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TITO & TARANTULA INTERVIEW |
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Darkness 69: Ok, so we mentioned earlier the “bicycle guy” here. The artwork here on the album is quite interesting, and you have always had some for example, rockabilly parts, sometimes, and various things in general. Can you tell us more about that? Do you have a great input when it comes to the artistry? Tito: Well, the artist who made that was a friend of my niece. And she showed it to me one day, and I really liked it. And then I met him - I wanted to meet him, he told me this skeleton he took from a pyramid in Mexico, from the Aztecs, and I liked it even more. And I knew it would be the cover of the record. Then the cover itself was redone. I’ve had this idea to take pieces of the bicycle, or the head and take it and make it into these different things, the spiderwebs, the trees, and so, it was just a simple idea and I gave it to the artist, and he took it apart. The bass player Lucy, she’s a graphics artist, so she did it first, she made all these pieces, and I sat there with her, and “What if we do this…? So then he did the final cover, the guy in Germany. I was also very surprised that it came out the way it did. The American version of the record will be different, it will be in colour. It’s a little different. It might also have one different song, but we’re not sure yet. But we’ll finish that in fall, when it comes out… Faerie Fee: So when we think of your band, we think of the film industry, especially Rodriguez and Tarantino, of course. So can you tell us about the beginnings of that collaboration? Tito: My collaboration with Quentin, was before Robert I met Quentin making a film for a guy named Alex Rockwell, also an underground film worker. Quentin was a friend of his, through acting. He was doing a small part in this movie that I was doing the score for. I was also involved as an actor. It was called “Somebody To Love” with Anthony Quinn, Harvey Keitel and Rosie Perez. Steve Buscemi was in there too. I met Quentin there, and went to dine with him and Alex and listened to him talk all day, and he was very interesting because he knew so much about film, it was unbelievable. When I met him, the first day I went to dinner with, he already was writing “Kill Bill”, and he had just finished “Reservoir Dogs”. He was ahead with everybody. He probably, you know, he just had so many ideas. And then I met Robert about, maybe 4 or 5 months later, at a benefit to raise money for college for Latin students, and he was there as a guest, and so was I. I didn’t know who he was, but I had heard about “Mariachi”, about this movie, but I hadn’t seen it. There were all these famous directors, and Cheech Martin came to me and said: “There’s a kid that wants to meet you. He’s a big fan of your group, and he wants to meet you, he’s standing over there”, and I said: ”Ok, we’ll go over there” and introduced myself. And when he was 14, he bought my record rom the Cruzados, and because he was a big fan. He told me, when he did “Mariachi”, he played the music to the actors, and he said: ”This is how I want you to feel”, and when he wrote the screenplay, he would listen to our music. So “yeah, that’s cool, and I’m gonna make another movie and you’re gonna be in it and you’re gonna do music”, and blah blah blah, I said “Ok!” (laughs) I didn’t believe him, but then about a year later, he called me and he said “I’m gonna start making ‘Desperado’”, it was called “Pistolero”, not “Desperado”, they changed the title, but so I went and auditioned, and I got the part, that was it. By this time, Quentin had just finished “Pulp Fiction”, it hadn’t been released yet, He was very excited. “Reservoir Dogs” had done ok, it was, it’s bigger now but it wasn’t so big then, and he was really excited about “Pulp Fiction”, and kept talking “it’s gonna be great”, and so he shot this movie “Desperado” in Mexico,and movie came out while we were there. It was huge. Then I think Robert’s movie, well maybe it came out around this time, I can’t remember now, it was so long ago, so we started that relatonship that way. Quentin, interestingly enough, was a big fan of ours too. He was a fan of “Repo Man”, he loved this movie, and then if you noticed in “Pulp Fiction”, the suitcase has a light inside and nobody ever sees what’s inside the suitcase and in “Repo Man”, it’s the same suitcase. It has a light inside and you never see what’s inside the suitcase. A lot of people think that it’s the same suitcase as in “Repo Man”, but it’s not, but he took this idea. He’s very clever. So he was a fan already of our music, and Robert was too and this is really the great relationship we have. While we were working on “Desperado” I played “After Dark” one day, just sitting up, we were mixing the movie and Robert filmed it, and said “I’m gonna play this for Quentin ‘cause we’re working on a vampire movie”, which I didn’t know, and I played them a vampire song, but it was just a coincidence. Then he went home that night and called me and said: “We were up all night, and we came up with an idea with the snake. Salma’s gonna dance and you’re gonna be in the movie, and we have all these really cool stuff”, and I said “Oh, cool”, so the movie originally didn’t have Salma dancing with the snake, and our band. It just had a jukebox. So we were very lucky also that the song created this moment in this film, because I think in the movie, it’s hard to imagine the movie without this moment. So it was a good collaboration between the three of us. I mean, we’re very proud with this moment, we were very lucky. Darkness 69: It was definitely a sort of trademark scene that marked the movie. Tito: Yeah. Where everything changes, “Oh, what happened?”, “What is going on?” Darkness 69: One time it’s an action movie, another it’s like a bunch of bats flying around…
Tito: Yeah, and people getting killed…
Darkness 69: So how fun was it to shoot that scene? Tito: It was so much fun! We worked maybe two and a half weeks in the bar, “Titty Twister”, every day it was crazy, fun, all the girls, the beautiful, and the costumes and the make-up, so many people come to the movie set, because by this time, Robert and Quentin were very famous, ‘cause “Desperado” was a big success, “Pulp Fiction” was huge, and so like, Robert De Niro was on the stage. All these… you know, they liked this kung fu movies, all these chinese directors came, and we had very many great dinners and one time we were celebrating Robert’s birthday, and at a restaurant, and Salma, we finished, had a lot of drinks and we walked out of the restaurant and we were waiting for our cars to pick us up. So they bring Salma’s BMW, and Robert had a big expensive car, Landrover, and then Quentin’s car comes and it’s all full of smoke! And it’s a little Yugo, you know the stuff? Darkness 69 & Faerie Fee: Of course! (all laughing) Tito: And Salma came there looking at Quentin: “Don’t tell me that’s your car!”, and he goes: ”It’s my lucky charm! It’s my lucky charm!” It was dusty, it was full of newspapers and shoes, and you couldn’t see up the windows, and the smoke everywhere, and she goes: “Tomorrow you’re coming with me, and you’re gonna buy a car, you cheap motherfucker!” (all laughing) and he drove up in his little car, and I kept thinking “Omg!” he could buy any car he wants, but this was a little car he got when he used to work at a radio store, he still had the same car and he was a funny guy. Of course now he doesn’t have it… Darkness 69: Good thing he was able to travel with that… Tito: Yeah, it was good, I thought we would have to push, but good he made it… Darkness 69: I’ve read that Robert Rodriguez was even a guest guitar player on a couple of shows. Tito: Yeah, he toured with us. He came on tour and we played with him many times when we go to Austin. Now I live in Austin, I just moved. But when we used to play in his home town, he would come on stage and play with us. In the beginning he wasn’t very good, he was just a fan of playing, like a hobby. But now he’s gone better, he has a little band that he does, ‘The Chingon”, and they play every now and then. But now he actually practised so he’s getting good. And he’s good at film scores, I shouldn’t have showed him all my tricks (laughs), now he doesn’t need me anymore. But he’s doing ok, he’s cool. Faerie Fee: You are both an actor and a musician, having over 20 appearances. What do the movies give you for, for example inspiration, or for your music? Tito: Well for my music… well, I think I don’t know if it relates to my music, but it relates to a dynamic. So you have acting, it’s similar to music and the sense that you have timing, you have a melody, sort of, in your dialogue, and a harmony with the other actors. So in that respect, they’re very similar. To find these moments, especially like, I’ve studied acting all my life, I was on stage, since I was a young boy, and this is where I learned they’re related, and I also sang in the choirs, played in the orchestra, so I realised all this was similar, it all was just a different way of expressing, and so in that respect I guess it relates to music, but only in that respect. Darkness 69: And as opposed to music? Tito: Music also has character in the way that acting does. And when you focus on the character of the song, it’s like being focused as an actor, if you’re playing Hamlet, so in some ways, not that music is acting, music has a different spirit if you wrote the song yourself, because it’s coming from inside. So it’s a hard thing to find in acting, is to find “how I am connected to this character”. Good directors understand this, or writers, and they write a character like Quentin writes, every character in his movie has a really long story. You know he has a brother, a sister, a really bad mother, a father who’s an asshole, you know, everybody has a story. And this helps the actor, because they can live this past. When you sing a song that you wrote, you know what it’s about, you know if it’s about a girl or something, your mother or whatever. So this is easier to do, and acting is harder if the director or the writer doesn’t have this understanding. So you have to kind of write it out yourself. Who is this person? Was he in jail? Was he bad? Was he good? Was he ever in love? Those things. So they do understand what you’re doing, so it helps, and I think this is why Quentin is such a strong director, ‘cause he knows every character very well. He knows who the person is. Darkness 69: It sounds very good while on film. Tito: Oh yeah, you believe it, you believe every character that he has on the screen. Robert’s different, he is not about the character. It is, but it’s more about the whole big picture, it’s spectacular action kind of thing, and he’s very good at that. They’s different kinds of filmmakers, and they’re really close friends, but they make two different kinds of movies. Darkness 69: You’ve played in various genres, and you did a Spanish version of “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols. That song featured on the “Million Dollar Hotel” soundtrack, where you also had a small role. What was it like to record the song with the musicians from U2? Tito: What happened was, this director, Wim Wenders, he cast me in a movie, he was a big the Plugz fan, and he cast me in a movie and I got sick and couldn’t do the movie, and then two years later, he called me and said: “I’m doing another movie with Bono, and I want you to be in it”. He said: “You can’t get sick!” (laughs). “You have to promise me”. So I said “Ok, I’ll be in it”, and then Wim kept telling Bono “Oh, he’s famous, in a punk band”, and etc., and Bono had heard of the Plugz, and so he said “I want you to sing this song in the movie, and we’re gonna record it, maybe you could make some lyrics”, and he sent me a tape of him singing. Bono doesn’t sing in Spanish, but he was pretending to sing in Spanish. I wrote some lyrics but I noticed that the song was “Anarchy in the UK”, and when I went into the studio, and we got together, I said: “I wrote the lyrics, but isn’t this ‘Anarchy in the Uk’? Why can’t we just translate the lyrics?”, and he goes:” Oh you know that song!”, and I said “Everybody knows it” (laughs) “You gotta be kidding right?”, and he said ok, and we went in, he got on the phone with Johnny Lyden, he was talking with him. I played with Johnny Lyden – Johnny Rotten when they came to LA, with the Plugz, we opened for them. So, I had met him already, and Bono was talking to him saying: ”We wanna do this in Spanish, is it ok?”, and he said: “Yeah, yeah, do it”, so then he came in, right about the record, I sat there maybe 30 minutes, translated it, and then I started singing it, and Bono was just like sitting in another segment, going “Yeah!”, yelling at me “Great!” (laughs), and we recorded it in one day, and it was exciting, it was cool. Darkness 69: It’s such a nice closure for the soundtrack. Tito: Yeah, it’s nice in the movie too, there’s the scene in the movie where they speed It up, and I like the way where he put it. The movie, unfortunately, didn’t do very much, but there’s a group of like cult people that really like the mvie, and they find it really good. I think Wim had a lot of trouble with the script, and that’s why, it kind of changed, and then it’s a little bit of… something’s missing, but it’s still I think beautiful to watch. Milla is great in there, and oh Mel Gibson is great as well, he’s a very cool guy. When I met him, he said: “Did you hear the one about the Mexican?”, he was telling a joke, and I said: “I’m a Mexican”, he said: “I know you’re a Mexican”, he goes: “Did you hear the one about the Mexican”, and he tells the joke. (laughs) Faerie Fee: Yeah, we have also many jokes about Bosnians. Tito: Oh yeah? Faerie Fee: Probably the most in the world, like one million, yeah.
Tito: (laughing) That’s funny, well if he ever makes a movie
here, he’ll be telling Bosnian jokes that’s for sure.
Darkness 69: Last year you got the newest member of the band, Caroline. The audience really seems to love her. Tito: Yeah, they love her. And I love her too, she’s great. Darkness 69: How is the chemistry in the band now? Tito: It’s the best that’s ever been. And it’s because of Lucy. Together we have the best rhythm section we ever had, and Alfredo played with her before. But then he had to go on tour with the Beastie Boys, so he couldn’t do the record, ‘cause he’s been playing with the Beastie Boys for many years. He unfortunately couldn’t do the record, but after the Beastie Boys tour, we started this tour, and he said: “I can do the tour”, so we already have had Lucy for one year, and they just connected. What’s nice about Lucy is that all the people I’ve had in my band are very well known musicians, our bass players that we changed, because they’ve gone to do other things, like Dominique plays with Blue Bonnets now, Abby went with the Bangles, Jennifer went too… so, you know, we’ve had these musicians, that when they’re not working, they go and everybody wants to play with them, so it’s very hard to keep the band together, so, when Dominique went to play with the Blue Bonnets, I thought maybe I look for someone that nobody knows, so I got on the computer, the Internet, and I typed “Mexican girl bass player, lives close to Austin, TX”, and I hit enter, and then Lucy came up (laughs). She lived in San Antonio, she’s half Mexican, she plays bass and there was a little interview with her in a basement, and I thought: “Oh, that’s what you do”, and then I heard her band, and it was like a punk, psychobilly bad, and I thought:”Wow, she is really good”, I mean, she can play. Nobody knows who she is, so Stevie called her, ‘cause she moved to Las Vegas, we met with her, we talked with her, and she said:”I don’t know, I’ve always been with my own band”, and we said that it’s ok, so her first tour was in Russia, we toured all over Russia. I said if she makes it through Russia, she’s gonna be fine, and she’s great. Darkness 69: In the end, I’d like to thank you very much for this interview. Tito: Oh thank you, and I hope I didn’t talk too much! Darkness 69: Can you send a message for all your bosnian fans? Tito: I would like to say “Hvala”, thank you to all of Bosnia, and I hope to see you again next year! Faerie Fee: we hope to see you too. Thank you very much.
Tito: Thank you! 1 2 |
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