So the band picked El Paso for its tour warm-up show Saturday. And when a large club was not available for that date, they asked their manager to find an alternative venue. "El Paso has always been good to us," bassist Chi Cheng said in a telephone interview from Paris, where the band was ending a European press tour.
"Our road manager told us we tend to play better when we see people like us staring back. I don't know why, but we just do." The Deftones -- Chino Moreno, singer-songwriter; Stephen Carpenter, guitar; Abe Cunningham, drums; DJ Frank Delgado; and Cheng -- will perform several songs off their fifth album "Saturday Night Wrist" on Saturday in the El Paso Coliseum Pavilion, right behind the El Paso County Coliseum.
The album, which has taken more than three years to record, will be released Tuesday -- on Halloween. "It seems like it took 30 years,"
But it was a very long process." "Some people needed to evaluate whether they were heart-sworn into it or not," he said. "We all had to get not only on the same page but on the same book.
" "I just kept wondering, 'When is he going to get inspired to sing this album?' " Cheng said. "I knew, once he laid his vocals on it, it would be some of his best work -- if not his best work ever.
It was just a matter of Chino actually doing it. "He got sidetracked a lot with the label and by management, but it was also due to his procrastination," Cheng continued. "When (people from the label) weren't hearing anything, they were like, 'Well, .
.. we aren't dropping any more money on them.
' That stopped the whole process." While many music critics and writers are calling "Saturday Night Wrist" the Deftones' most innovative album yet, Cheng simply said it's the Deftones being the Deftones. "We know where a song starts, but we never know where it's going to finish," he said.
"The innovation comes naturally. All of us come from very different musical backgrounds and very different influences. Everybody adds their influence, their idea, their passion and their love.
And then you get a song that is indicative of the Deftones." Eastsider Ronnie Lopez has been to almost every Deftones concert in the area. He saw them at the Taste of Chaos tour in February 2006, at Club Xcape in October 2004, and in Las Cruces in November 2003.
"I even saw Chino and his side project at the T Lounge in 2005," he said. "They are a special band who never bows down to what is commercially acceptable. They play what they feel and that in itself is a lost art.
They have not sold their souls, and you have to respect them for that." Victor R. Martinez may be reached at vmartinez@elpasotimes.
com; 546-6128.
ticketmaster.com.
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