a bit of a surprise when four members of the band relocated to California last year. Bixler says it was simply time to make a change. "It's a love-hate thing," he says. "There's the boredom [in El Paso] and a little bit of a threat of getting beat up for no reason because of the way we look." Bixler and Rodriguez live in Long Beach, a working-class city that's not dissimilar to El Paso culturally. Which may be why Hinojos and Hajjar opted to live in the Los Angeles area. "Long Beach felt like El Paso, and I left El Paso," Hajjar says.

Having left, they now feel that El Paso is in their blood more than ever. "Now they notice how much they were influenced by their environment," says Dennis Bixler-Márquez, Cedric's father and the director of Chicano studies at UTEP. Jim Ward's bond remains the strongest—he still calls the city home. Because the band tours for more than forty weeks out of the year, his decision to stay causes few practical problems. The only Anglo member of the band, Ward thinks of El Paso's culture as his own. "I've made people mad before by saying it, but I consider myself pretty much Chicano," he says. "I was raised here. When I'm away from the mountains for too long, when I come home I literally get teary-eyed, like I'm so happy to be home with my mountains."