Internationally, Marcos Rodríguez is best known as the former guitarist and occasional singer of German metal legends Rage. However, his first proper band was the Venezuelan power metal band Torre de Marfil. Rodríguez looks back on his early days as a musician, and the effect they have had on his future as a musician and a sound engineer.

“My parents are from the Canary Islands”, Rodríguez clears up. “My dad was working in Argentina back in the day, and my mom got pregnant. She had a very difficult pregnancy, so she had to stay in bed throughout all nine months of pregnancy. So I was born in Argentina, and then they took me to Venezuela when I was three months old, where I grew up until I was about twenty years old, when I moved to Spain.

I have been playing music since I was 11 years old or so, and I have been singing in different social clubs since I was 5 years old. My family is Canarian, and Venezuela was kind of a clubhouse where all the Canarians got together. They had parties, and I used to sing there as a kid.

My dad plays guitar and sings, all my uncles and aunts sing and play some instruments, but none of them were into rock. It was more like popular music from the Canary Islands, Mexican rancheras, and stuff like that. Really nothing to do with metal or rock at all. So I was, let’s say, the black sheep of the family, doing all this devil’s music, haha!

At some point, my mom and dad just understood that this was what I like. They thought it was a teenage thing, but it didn’t stop after my teenage years, haha! They were very supportive. Also, music was around the house, even though it wasn’t rock and metal.”

Dancing Boy Band

“In the beginning of the nineties, maybe I was 12 years old or so, there was a Puerto Rican band with Ricky Martin called Menudo. They were pretty big in Venezuela, but they were like a rock/pop dancing boy band sort of thing. But I remember I was watching something on TV, and they started singing in English, and I liked it. So I needed to find out what it was.

It wasn’t that poppy thing that they usually sang. Then I found out through some friends at school that it was ‘Lay Your Hands on Me’ from Bon Jovi. So I thought: this is cool, I like this. And my friends said: you need to listen to this cassette. It featured these same guys singing stuff like Guns N’ Roses. I liked that better than what they were known for.

Eventually, I got into Metallica’s ‘Kill ‘Em All’ through a friend of mine, who told me that was the real thing. I still remember hearing the opening bars of ‘Hit the Lights’ and thinking: what is this? From then on, I went down the drain and got into Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and so on. I reckon it would have been 1990 or 1991.”

Things that Europeans Like

“We were very influenced by the American music scene. That’s why in the beginning, I didn’t know anything about European bands. I mean… I started to learn about Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, obviously, because they were really big in America. But I never got into the European power metal at the time. I never got this sort of information before.

All I had was Metallica, Iron Maiden – of course, they were British, but they were huge in America – Manowar, Megadeth, Anthrax, Obituary, Slayer… All the American bands. This is what excited me, because it was closer to us. We had Florida three hours away, so we sort of got that connection.

Later on, in the beginning of the nineties, there were a couple of CD stores that were bringing in things that Europeans like. For instance: there was a Spanish magazine called Heavy Rock, and they used to bring just five copies of it. So they were really expensive for a kid, but if you grabbed one, you started reading about all these bands.

We didn’t have the internet, so you had to depend on friends who had like an uncle in Italy, so they could bring me an album from Helloween, Rage, Blind Guardian or whatever. And then you start listening to all these things and think: okay, this is the real thing. So you would have to save even more money to order all these albums. A Metallica album could be around 10 dollars, while a Helloween album could be 25 dollars. Back in the day, that was a shit ton of money.

So if a friend of mine had an album, I would go there with a cassette, so I could have it at home and listen to it. Then the internet started to come in the mid-nineties, and you could get access to certain things. But in the beginning, it was really hard.”

The Pillars for a Young Generation

“Even though there was kind of a movement in Venezuela, it wasn’t that big. We are at the north of South America, next to the Caribbeans, so most of the music you can listen to on the streets is going to be Caribbean music, like salsa and various styles of Latin music. The rock community was very small. It wasn’t like nothing, but it was really small.

At the end of the eighties and in the beginning of the nineties, the rock scene was very limited. There were a couple of rock bands, but it was a very small niche. So just to find out about national bands, there were maybe two or three, or maybe five you could actually identify with. There were a few bands into the death metal thing in the beginning of the nineties, but I was too young and I didn’t have the knowledge about this kind of music.

I listened to some Spanish bands, like Barón Rojo and Obús. And in Venezuela, the main Spanish-language heavy rock band back in the day was Gillman. Paul Gillman was the main influence for the youth that was into rock music. His bands Arkangel and Gillman were like the pillars for this young generation playing this kind of heavy metal, power metal sort of thing. He was a big influence for me in my growth as a musician and as a singer.”

Representing the Band

“A good friend of mine at school told me that I had to listen to this band called Torre de Marfil. They won a festival where six or seven schools were represented by one band each, and it was a heavy metal band. I got a VHS tape, and I listened to these guys and thought: yeah, it’s fantastic, but their singer doesn’t represent the band at all! I was used to frontmen like Axl Rose, Bruce Dickinson and André Matos from Angra. It had to be something like that.

And I could sing like that, so I ended up doing kind of like an audition for them by singing metal at a party. They thought: this is the guy! So we got together, and I joined them as a singer. Because they already had two guitars, bass, and drums. But I was already playing guitar. I started playing guitar when I was 11 years old, and I joined the band in 1996 when I was 17 years old.

I played guitar with those guys when we were writing songs. Actually, a big part of the first Torre de Marfil album, I wrote the music as well, along with the other guitarist. So there were three guitarists in the band, but I was just the singer at the time. Later on, I decided to jump on the guitar, because one of the main guys had moved to the States, and we thought: instead of someone else, I will just play guitar and sing, Hetfield style, why not?”

Making People Part of It

“I was singing in front of people since I was 5 years old, at social clubs, while people go there to have drinks, lunch, play tennis or whatever. There were parties, and my grandfather was playing the guitar, while I was singing on front of people on stage. So I was used to it since I was very young. I never really was afraid to be on stage. That’s my thing: this is exactly what I like. So I was really confident.

Also, I had seen a lot of concerts, from Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Aerosmith… All those guys who were so into it. And also, Paul. Paul was putting all the people in his pocket. This, for me, was a very big influence. It was in my mind that this is the way you have to be on stage, just to make the people be a part of it, and be confident. Otherwise you don’t put on a show.

People want a show. People don’t want to see you playing and knowing how good you are, or how good my guitar and my amp are. If you go to a show, it’s an experience. It’s not the same thing as listening to the same guys on CD or on Spotify or whatever. So yeah, I have never really been afraid of the stage, haha!”

The Only Guitar in Mind

“My dad, my grandfather, and my uncles started with acoustic guitars, and the first thing that I learned was a couple of chords. My dad never insisted that I play guitar. I just took his guitar, and the first thing I learned was ‘Nothing Else Matters, because I don’t need to use my left hand. Very convenient, haha!

Then, I said to my dad: teach me a couple of chords! I will never forget: the first thing I learned to play properly was the last part of ‘Patience’ from Guns N’ Roses, which is only two chords: G major and D major. I was playing the same chords for hours and days, until my dad said: you need to learn more chords than that.

I started to learn more and share things with friends, and then I thought: I need an electric guitar, because I want to play rock. The only guitar I had in mind was Slash’s Gibson Les Paul. This was what I wanted, but back in the day, that guitar was a thousand-plus dollars. My first guitar was a Vester, a brand I had never heard of. And I had a Dean Markley amp. That’s it; I didn’t have any pedals. My second guitar was a Washburn N2. There’s actually some videos on YouTube of me with Torre de Marfil with that guitar.”

Someone Who Would Bring It Over

“Back in the day, in Venezuela, most of the shops didn’t have too many quality electric guitars, as far as I remember. There were a couple of Washburns, and these brands like Vester and Lion, and stuff that I had never heard before. But a Gibson, an Ibanez, or an ESP: no. There had to be somebody who would bring it over from the States to sell it here second-hand. The market wasn’t good. I had a Washburn for a very long time until I moved to Spain in 2000 or 2001. That’s when I got my first Ibanez, and the nightmare started, haha!

My parents used to have a company that fixes broken elevators, and they used to fly to the States quite often, maybe ten times a year. One of those trips, I said to my mom: you have to bring me a pedalboard. She brought me the RP-5 from DigiTech, I think it was. It was recently released back then. She said the guy from the store told her it was brand-new.

I kept that pedalboard for ages, and then I moved on to the RP100. I have always been kind of a digital guy, even though I play with amps; I have been endorsed by Engl and I try different cabinets, and I have a shitload of amps. But I have always been fascinated by the digital thing, so I have always had pedalboards in my hands.”

Bouncing Out the Tracks

These days, Rodríguez is an experienced sound engineer. He was never involved with the Torre de Marfil recordings, though. “The first album, I was only involved by learning”, he smiles. “We recorded with a sound engineer, and I paid close attention to what he was doing. How do you mic the drum set? How do you record the bass? Why do you have this microphone for the bass? What is this microphone? It was a learning process for me, but I didn’t really figure out how to do it until I moved to Europe.

The first Torre de Marfil album (self-titled, 1999) we did in a very small studio. We did some demos first in a rehearsal studio, but they had everything mic’d up when we played, and we recorded rehearsals and released a couple of demos out of that. When we had enough material to record an album, we went into Estudios Micro, a very small studio.

It was really immature, trying to do edits, we recorded the drums on tape, with a hard drive, an Akai eight-track. We had to record eight tracks, then bounce that out, and record other tracks in there. It was a nightmare. But we made it! In two months or something like that, because some of us were still in school. I don’t remember the exact situation, but it was difficult.

The second album (‘El Poder del Lado Oscuro’, 2000) was insane. The music was recorded live, and the vocals on the spot, and it was made in three days or something like that. That’s why it sounds shitty. And it was cheap. I remember that we didn’t even pay fifty dollars for that recording. It was nothing.

We released that, and then I moved out to Spain. Then later, we realized that we needed to re-record that album. I think we started to record that in 2018 or something like that. I really just wanted to bring justice to that music, and it was really cool.

Nowadays, none of us lives in Venezuela. One of us is in Switzerland, our bassist Christian LaSpina lives twenty minutes from where I live, and our drummer Ivor Lugo is in Barcelona. Everybody has had a different life and grew up in a different way. However, there will eventually be new stuff coming from Torre de Marfil.”

Very Rare in the Venezuelan Scene

“We toured with Gillman a lot, because we got to sign with the same management company. Gillman’s manager was also our manager. It was a package: if you buy Gillman, you buy Gillman and Torre de Marfil. And we got paid, which is something very, very rare in the Venezuelan scene. And not with a burger and a pizza either: we were paid actual money. And they paid our hotel rooms and transportation. If we needed a backline because we couldn’t travel with the drum set, they would get us a backline.

When I moved out of Venezuela, the band continued, but the management didn’t want to continue working with them. I was like the main guy in contact with Paul and management. So the band continued a bit longer, while the success was already kind of high, and then they changed singers, and things went downhill a little bit.

It had nothing to do with me personally, it was just that it was different. Joad Jiménez was there for a few weeks, and then they got Sokrates Papadopolus, and a different guitarist, a different bassist. It was basically Jorge (Romero), the main guitarist and the one I used to write the songs with, and Igor. And then everybody moved out of Venezuela.”

Not the Same Impact

“Jorge, the founder, let’s say the father of Torre de Marfil, is my brother. We’ve been together a couple of weeks ago on holiday. He wrote the music on their third album ‘Ecos de la Tercera Realidad’ with another guitar player. They released this album, but Jorge had the same feeling as the second album we did together: the songs are good, the writing is good, but he doesn’t like the way it sounds.

He said this to me for a long time: you should have sung on that album, this album is for you, I want to hear your voice on it, I know you can put a different story on it. But it’s already been done. And I like the album! There are really nice songs on it. Darker songs. Not as power metal as before. It has darker topics in the lyrics: depression, loneliness, feeling down, preventing suicide, really dark lyrics.

They were signed to a record label in Venezuela, Ariah Records. These guys are two brothers, and they signed Torre de Marfil when I wasn’t there. It was a nice digipak sort of thing. But it didn’t make the impact we had back in the day, when we were in our prime. They played concerts, but the response wasn’t the same.

We are now talking about remixing or re-recording parts of that album, including my voice. Right now, I’m trying to arrange some things, because I really need to have the stems from that album in order to improve it somehow.”

Absolutely on Board

“I started Soundchaser immediately after I moved to Spain. It was first called Ilios, which means ‘sun’ in Greek, but in 2003, I changed the name to Soundchaser. I already knew about the Soundchaser from Rage’s ‘Perfect Man’ (1988), but when ‘Soundchaser’ came out in 2003, I thought: I love that name! I actually talked to Peavy (Wagner, Rage’s singer/bassist) back in the day, and said: my band is going to be called Soundchaser. And he said: sure!

Soundchaser is my thing. We released two albums: ‘A New Awakening’ in 2009 and ‘Changes Part I: The Betrayed’ in 2014, and I wrote everything. Except ‘Karma’, which is written way back, but I wrote 98 percent of the songs. It is my vision of the original music. Then I use the name for the cover band I play with in order to pay the bills.

Regarding the live band playing every day: I’m playing with two guys, Jesse Marrero and José Plaza, and those guys are absolutely on board with me wherever I go, whatever direction I give them. If I go: tonight we’re going to just play Iron Maiden, they don’t complain. Tonight we’re going to play just classic rock and Deep Purple, let’s do it. I have the liberty to do that. And they are really good musicians.”

Taking Back Control of the Band

“I remember when I sent the Soundchaser albums to Peavy. He absolutely loved them, because it’s very Rage-like. I mean… Rage was my favorite band since I discovered them. Soundchaser opened for Rage for a couple of shows, and one of the shows, Rage couldn’t play. So we were playing longer than an opening band usually would play, almost an hour. The Metal Hammer people who were there were super-impressed with us.

After that show, Peavy said: dude, we have to do something together. And a few months later, he kicked out Victor (Smolski, guitarist) and André (Hilgers, drummer). He took back control of the band, actually, haha! And I told him: this is your band, dude, remember ‘Black in Mind’ (1995)? Since ‘Welcome to the Other Side’ (2001), I think that Rage changed direction into a more prog guitar-oriented band. And for me, Rage was more song-oriented: melodies, lyrics.

So when I joined the band, I really wanted to bring Rage to its former glory. Because for the last couple of years with Victor, they were going downhill. They did their thirty-first anniversary in a venue with a capacity of two thousand in front of eighty, ninety people. It pained my heart.

Once I joined the band, I said: let’s write music like ‘Black in Mind’ and ‘End of All Days’ (1996). The trilogy for me is ‘Black in Mind’, ‘End of All Days’ and ‘XIII’ (1998). I wanted to bring that back to the band. And Peavy agreed. I’m very proud of those three albums that I did with them. Especially the last one (‘Wings of Rage’, 2020), because I got to mix it, pre-produce it, produce it, and write most of it.”

Scarecrows and Vultures

“Rage were on the way up when I was there. First, we did a tour for the anniversary of ‘Black in Mind’, and that already brought in some more people. But then, with the first album that we released, ‘The Devil Strikes Again’ (2016), you could see more people coming to the shows. We started filling up venues with a capacity of three hundred, four hundred. Something was going on! Then with ‘Seasons of the Black’ (2017) as well: we got calls from bigger festivals, and then we did the Lingua Mortis thing with the orchestra… It was getting bigger and bigger.

But then… It’s public knowledge that I didn’t leave the band because I wanted to. But you know, it’s not just Peavy. There’s a machinery behind Peavy as well. There’s a management that was covering everything and manipulating everything. I started seeing some things that I didn’t like, and when I pointed them out, they suddenly told me I had no rights. I thought: well, I’m going back to Tenerife then. I said: I’m sorry Peavy, I’m leaving.

Peavy was crying. He asked me: please do not leave the band, don’t leave me alone. I told him: you’re not alone, you’re surrounded by scarecrows and vultures, so I’m sorry. It was over a period of five, six years that I’ve seen some things I didn’t like, and in the end, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I don’t need these people around me in my life. And believe it or not, dude, it still hurts. To the point that I never listened to Rage again. Not even my own songs.

When the announcement came out, the first guy who called me was Kai Hansen. The second was Mille Petrozza from Kreator. And when I explained the whole thing, they said: you did exactly what you had to do. I’m sad because of how things went down, and I love Peavy with all my soul and energy. But as long as he’s surrounded with the wrong people, I won’t be around there.”

Still Waiting for the Call

The most recent project Rodríguez was involved with was Enemy Eyes, “Enemy Eyes started as a project from Frontiers Records”, Rodríguez explains. “And since Alessandro (Del Vecchio, bassist and keyboard player) left Frontiers – he was producing a shitload of bands – Frontiers offered me to be their in-house producer and songwriter for them. There was good money involved and all that, but I didn’t want to have any attachments to anything, especially around that time.

The Enemy Eyes project was the idea of Alessandro and Johnny (Gioeli, singer). They contacted me: dude, we want you in, nobody can do this thing better than you! I asked them to send me the demos that they had and thought it was really good. We did a couple of sessions, and then everything was in chaos at Frontiers. Johnny left, Alessandro left, but I think the name belongs to Frontiers. So I don’t know exactly which point we are at right now.

The music was really cool, though, and there was a demand for playing live with this. Honestly, this line-up! Fabio (Alessandrini) on drums, absolutely killer musician. Alessandro, Johnny, and I’m doing backing vocals and shredding and stuff. The idea was to have like three albums and a live album, but it didn’t happen. I’m still waiting for the call.

I know Johnny wants to carry on, because the last time I talked to him, he said: dude, Marcos, we have to carry on! But of course, he’s with Crush 40 and Hardline now, and these are already established names. And for Enemy Eyes to be established, you would have to push it, and dedicate time and effort to it. And if you don’t have label backing, you have to invest even more time, money and effort.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with Enemy Eyes, but it’s a project that I’m certainly very proud of. And I love the fact that Johnny and Alessandro are just as passionate about music as I am.”

In a Different Bubble

“The thing with Torre de Marfil is that it was a certain period of time. Very short. I wish it could be longer. Next year is going to be the thirtieth anniversary of the band. We kind of never split, but we did. Actually, I just bought the page torredemarfiloficial.com, so there are still plans to do something.

Another thing I can tell you about Torre de Marfil is the fact that in the Covid years, I wrote a full eleven or twelve-song album for the band, along with the bassist. But it was just me and him, because everybody is in a different bubble right now. One is working here, one is working there, one is a father, the other is divorced… So we didn’t get together in order to release this new material.

I released the single ‘Cantos de Victoria II’, and there was another ten, eleven songs that I have pre-produced and demoed, but it eventually stopped in 2023, because we didn’t decide anything, and I’m not going to be after the guys, because everybody has their own lives. But we have this idea. And I still have. I listen to a lot of the songs that I have, and I think: dude, if it’s not Torre de Marfil, let’s just put another name on it and release it!

Jorge and I have reconnected again, and I’m thinking about releasing this stuff as singles. Like: release something every month in the period of next year, because next year is the thirtieth anniversary of the band, and then maybe release brand-new album or an EP or something. But there will be no plans to play live, and it’s not just going to be me with other musicians.”

Many thanks to Joad Manuel Jiménez for helping set up this interview.