It’s a term that Marty suggests stems from the collective mentality prescribed by notional Mesa Cosa leader Pablo Alvarado. “It seemed like this very loose gang when I showed up for our very first rehearsal,” Marty says. “It’s always been very inclusive. People have elbowed their way into the band just by being there.”
Mesa Cosa was conceived around seven years ago when, according to legend, Alvarado’s tarot reading suggested he start a band. So Alvarado quit his day job and formed a band. And the rest, at the risk of using a hackneyed expression, is history. “Pablo has this DIT philosophy – do it together, rather than do it yourself,” Marty says. “Sometimes Pablo seems like he’s full of shit, but I’ve known him for such a long time now, and he really cares about the community and us.”
Marty had been playing guitar in a local Melbourne band when Mesa Cosa’s original drummer invited him to play bass in the nascent Mesa Cosa. “We were at the Brunswick Hotel and he said, ‘These guys are a bit flaky, so we need to make it a bit more together,’” says Marty. “The first time I met everyone in the band was walking into the very first rehearsal. Then we played our first show at a party at Pablo’s house.”
Over the past seven years Mesa Cosa has evolved from such humble beginnings, dragging in new members and losing other members along the way, the latter including a couple of drummers. An EP was released in 2012, followed by a debut album a year later. A new album is in the wings, waiting to be unleashed.
Mesa Cosa is renowned for its synthesis of raucous rock’n’roll sound and energetic stage performance. “It’s exciting, and I love it. But I don’t always know whether it’s going to hold together,” Marty says. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘I know what’s going on, this is really cool,’ and sometimes you’re trying not to get hit in the face by someone’s guitar. But I’m not one to smash my shit up and go off. My job is to stay calm while everyone else goes free. It’s chaos, but it’s great. It energises me.”
Marty fondly recalls a Mesa Cosa gig in Wollongong where guitarist Chris Penney decided to surf his guitar down a stair railing. Having hit a reasonable velocity by the time he reached the end of the railing, Penney was confronted by a tower of amplifiers – which he crashed straight into, breaking the neck of his guitar. “It was a relatively clean break and wasn’t where the strings were,” Marty says. “So he drilled a hole in it and kept using that guitar for ages. That was bad arse, I was so impressed.”
This week Mesa Cosa celebrates the release of its new single, Church of the Snake, with shows in Melbourne and Sydney. The inspiration for the song came from Mesa Cosa’s former drummer, who came up with a story involving a snake living underground in Tasmania. “He had a voice for it, a personality and a name, Jeffrey,” Marty says. “He held onto that idea. We were quite excited by it. We’re pretty into the occult in a variety of ways, and the irony is that while we’re really serious about our interest in the occult, we’re not serious about that song.”
The single is accompanied by a film clip courtesy of Jase Harper, a local comic book artist who befriended Mesa Cosa after being one of three people in the audience at a house show in Brunswick many years ago.
Marty is adamant that Mesa Cosa is more than just an entertaining party band – there are songs, there’s musicianship and there’s commitment. “We don’t want the chaos to mask our ability to play songs or write music,” Marty says. “There’s a lot of bands where the stage show is the show. We want the music to be the show and the stage show to be a fun part of it because we’re having fun.”
