Remember That Song: One Armed Scissor

25 years ago At the Drive-In punched us in the ears with their high-intensity rock classic

It was one of those moments that happened by chance. Sometime in the Fall of 2000, I was up late doing homework on my computer. I had a small television set in my room, a hand-me-down from one of the roommates in the group house after he upgraded and bought a larger one.

I had the television on, in view of the computer, using a WWF program on the USA Network as a background distraction. Was it Monday Night Raw? I don’t know, this was 25 years ago. The wrestling program ended, and a show called Jimmy and Doug’s Farmclub came on. It was hosted by Matt Pinfield, who had recently departed from MTV and was a pivotal voice of my teenage years, so I let it play on.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the show, and honestly, I don’t even remember watching it besides this one night by pure chance. But what I saw that night blew me away.

The headline musical guest was At the Drive-In, a band unknown to me at the time. It was their nationwide television debut that night, and they performed what would become their signature song, One Armed Scissor.

It was the craziest fucking thing I’d ever seen.

I was at a crossroads in my musical tastes at the time. I came up on 1990’s grunge and alternative rock, and really enjoyed the punk and pop punk part of that wave. I’d even gone backwards and filled in with bands like Bad Religion, Social Distortion and NOFX.

But a lot of the bands of my youth were getting stale. The relatively new prevalence of high speed internet and MP3 file sharing was opening new doors, and causing trends and tastes to move faster than ever. Suddenly, bands that were fresh only five to ten years ago seemed like old timers.

This was also the year Green Day put out Warning, which retrospectively is a solid album, but at the time was a great disappointment. The Offspring’s new single was Original Prankster, a follow up to the equally corny Pretty Fly for a White Guy and Why Don’t You Get a Job? Like I said, our favorite bands from middle school and high school suddenly seemed like they’d lost their edge.

I was ripe for something mind blowing, and the random viewing of Farmclub that night gave me everything I needed.

At the Drive-In wasn’t a new band in 2000. They’d been touring since 1996 and gaining underground momentum behind two previous albums, Acrobatic Tenement and In/Casino/Out. Their latest, Relationship of Command, came out in September 2000. But that night on Farmclub was my first exposure to them.

The performance that night was chaotic punk rock and roll. The jumping guitar spins and yelling of Omar Rodríguez-López and the erratic vocals of Cedric Bixler-Zavala, both bushy-haired Latinos, teamed up with the yelling and guitar playing of Jim Ward to create something magical that night. Bixler-Zavala was all over the place, head banging, jumping off of monitors, contorting his body with the music in ways that defied nature.

I immediately found the song on whatever illegal download service I was using at the time, and the next Friday when I got paid, I went to the mall and bought the CD.

The weirdest part about this one though is the fact that I didn’t go out and tell all my friends about this discovery. They won’t get it, I thought. It’s too far out there for them.

It wasn’t until years later I found out a lot of my friends were into them as well, and thought the same thing.

I never got to see them live. As it turned out, the erratic stage behavior wasn’t entirely an act. At the Drive-In only lasted another six months before disbanding. They were at their commercial peak, having just finished a world tour, and about to embark on a much hyped run through the United States. Blaming multiple factors, such as drug use, artistic differences and road weariness, the primary run of At the Drive-In was over by March 2001.

They’d return a few more times over the years, including a fourth album released in 2017, but it was never the same. Review were more mixed, issues led to original band members including Ward being excluded from the final run, and by 2018 they called it quits for good.

Rodrigez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala would go on to form The Mars Volta, an even weirder band that received a high amount of acclaim. Ward, along with drummer Tony Hajjar and bassist Paul Hinojos, went on to form Sparta, which sounded like a more polished version of At the Drive-In. The split into these two projects highlighted the obvious artistic differences between the groups, and allowed them to pursue their respective directions.

But I’ll never forget that random night in the Fall of 2000 when I saw At the Drive-In perform One Armed Scissor on Farm Club.