It's always been hard to compare the Mars Volta to just about any other band, really, but Volta's Cedric Bixler-Zavala shocked Spinner by telling us -- straight-faced -- "Ever since I was a teenager, Omar and I always talked about putting together a punk-rock Grateful Dead." The duo will get one step closer to that goal on New Year's Eve when they take over the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium for an all-night party in the long-standing tradition of, yes, the Grateful Dead. Activities are being planned, DJs are being brought in and costumes are required of everyone in attendance.

"We've always had a fascination with the kind of culture that a band like the Grateful Dead has," Bixler-Zavala says. "Hopefully we can keep doing it year after year, and keep having more and more weirdos come to our version of Mecca."

The New Year's Eve extravaganza is the only live event the band currently has planned. However, on January 29. they will release 'The Bedlam in Goliath,' their fourth studio album. With its crushing density and sonic intensity, plus shorter songs than 2006's 'Amputechture,' comparisons to the Dead would be hard to make. "The way I see it," he says, "we listened to a lot of Slade. And I think that wore off on us."