Resistencia is one of the oldest heavy metal bands in South America. They became active in the late seventies, and quickly became one of the most beloved rock bands of Venezuela. Recently, singer César Somoza en bassist Víctor López Inaudi revived the band with new musicians. I spoke to both original members shortly after the first concerts with this line-up took place.

“We started doing shows in the middle of 1978”, Somoza says. “But in 1977, you could say that the typical story of a band started. We were trying to give it some form, people are coming, people are going, people are coming back, then people are going out, you continue with the dreams, you imagine the things that will happen… And then, suddenly, we could start to get the first taste of being a real band in 1979.

Ricardo (Escobar, drummer) and myself met at university, and there we started with a dream. When Víctor joined, we had one attempt, we also had a show, but the band was exactly like in the Queen movie: those guys are playing one night, and after the second night, there already was no band anymore. The same thing happened to us.”

A Primitive Way of Communication

“Ricardo and myself had zero academic musical knowledge. We were just following the music of our souls. We started together in a very primitive manner, trying to write some riffs. I play cuatro and guitar, but I wasn’t a guitar man at all. It was just a way to get the melodies and the other things we had in mind out. So Ricardo and myself started writing songs like that.

After that, we met Víctor at university as well. Then, things changed for us. Because Ricardo and myself had a very primitive way to communicate our music on paper. Víctor did have that academic background. He came from a symphonic orchestra. In those times, we had some very nice symphonic orchestras throughout the country. Víctor was in one of those in the west of the country, where he was born, in Maracaibo.

So when Víctor came along, we continued with those primitive riffs and primitive ways of communicating them, but with a man who can already put it on paper. And we started to learn: oh, this is a C and this is an A! Great! That was great. We were a fantastic team.”

“From the first time we started talking about music, it went great”, López adds. “But I used to play more salsa and gaita, a kind of music that used to be played in Maracaibo. I listened to rock ‘n’ roll thanks to my sisters, but I never played that kind of music before I met César and Ricardo in 1978.

So I started playing heavy rock, and I started listening to Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne and that kind of music with them. Then I started to use the musical knowledge I built up playing salsa and gaita, and putting that into rock.”

Rock Is (Not) in English

Singing in Spanish was of essential to the young band. “It was very important”, Somoza emphasizes. “Firstly because in Venezuela, as students, we had access to the English language from a very early stage. In primary school, high school and university, there were mandatory classes. However, there was already a movement in Spanish-language rock music. We knew about the movement in Argentina, with artists like Sui Generis – when Charly García was just a kid – and Spinetta. We also had references from Spanish bands like Iceberg.”

“And Barón Rojo”, López adds.

“Yes”, Somoza nods. “I remember Ricardo had some albums from Polifemo, and we said: you see? We can do it in Spanish! Even when we were auditioning guitarists, some of them were asking: why do you even want to make rock in Spanish? Rock is in English! And that just encouraged us more. We were like little kids: you told us this can’t be done? Well, it can, and we want to make it.”

“The other thing is that old musicians in Venezuela, older than us, translated songs from The Beatles and other artists to Spanish”, López emphasizes. “So we were used to hearing those songs in Spanish all the time, because they were played on the radio all the time. So we learned that these types of songs could be sung in Spanish, and sound great in Spanish.”

Starting the Movement

“In the beginning, in Caracas and the rest of Venezuela, there was a movement”, Somoza explains. “There were a lot of people playing. At the garage level, at least. The radio and the media were obviously ruled by pop music. When I say pop music, it was very broad in our country: from the folkloric to the experimental to normal commercial music, José Luis Rodríguez “El Puma”, Camilo Sesto, Julio Iglesias, things like that.

But heavy rock? No, no, no. We were at ground zero in the basements. We couldn’t go up. But we as musicians, we knew there were friends out there playing in that garage, there were guys out there, in another street, in another country, playing rock music. We knew that.

When we started playing live, we shared the stage with other bands. The first show, we were playing with two or three bands. We needed to play four or five songs. But after that, it was a short time, but the promoters wanted to organize concerts that were just us. We were so happy, because we could do anything we wanted! It was fantastic. We belonged to a very nice group of people who really started the movement.”

“And people used to go to venues to enjoy bands playing their own songs”, López emphasizes. “They started to listen to these bands, and they started to learn about the music, and the songs, and they started to sing the songs. At our most recent concerts, people were still enjoying the songs. Forty years later, they still know the songs! It’s crazy, but it’s nice.”

“And we knew that people in the audience were recording the shows on cassettes”, Somoza adds. “We knew, because after that, there was an underground movement making those tapes and selling them, haha! They were making a business there. But we were fine with that. For us, it was a way to spread our music.”

The Signature of the Band

Resistencia’s debut ‘Hecho en Venezuela’ has a remarkably good sound for an album recorded in 1981, presumably with engineers who had no prior experience recording heavy music. “The engineers were used to recording salsa”, López confirms. “They never recorded rock ‘n’ roll. The first time, the engineer said: I don’tknow that kind of music, but the owner of the studio and the record company – Color Records – told me that I’m going to be the engineer.”

“It was difficult”, Somoza admits. “Can you imagine Rodrigo (Yoma, guitarist) arriving with a big amp and making a lot of noise? We were fighting with the engineers. They didn’t understand. They thought we were going to ruin the speakers. That was a big problem, and we had to sort it out, because we only had three days. We recorded that whole album in three days.

We were begging the record company to send us to the United States to record the album there, because nobody knew how to do it in Venezuela. But the thing is, Rodrigo and Marco (Ciargo, guitarist) were very focused and studied on their instruments. On top of that, they were technicians or electricians. They were very open people with a lot of curiosity. They would take out their pick-ups and rewire things, just to get the sound they wanted. Which is important, because that’s the signature of the band.”

“Their guitars and amplifiers were different from regular amplifiers”, López adds. “And also, the pick-ups and the wiring in the guitars. That’s why the sound is so different. Rodrigo used to change the coils in his pick-ups all the time, so everything would sound different. Even César and I don’t know exactly what they did. They used to open their amplifiers, open their guitars, and change everything. They tried to change some things in my bass too, but I liked the sound of my bass.”

Losing Track of Time

“The riffs were different too”, López points out. “As was the right hand technique of Rodrigo and Marco. Everyone tried to play downstrokes all the time back then, and they played both up and down, making things sound a little different. That makes the sound on the old guitars and instruments sound different too.”

“We knew very clearly what we wanted”, Somoza says. “In terms of sound, in terms of riffs, how it must sound, and everything. I remember that in rehearsal, we would just play an E for maybe an hour, an hour and a half, until we would get that sound. Because when we started, it didn’t sound that good. So I remember we did this for hours. We would rehearse for hours. Seven, eight, nine, ten hours. We lost track of time, because we were working on our sound.

Ricardo was a very nice director, because he had more access to music than us, as he could travel to the United States regularly. He was really well-informed about new releases and new sounds. And we started looking for parts that we liked. All the contributions that Black Sabbath made to rock ‘n’ roll, one of the reasons was their guitar sound. I remember that Ricardo and I said: we’re going to make that, but we’re going to make it better, haha!

We were kids, but we were very clever. We recorded those guitars with three or four microphones. Nobody else did that here! They would record the guitars straight to the console. They didn’t know how to record a Twin Reverb with two loud speakers. They didn’t know! So another microphone in the back, and one three meters from the speaker; we would put that together into one sound.”

The Invention of the Millennium

“The sound was better at our live concerts than it was in the studio”, López emphasizes. “With one microphone, with the amplifiers at a volume that we couldn’t turn them up to in the studio, because they said it was going to break everything, and the people on the other floor were going to close the office, and things like that. But the sound at our live concerts was better than in the studio. And by far better than on ‘Hecho en Venezuela’.”

“We were also using new technology”, Somoza adds. “For example, we discovered the Power-Soak, from Tom Scholz. That was extraordinary, because we started using that at home also. We would go to Rodrigo’s house, and we would record all the guitars with full distortion and everything at a limited volume. It was fantastic. It was the invention of the millennium.

After that, we said: let’s just take this thing to the console, let’s put it so that you get your amp very saturated. These things really helped us a lot.”

“So in conclusion, it was our sound”, López smiles. “We were the ones who made that sound.”

A Formula That Worked

“At the moment we recorded the first album, we already had fifteen songs”, Somoza says. “So we made a decision which songs we were going to record then, and we never threw away any material. All that we put on our three albums is what we were working on and composing at that moment. It’s all part of our history.

We had friends in other bands, and they were composing songs that they rehearsed a couple of times, and then six months later, they didn’t play them anymore. We never did that. If we didn’t like something, we tried to remake it, cut a bit here or add a little bit there. We believed too much in it that something was already coming.”

“The songs were written with me, but I left the band”, López emphasizes. “They are part of our history until the third album, but I left the band. I didn’t know that other bands wanted to play with me, but Ricardo didn’t, haha!”

“But even on the third album (‘Dacapo’, 1984), perhaps a little over fifty percent was composed when Víctor was still in the band”, Somoza adds. “Víctor’s hands are there. We were very prolific, because we found a formula that worked for us.”

“You can hear that the sound changed a little, though”, López point out. “Because the vibe was different too.”

Builders of a Scene

“We knew we had something”, Somoza explains Resistencia’s pioneering early work. “But we also knew it was difficult to open the gate to those who ruled the media. But even so, I will say that we made history in our time. The concerts were packed, the movement started to grow, a lot of bands started to join, there was a scene, nationally, locally. It was fantastic. I believe we are the builders of one part of that scene. Together with our friends: La Misma Gente, Power Age, Equilibrio vital, Témpano…”

“Témpano’s keyboard player is now a producer for Olga Tañón”, López adds. “He’s playing salsa, but he was a very progressive and classical musician at that time.”

“The movement – and I call it that all the time, it was a movement – is here, but we are suppressed by the rulers”, Somoza continues. “So the people from the movement started to jump off and play the night circuit, playing covers, and the movement started to disintegrate, because everybody was trying to make a living playing covers. After that, we lost credibility.

In Europe and America, the whole rock ‘n’ roll movement woke up, with people playing their own music everywhere. People here didn’t really understand that, and started to jump to the other side of the aisle, leaving the movement. We needed more people in order to create our scene, like what was happening in Argentina.

I remember, for example, that we talked to Soda Stereo, and those guys said: we are really tired, we have played from Sunday to Sunday for more than two years. And they were playing their own songs from Sunday to Sunday! The same thing happened to Led Zeppelin, to Deep Purple, to The Beatles… But not in Venezuela.”

Exodus to Cover Bands

“People from the scene playing covers is one of the factors that really hurt the band”, Somoza says. “Fans thought it wasn’t right to see the band members playing with us one night, and seeing them play pop music with other guys the other. The thing with Resistencia is, over ninety percent of our shows were produced and promoted by ourselves. The possibilities to organize concerts after that became very expensive.

They told us: you are the only ones who are trying to do this. It’s different when there is a real movement, having a rock ‘n’ roll band every week, and the total costs are coming a little bit down. So during that exodus to cover bands, Resistencia started to struggle. If you don’t have shows, people will think nothing is happening. That was when Rodrigo received the call to go play with Gillman.

We were recording our third album. But when you’re so desperate to get a little extra here and there, things like that happen. It was like Eddie Van Halen with the Michael Jackson solo: he didn’t tell us anything. We didn’t know anything. After that, even though we were still friends, we had a pact that this was our band, and you are not going anywhere, even if someone invites you.

Things happened. For us, it was very, very difficult. We had to make a decision. That was really bad for the band. We felt betrayed. I think that was the beginning of the real struggle for the band. Even I started to look for other things. I started singing in musicals here in Caracas, trying to find other things to build our careers as artists.”

Studying the Style

“Older musicians stopped playing their own songs, and started to play covers”, López confirms. “Even myself. But the soul of Resistencia remained. Rodrigo died, Ricardo also passed away, Marco went to Europe, and César moved to South Africa. So other people started to play in Resistencia and said that they were Resistencia also. That’s why we started again, and why we returned.

In 2014, I went to South Africa to see César again, and I told him I had an idea: let’s do it like we wanted to do it in 1981. So we decided to see what we could do. We called Marco, and in the beginning, Marco said yes. But after a while, he said his heart told him not to do it. But I thought we could do it better than before.

The thing is that Rodrigo is not with us anymore, and we were going to try something else. But Marco said: so much time has passed, it’s twenty years later now, I can do it. He sent us a sample of one of the solos, and it was perfect. So I said: okay, we have a new Rodrigo now, and it’s Marco. So we had to find a second guitarist to go with that.

But after about six months, Marco said: no, my heart said that I don’t want to play that, I’m going to play my own music. So we started looking for new musicians. Through the web, we found about fifteen guitarists, trying to play the solo, trying to play the music like we wanted, but it wasn’t right. Until I saw a friend playing a gig in Miami.

I thought he was going to be the guy that we wanted. So he started to study Rodrigo’s style, and he just got it. That’s why we recorded ‘Debes Resistir’ (2024) with Rubén Gutiérrez. And we found a friend in Texas to play the drums, Franco Melchiorri, a very good drummer. He got all the ideas so fast.”

Great Companions

“Many Venezuelans cannot travel”, López continues. “So we couldn’t take advantage of that line-up for all the things we wanted to do in Venezuela. So we started searching for some musicians to play live with, and to do our first live concert in Venezuela with. We found some new musicians, but it took eight years trying to get this off the ground.”

“It has been a long process”, Somoza sighs. “A lot of people came and went. It’s not easy. This story happens all the time with so many bands. People try to set up a reunion, and then they disappear. It’s so beautiful to have your band for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, like the Rolling Stones or Deep Purple.

It has been very tough for Víctor and myself to really get the band together. We found some very nice musicians who are great companions for us, but after that, it’s really difficult to consolidate the whole thing for the shows. We did our shows in May, in Venezuela, and they were fantastic. We feel that this band is ready for anything. We are just waiting for promoters to be interested in the band. We did this as an appetizer, haha!

The energy is there, the whole thing was fantastic. We are just now starting to write new material for a new production. We believe, one hundred percent, in the stage that we are in right now, that we need to produce another album.”

Three Bars and Goodbye

“We also thought: let’s get a little bit crazy with these concerts”, Somoza smiles. “It doesn’t matter. We’re going to do another one after that. We just needed to make a change. For these shows, we incorporate three guitars, plus a keyboard. And we were very cautious about keyboards, because sometimes when you put them in, people are saying you’re going to be too symphonic, haha! We changed a couple of songs a bit, added these sounds there, and it was very well received. It’s going to be just as heavy, but richer.”

“Maybe Rodrigo did the work for two guitarists”, López adds. “When you are not the original musicians, and you’re going to play the work of the original band, you’re going to have to learn the work of the original ones. And when the original musicians did such great work, you have to find very, very good musicians. And if you don’t find one musician who is good as the one you had before, you have to find two.”

“We had that dilemma”, Somoza continues. “Because we were looking for guitarists who could do the same job. We had huge arguments with guitarists, because they wanted to express themselves. I said: can you imagine that you’re playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Hotel California’, and you’re going to play a different solo?

Víctor and myself certainly believe that a big part of what people love about Resistencia is how the solos are done. It’s a rhythm that people understood: Víctor and Ricardo had a huge job, my job there as a poet and my lyrics, which also got recognition, but a big part of that is Rodrigo’s solos. It was the first time ever in Venezuela that someone was doing that. Ever. Before that, the solos were three bars and goodbye. Our solos are sometimes eighty-five bars.”

“We worked so hard on making these solos”, López emphasizes. “All the solos say something.”

Doing Damage to the Band

“It’s not like Rodrigo played something different every show”, Somoza confirms. “It was really amazing. It happened to us when Rodrigo left and Marco said: I don’t want another guitarist, I can take over. And we knew he couldn’t play the solos like that. I knew when I saw the disappointment in the audience.

When Marco left, Nicky Scarola, another great guitarist, a good friend too, also couldn’t do it. He even asked me one day: César, I can’t do this, you need to talk to Ricardo, because he wants me to do it exactly the same, and I can’t do what this guy was doing. And I said: well, what can we do? Just do what you can. Otherwise we don’t have a guitarist.

After that, I understood that it wasn’t good, because it was doing damage to the band. People were coming to the shows to hear these solos. It’s a cult band; the people know that album from beginning to end. When you play in front of these people, they are playing exactly what is done on the album on air guitars! They know what is coming. You can’t disappoint these guys.

That was very tough for us. It was time-consuming. A lot of guitarists came, played three, four months with us, and left after that. It’s happened to us four or five times, something like that.”

Accelerating the Songs

“I don’t know if I prefer ‘Tierra Prometida’ before or now”, López wonders aloud. “Because now, we play it slower. After the concerts, some people commented that now they understand the song. Now they know what is happening in the song, and they can tell what César is saying. It’s an adult song now. It was a children’s song then. It was very nice, but very difficult to play. It was so fast!”

“We started that way”, Somoza emphasizes. “Even ‘Tierra Prometida’ was like that. It was a heavy song. But after that, when we went to the studio, he record company told us that each side could be no more than twenty minutes, because otherwise, the sound would be bad at the end of the side. So what we did was we just started to accelerated the songs. We cut some parts, and we accelerated to gain time. But that was not the intention. Our songs were different. We loved heavy things.”

“And we started to play faster after that”, López adds. “We thought: okay, we have to play it like we did on the album.”

“And Ricardo loved it”, Somoza smiles. “Ricardo really developed serious skills with speed. Also, Marco and Rodrigo could do it. Now we said: let’s go back to doing it as it was. Also, we are maturing. Even if you listen to Deep Purple today, or even Led Zeppelin when they did the reunion show: it’s another band. It’s heavier. They have that organic punch.”

A Necessity to Make Music

“We never considered ourselves a metal band”, Somoza admits. “We said at the time that we are a rock band. So now, we want to incorporate different things. We’re going to move a little bit from there. Just a little bit, haha!”

“We’re not finished making heavy rock”, López assures. “We just want to adapt all our ideas of Venezuelan music and world music, and put them into our old style. Because I think we have a style. A very defined style. But that style goes to the left and to the right sometimes. And very straight at other moments.”

López already worked with Somoza in his own project Celacanto. “Víctor helped me out by playing bass on some songs, and telling me which ideas were good enough”, Somoza nods. “It was just that necessity to makemusic. It wasn’t going to be an album, but people were telling me it was good.”

“The basis of what César makes with Celacanto is very close to Resistencia”, López says. “But it’s not Resistencia. There is a very nice Resistencia song that César played with Celacanto, ‘El Blues de la Leyenda Dorada’, and it goes back to Resistencia’s style again, and adding some Venezuelan flavor to it, like Vytas Brenner. We took three songs from Celacanto and took them to the Venezuelan concerts a few months ago, with different arrangements, and a very good sound, and it works very well.”

“Perhaps that is where we are looking to experiment”, Somoza thinks aloud. “Because in Resistencia, thanks to what Víctor does on the bass, providing this background of salsa and folkloric rhythms from Venezuela inside the rock ‘n’ roll style. It’s what gives us our identity. So we want that to be more pronounced. Just to shake it up a little and see what happens.”