reporting from san diego
Climbing onto the small stage at Bar Pink for an afternoon sound check, Javier Escovedo, singer-guitarist for the Zeros, unloads a flash of ringing guitar during "Cosmetic Couple" and snarls into a microphone: "When it gets dark we all come out / looking for love, ready to rock out / We look so pretty, so so dressed up / Walking down the city, so so messed up." Unfurled behind him is a hand-painted backdrop of red circles descending into a vivid bull's-eye.
Part of the first wave of West Coast punk, the Zeros were four teenagers out of Chula Vista, Calif., fueled by the rough edges of the New York Dolls and the Velvet Underground, whose music burst onto the scene in the late 1970s. By 1980, the Zeros were over, having released just a handful of songs on Los Angeles-based Bomp! Records, but they've now reconvened for a series of summer shows, delivering the old thrills and bad attitude to another generation of edgy rock fans.
In the intervening years, the band's members, Escovedo, guitarist-singer Robert Lopez, bassist Hector Penalosa and drummer Baba Chenelle, have spent plenty of time on stages with other ventures -- among those were the True Believers, Escovedo's band with older brother Alejandro, and Lopez's international career as El Vez, "the Mexican Elvis." But performing together as the Zeros offers the musicians a singular kind of nostalgic thrill.
"We don't think about the coulda been," Lopez says. "We were just kids when we did it, and we were doing it for the love of it. We were 16, 17, 18, and lucky enough to be in high school and still play the Whisky a Go-Go. We were enjoying the moment and we never had a plan."
The band still doesn't have much of a plan beyond the handful of scattered tour dates that will deliver it to the Troubadour on July 16 and to Europe next spring.
Aside from a few covers, the repertoire remains limited to the 25 to 30 original Zeros songs written in the '70s.
"We don't plan to write new songs, because what you write when you're 16 is completely different from what you write when you're 49," Lopez says. "Trying to recapture that would be silly."
The band's brief career is evidence that large movements in pop music do not emerge from any single artist or city, but represent a collective force from many directions at once.
