When I call Gabriel “Gabe” Rodriguez for an interview, he tells me he has open heart surgery in two days, and I apologize for the call, but he says he’s “glad to think of something else.” His story is the story of the Laredo metal and hardcore scenes during their heights at Sal’s Pizza.
Rodriguez was raised in Corpus Christi where he fell in love with tattoo art, the family trade, at four. As a teenager, he walked into a local tattoo shop for an apprenticeship and was laughed out of the building. He said growing up there exposed him to a diverse musical community of “punks, skins, metalheads, and ska.”
He said he found no real music scene when he moved to Laredo in 1991. He enrolled at Martin High School where he was labelled a troublemaker, and placed with the “bad kids,” the metalheads who became his lifelong friends.
Through them, Rodriguez experienced the sum of the local 1990s music scene in Laredo: backyard parties. Scattered shows were the only places young Laredoans could build the camaraderie found in a vibrant music scene. “The bands were mostly metal and punk and played a lot of covers,” he recalled. His upcoming documentary Into the Void records how he and his friends changed that.
Much of the scene Rodriguez hopes to record began when “very Satanic,” the Houston black metal band, needed a venue, and Guillie Ibañez of Sal’s Pizza’s liked the idea of packing the restaurant and poolhall with hungry teenagers. “It was a mind-blowing show for Laredo,” Rodriguez said.
As the metal scene grew, he was behind the scenes designing flyers and band logos, learning sound production and stage lighting, and mic’ing the stage between bands.
Every show attracted bigger crowds, and eventually, bigger bands, he recalled “National touring bands saved their best dates for us,” he said. San Antonio was a bigger city, but they didn’t have good venues and hardly promoted the bands. There was controversy around shows at Sal’s Pizza, however — notably, a Brazilian black metal band that advertised “The Gates to Hell open at 7 on Good Friday” for an Easter weekend show in the late 1990s. Local religious groups protested and doused Sal’s with holy water and oil, postponing the show.
Sal’s popularity brought more bands, more genres, and more promoters, all vying for the same stage. Sundays featured matinees for a dollar a person and attracted nearly 100 punk and hardcore fans at a time. Eventually, Rodriguez’s group moved their shows to other venues. The metal scene’s death knell was Deicide’s 2006 show at Hustler’s. The show was riddled with problems — the mics went out, the cops were called, and the guitarist was maced and arrested.
While his involvement in music slowed, Rodriguez did not. After apprenticing in a tattoo shop in 1997, he officially began tattooing in 1999 and opened Por Vida Tattoos in 2014. He’s since hosted the Por Vida Tattoo Festival, featuring local artists, tattoo artists, and vendors at L.I.F.E. Downs.
Rodriguez also published the short-lived Static Age, a zine “love letter to Laredo,” featuring local photographers, writers, and journalists.
During COVID, when tattoo shops were ordered closed, he and his wife Brenda started Con Safos Printing Co., selling shirts, bandanas, and art books of their own designs focused on Mexican American culture. “It kept us afloat,” he said, quickly adding that “Brenda took it over.”
After the pandemic, Rodriguez began a podcast which became the catalyst for Into the Void. Guests were people involved with the Sal’s musical era. He said that at first he just “wanted to see if he could do it,” but Brenda insisted he interview Guillie Ibañez. The project snowballed. Rodriguez had some equipment, downloaded video production apps, and reached out to anyone who was involved with Sal’s but soon ran into difficulties. Some downplayed their involvement and others, well, had died. Even with these obstacles, Rodriguez edited about 15 minutes of the documentary. He had the introduction, some narration, and his focus for the metal portion, but something was missing – a direction.
The Laredo Film Society solved that problem. A presenting documentarian saw a rough cut at an event and bluntly asked, “What’s the point?” Was Gabe looking to make a record of the old times, or was there a deeper reason behind Into the Void?
Nostalgia was partly the motivation. Gabe felt good about giving the youth of Laredo “something to do on the weekends” and exposing them to different music, but Sal’s was so much more. Gabe wanted Into the Void to show “lightning struck Sal’s twice.” That there was a vibrant metal scene at all was amazing, but it was followed by an equally thriving hardcore scene. Twice, Laredo had small music scenes with local bands growing to attract national bands and music festivals. The Boogie Bashes and Texas Hardcore Superbowls, for example, had dozens of hardcore bands performing for hundreds of people for years.
Sal’s musical era was a significant cultural period, and while it’s still talked about fondly, the original crowd is dwindling. Rodriguez hopes Into the Void can do something for the art and music scenes in Laredo. He worries about youth culture “because Laredo doesn’t nurture it. It’s even worse than before,” he laments. There is no structure for local artist growth, but he believes collaboration can change that.
Perhaps a documentary about how a group of friends went from backyard punk shows to some of the biggest hardcore festivals in Texas can inspire the next generation to do greater things than Rodriguez did.
