In Conversation: Sergio Vega of Quicksand
He's spent over three decades holding it down for one of hardcore's most influential bands. If Sergio Vega is more committed than ever, it's because he knows: His is a rare and special position.
It was not an accident that I chose to open the Anti-Matter compilation album in 1996 with Quicksand. As anyone who was there can attest, this was a band that ushered in hardcore’s second decade with a mind to push it forward and the credentials to convince the rest of us to come along. Of the band’s original four members, bassist Sergio Vega was probably the least known at the time: His pre-Quicksand musical efforts—most notably, Collapse and Absolution—never really made it past their early local stages. But in New York City, Sergio had a well-known presence in the scene, where he always straddled between punk and hardcore party lines with true singularity.
As this year marks the 30th anniversary of Quicksand’s debut album Slip, and with twelve years as the bassist in Deftones now firmly in his rearview, it seemed like an opportune moment to revisit the twists and turns that brought him here—from his Nuyorican upbringing to his New York hardcore family and beyond. Through it all, Sergio remains consistently true to the uptown kid who found a life with the downtown punks: “I just identified myself as part of this culture,” he says. “I knew I was in it for life.”
You grew up in the Bronx in the 1970s.
SERGIO: I did.
I think we tend to have this image of the Bronx as this super rough place. Or at least that’s how Jennifer Lopez wants it [laughs]. How would you have described it when you were growing up?
SERGIO: I don’t know if the Bronx was worse than any place else in New York City at that time. I mean, it definitely wasn’t a walk in the park; it was definitely tense. But it was also a lot of fun. My parents divorced when I was young, though. I split time to be with my father, and he lived in lots of places throughout New York: He lived in Far Rockaway, he lived in Tribeca for a while, and then he and his wife settled in Park Slope. So I definitely had a more expansive view of the city.
The 1970s, in general, was arguably a fairly depressed time all across the city. But if you watch all these hip-hop documentaries, whenever they start talking about Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, they always immediately cut to the same stock footage of these burned-down buildings and just totally decimated blocks. But the Bronx is bigger than that.
SERGIO: That’s true. They’re mostly showing the South Bronx. I grew up in Parkchester. So in the ‘70s, when I’m in my single-digits, I’m just running up and down my block. I have a Big Wheel. I spent a lot of time playing Ringolevio in the schoolyard, or playing stickball or whatever. It wasn’t particularly violent. My block was all right.
Were your parents immigrant parents?
SERGIO: No. Well, my father was born in Puerto Rico. My mother was born in Manhattan, but her parents were born in Puerto Rico.
How connected did you feel to Puerto Rican culture as a kid growing up?
SERGIO: Oh, you couldn’t escape that. It was just part and parcel of what you were, in a sense. So I didn’t think of myself as “connected” to Puerto Rican culture per se, as much as it was just the food that we ate, the things that we did, the music that my mother listened to, and the stuff my mother was doing. At that point in my life, my mother was the director of an organization called El Museo del Barrio—which featured a lot of art from Puerto Rico or from Puerto Rican artists. It was baked into everything that was happening.
It’s probably helpful to know my mother is an author and cultural activist. Her name is Dr. Marta Moreno Vega. That was her thing, and that was my life. She was always about the Puerto Rican experience, and by extension of that, the Nuyorican experience. She had been going to places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe when she was little. and her organization was always putting on concerts and doing art exhibits.
So cultural identity was strong in your house.
SERGIO: It was paramount. It was her thing. It still is.
I remember seeing on your social media that you started taking Spanish language classes at some point over the last few years. Did you speak Spanish growing up?
SERGIO: It was strange. Even despite everything I’ve been saying, we spoke English [in my house]. And I never questioned that. My brother and I never learned Spanish. My mother will say I never picked it up, or that we never picked it up, but she never really spoke it. Neither did my father. My father was different. He wasn’t so much into [the culture]. He is a painter, and he’s an artist, so it wasn’t so much about culture for him as it was about art.
You saw me taking Spanish classes over the pandemic because my wife’s first language is Spanish. Her family is from Mexico, and she speaks English, but it was something that I kind of always wanted to do. I wanted to learn it, but I didn’t. But then over the pandemic, I took it seriously and I started taking classes through a friend of hers who actually teaches in Mexico. Before that, I couldn’t speak at all. I had a couple of phrases, but I didn’t speak well; I couldn’t express myself. Since then, I’ve progressed a lot. But I consider myself Spanglish [laughs]. I can handle myself, you know? I can go out on my own when I’m in Mexico and it’s nice. I’m not fooling anyone; no one thinks that I’m a native speaker. But at least I can communicate and I can understand. When I first met my wife’s parents, we had to use Google Translate, but now we can just talk.
At one point I remember hearing that you wanted to be a baseball player when you were a kid. Was that a serious thing, or is that like saying you wanted to be an astronaut?
SERGIO: No! I wanted to be a baseball player! But I learned young that it’s very rare that someone just comes out of the blue and becomes an athlete or anything without some kind of support within your family structure. And I don’t have athletes in my family. I have people in my family who were musicians or artists or things like that. My family isn’t that big, but that’s what they do. So it was always in the cards that it was much more likely that I’d wind up doing something creative than playing sports.
Which is weird! Because most of us grow up in families where doing creative work is seen as impractical. We’re not socialized to believe that art or music are things that people really do for a living. But you essentially had the opportunity to create a mindset where a creative career might be possible because you saw it all around you.
SERGIO: In a sense, yeah. I mean, I still took jobs. I was working in health food stores. I was doing whatever it took to make some money. But it would be to buy instruments and things like that. I never really thought I would make a living as a musician, but I did think I would work in jobs that allowed me to make music. That was kind of it. I didn’t expect the kind of music I played to ever become a living.
The way it happened, where I started to make a living through music, was incremental—so it didn’t feel too shocking—but I felt very happy and very fortunate to have the events come together in that way. Because a lot of people can do a lot of cool things at the wrong time, where it doesn’t land. That’s because there are bigger forces at work. It’s a function of timing, of dedication, of love for what you’re doing, but also a lot of things that are going on outside of us, like the bands before us who helped create the environment for us to even have that opportunity. And a lot of luck. There’s luck in the timing. There’s luck in the location, like being born in New York at that time or getting to the turn that led me to CBGB. There are so many factors that had to go right to steer me to that point in time, and I don’t take any of it for granted. I wake up and I’m always very thankful.
You and I share one of these specific turns.
SERGIO: Oh yeah? What is it?
Being inspired to play in a band through watching The Partridge Family.
SERGIO: Yes!
For real, I don’t even know that I’ve ever talked with anyone about this besides my partner, but I was obsessed with that show. I watched it every single day. And even at the time, I was completely conscious of the fact that I was this Latin kid in Queens who really wanted to be part of the whitest family ever [laughs]. Was there ever even a person of color on that show?
SERGIO: No, not at all! I never even thought about that, but that’s true [laughs]. For me, there was kind of a three-pronged attack going on at that time. There was Danny Partridge and what he represented to me. I liked his attitude and his vibe, and I associated that with him holding a bass. The other members of the [Partridge] family didn’t resonate with me like that. I loved the whole family, but he was the cool one. He was this spunky, snarky dude. Also, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I even thought his bass was sick. He was playing a Richenbacher, which I wound up playing later without making that connection.
Tom and Jerry was equally a thing. There’s this episode where Tom is playing an upright bass and he’s singing “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” and he was wooing this girl in the window. I made that association too. I was like, “Oh. Girls!” [laughs]. He was romantic. So I saw these two characters, and they were different things, but they both had a bass and I thought that both of the things they were doing were cool.
The other thing was that my cousin was a musician. He plays piano. He was in a freestyle group at the time called Temper, who wound up having some people that went on to become Tony! Toni! Toné! later. They were a one-hit wonder, and they had a really big song when I was in school. He had a friend who was dating his sister, who is my other cousin, and he played bass. And he was cool. He had this thing. So I saw these three archetypes, and they were all cool and they were all playing a bass. That was it for me. Even though my family were visual artists, I just thought I’d play bass. In junior high school, I picked up the bass in orchestra and that was where it started.
You discovered hardcore in the ‘80s, at some point when you were in high school. You seemed to have this life in the Bronx, and you were connected with the Bronx musical culture, but then you started going downtown and discovering the musical culture there and finding your way in. Did you ever feel like there was a schism between those two things?
SERGIO: At that point in my life, I was into writing graffiti. We had a babysitter that watched after my brother, and her boyfriend was a graffiti writer. He was teaching me how to make homemade markers with the erasers from school and stealing the ink from Xerox machines. So in grade school, we used to go out walking, but we would go out, like, bombing. Within a few years, I’m not even fifteen, I’m painting trains and running around with people from Harlem and the South Bronx and this crew called Tats Cru—and I’m not really a member, but I’m adjacent to them. At some point, my mother had taken me downtown and I saw these punks on Saint Mark’s Place. I thought they were cool, but I didn’t really think too much about it. But then someone in my graffiti life was really into The Police, and he got me into them, and that kind of led me on this weird tangent. Somehow I started listening to all this guitar stuff by all these people who were dressed kind of crazy, and I can’t remember what was the moment, but that leads me into discovering Danceteria. But no one would go with me. So I used to go there on my own.
I started to cut my hair differently, and it was starting to morph incrementally. I had some weird outlier friends who were kind of punk. I discovered Bleecker Bob’s. I’m going to Danceteria with no real clue. I was still only fifteen or sixteen. I don’t even know how my mom let me do that, but I was doing it. There was this girl who used to go to Danceteria, and she had a [motorcycle] jacket. I read every band name on her jacket and remembered them and I would take whatever money I had to go to Bleecker Bob’s and buy the records.
By this point I’m sixteen or seventeen and I’m thinking, I’m fucking punk! But all these bands were all goth bands. I didn’t know that. I had bought all this Batcave stuff, early Cult when they were Southern Death Cult, the Cure, and all that. I just fell in love with it, and I got my own jacket and painted it. Everyone in the Bronx just cut me off. There wasn’t a schism, really. I was fine with it—but they were not [laughs]. They were like, “You’re cool. We think you’re good at graffiti. We’ll still come to you for some outlines. We’ll still mess with you on that level, but we are not hanging out with you.” So I kind of went all in. I was like, fuck this. I’m out. I just abandoned graffiti and I kept finding my way until I met some more kids downtown.
What was it about the downtown kids that made you feel like they were more your people versus the kids you grew up with?
SERGIO: Well, they wouldn’t hang out with me uptown! If they would have stayed hanging out with me, then that might have been different, but they were just clearly like, “We are not fucking with you.”
You must have had some kind of kinship with those kids if you were going all in.
SERGIO: No! I just had nobody else [laughs]. I was in a friend desert. I had nothing. I just went downtown and the first two friends I made were a girl named Margo and a guy named Max. They were just asking for spare change on a corner and I had a little extra money, so I bought them a slice of pizza and we just hung out. That was it. We became friends, and then their friends became my friends. That led to everything, though. That eventually led me over eventually to people like John John Jesse and Nausea and everything that came off of that.
This makes so much more sense to me now. I always had this perception of you in the ‘80s that you sort of played in the margins of what was popular in hardcore at the time—like, you weren’t a skinhead, you weren’t Youth Crew. If anything, you veered towards the punk faction in hardcore, which is something that I think people don’t realize anymore: Punks actually did go to hardcore shows [laughs]. Punk bands played shows. You even played in that band Trauma, with members of Nausea.
SERGIO: Right, exactly.
So there was this thing about you that was always more punk than quote-unquote “hardcore“ to me, but did you see it that way?
SERGIO: Yeah. I didn’t realize there was hardcore yet. I was like, “I’m punk,” but then you go through these stages of refinement. Like, my first records were goth albums. Then I started out like everyone else, with Exploited and GBH. I loved all that. And then as I got to meet the Nausea cats and Gavin [Van Vlack, from Absolution and Burn]—who is one of my oldest friends—that was when I started to see this other level of bands, like Discharge and Crucifix and Broken Bones and Crass. I mean, Crass really grabbed me. I [learned about] vegetarianism and veganism when I got into Crass, and I immediately became vegan.
Djinji [Brown, from Absolution] came through me, and I think because of our upbringings, we never really bought into the idea that you had to be orthodox or copy this thing. We still had this thing from being uptown about “being fresh” and putting your own twist on things, and the idea of just bringing something different to the party, like: What’s your contribution? What’s your thing? So my style evolved. I was definitely on the punk end of hardcore, but I also wanted to push the boundaries and try to add something different. It was kind of baked into us that you have to add something and not just copy something. We understood that the parameters could be strict, but we wanted to see what was possible within the structure of what it is and where you can take it.
You did a band with Tommy Carroll [from Straight Ahead] called Irate, and I found this interesting thing he said about you.
SERGIO: Oh, me? Whoa! [laughs]
He said, “Sergio was a real good kid who had something going on. He brought me along to sing in the band but I was really done by then, and I was going through the motions. I was washed up at 20.” That’s just an interesting way to talk about it.
SERGIO: I don’t even remember what the songs sound like? It was just whatever I was doing. But Tommy was expanding out of being straight-edge at that time and getting into Rastafarianism. He was touching on some really different topics. The one thing I remember him singing about was something to do with farming—like, some sort of subsidized farming that was happening where they were throwing soybeans out because they were getting paid to get rid of them in some way. It was political, but it was about soybeans being thrown into the ocean. It was just something else, and I thought it was cool.
I think Tommy was at a crossroads between what he was and whatever he was going to become. But me, I was just trying to pull together a band. All of my first projects were with people who were doing other things, and often with people who were playing instruments that weren’t their first instrument—with the exception of Tommy. It was just weird.
By the end of the ‘80s, you’d gone through a lot of bands—Trauma, Collapse, Absolution—so I’m curious if you ever felt like Tommy and got to a point where you were like, maybe not, “I’m washed up,” but more, “This just isn’t going to work out for me.”
SERGIO: No, because when the bands broke up, it all made sense. I wasn’t really looking at music like a potential career that I was failing at. I just identified myself as part of this culture, and that was just the way I expressed myself. I had just signed up for this for life at that point. I knew I was in it for life. It was just: “This is who I am, and this is what I am, and this is my identity.”
I was thinking about the first time Quicksand broke up, after Manic Compression. I remember Texas is the Reason did a short run with you at that time, and my perception was that you guys were really cohesive and strong—but then obviously after that things kind of went off the rails. Did you personally feel like it was time to break up at that time? Were you on board with that?
SERGIO: Me now would have said, “Hey, maybe we should just take a break.” We had gone so hard and so fast for so long, you know, and that was unprecedented for any of us. We really just needed a break, but personally speaking, I didn’t think that was really possible at the time. Everything just seemed very binary back then. I didn’t see the world in the way I do now, where there are just infinite shades and infinite possibilities; it doesn’t have to be, “You either exist or you don’t.” And you know, interestingly enough, our tenure now is longer than our first incarnation. We’ve been together now longer than we were back then.
In my mind, when we broke up that time, I definitely felt bummed. But it didn’t feel so crazy. I just felt like I have to get on with the next thing in my life. I have to do something or I should go get a job. I wasn’t thinking about it past that. I didn’t lament too much. Speaking for myself, there was never anything against the other guys in the band. I love those guys. And all I know is that even after breaking up and doing other projects, I only came to appreciate them more. The more I developed as a musician, the more I came to appreciate what they do and the talent they have. I also understand now that no matter what you do, certain configurations are unique, and you can’t do those certain things without the right people. It can’t exist. We’re kind of woven together.
I also wanted to talk a little bit about your exit from Deftones, and how I thought your reasons for leaving were kind of hardcore [laughs]. I’ll tell you why. Earlier we talked a little bit about growing up and seeing your mom and seeing that path towards having a career as a creative—and I’m sure by the time you left the band, Deftones were a huge part of your creative portfolio, so to speak. Your reason for leaving, though, very much felt like a principle-versus-money question. In other words, you weren’t leaving because you wanted more money; you were leaving because, after twelve years, you needed to feel a greater sense of belonging in the band. That, to me, is hardcore. At its roots, there is a sense of belonging that we get from hardcore that we tend to identify with over time, and that we tend to value more over time. We also tend to value that over money repeatedly. Is that at all how you saw it?
SERGIO: Yeah, in a sense. I mean, it’s funny because right now I’m looking through the rearview mirror, so in the same way that we’re talking about Quicksand, I can say the same thing about Deftones: I think it boils down to communication and understanding people’s positions and where people are at. That makes a big difference. I was with [Deftones] for a long time, and at some point you just want to feel like, “OK, cool. This is a thing.” I don’t know if it had to be public knowledge or not public knowledge, but at some point I just wanted to really put a ring on it, for lack of a better term. We just couldn’t get there.
To be honest, the only reason I ever mentioned anything publicly was because they posted a picture as a four-piece, and that just led people to wondering what was going on. Deftones have a very active and passionate fanbase, and they’re going to try to speculate. They’re going to try to figure out what’s going on and why things are happening. And it kind of quickly came to my attention that Quicksand was taking a hit over that narrative, so I just didn’t want to allow that narrative to spiral out. It wasn’t a particularly easy thing to do. You have to find the line of explaining the situation and reporting the news, versus a dramatization or getting salacious with something or being spiteful—and that’s not something I felt in either case, whether it was Quicksand breaking up or leaving Deftones.
At this point, rather than focus on how it ended or why it ended, I think about it more like, “What did I get from it? What did I bring to it?” And so I think of my time with Deftones with a lot of fondness. I learned a lot and they were always very supportive. Both bands have people that are very unique, you know? Like, no one hits like Abe [Cunningham]. No one sings like Chino [Moreno]. No one plays guitar like Steph [Carpenter]. The way that Frank [Delgado] approaches using turntables or the way he approaches using samples are not like what you would think someone in that world would be doing. Everyone has their own voice: Walter [Schreifels], Alan [Cage], Tom [Capone]. They all have distinct, unique voices, and I got to get something from all those guys, as well as share whatever I bring to the table with them, too.
One of the things that I thought was punctuated when you released that video explaining your departure is that you are a bit more plugged into social media than a lot of people our age—and even with Pinche Vegano, which I love.
SERGIO: Oh, that was [my wife’s] idea! She’s really much more active on social media and she’s very refined in her approach. She was like, “You’re traveling around and you’re doing all these things, you should really tap into that interest [in veganism] and give it a home so that you can share that aspect of yourself.” So I gave it its own account to give it a little more focus, as opposed to being like, “Here’s some music, but here’s a food thing” [laughs]. I don’t really do the food stuff on my personal account. That’s just music and politics.
You talked about being introduced to veganism through punk earlier, which leads me to assume that your veganism is somewhat political.
SERGIO: Honestly, at first it was easy for me to become vegan because even eating a chicken leg was always kind of a problem for me—like, I could see the veins and the muscles and the tendons, and that was just kind of a lot. But becoming a vegan also made me delve into it and understand the circumstances around it and develop compassion for the animals’ experience. Also, Crass were really big on the environmental impact of [factory farming]. It just seems that, for the bigger picture, the more that one can adopt a meat-free or vegan diet, the better it is for the longevity of the planet.
“Pinche” kind of means “crappy” or “lousy,” right?
SERGIO: It kind of means “fucking.” Like, “I’m a fucking vegan” [laughs].
I was listening to a podcast you were recently on, and while you didn’t name the store, I knew you were telling him about Prana Foods—which was the health food store I worked at from 1993 to 1994 [with a variety of people from the New York hardcore scene]. One of the things you mentioned was that the owner, Bruce, was essentially subsidizing all of our veganism [laughs]. And it’s true. I mean, I’m not proud of it, but we all kind of robbed that store blind.
SERGIO: I’ve seen those things happen! I never worked there, but I always benefited from it.
Right. But I think that by telling that story, you also inadvertently made a point about the issue of socioeconomic access to vegan food. Because at that time, and probably now, it was definitely cheaper to buy real milk than it was to buy soy milk. Thinking back on it, if I didn’t have access to free vegan groceries back then, I might not have been vegan. Do you feel like that’s still an issue?
SERGIO: I think it’s even more of a problem. There are a few issues, really. Like, if you’re undereducated. Or how in a lot of cultures eating meat is considered a macho thing, like, “That’s fey. Why aren’t you eating meat? It’s manly!” But there’s also the economic thing. All of this Beyond Meat or soy milk or going to a [vegan] restaurant—these things are expensive. If you have the option of going to McDonald’s or going to a vegan restaurant, the price jump is insane. So that was baked into the initial thinking of Pinche Vegano, from my conversations with my wife. We’ve actually started getting into doing recipes, and eventually we want to do a cookbook, but the thing that is really important to us is that the recipes are inexpensive [and accessible]. We’re trying to write recipes where you can find the ingredients whether you’re in a big city or a small town.
Was your Puerto Rican family mortified when you went vegan?
SERGIO: My mother became a vegetarian! She’s borderline vegan, but really a vegetarian. I think she wanted to get on board with it and support it because she grew up in the age when heroin was introduced to Harlem, and things went kind of sideways, and in her own personal experience, she never drank or smoked or did anything. So to see that I got involved in something like veganism at a crucial age—she just really wanted to support that. It had other benefits for her, too. It did wonders for her health. Our family has a history of heart issues, and she basically escaped that whole thing by going vegetarian. My brother did it for a while, too. My grandfather, at the time, he was cooking for us so he didn’t really like it or get it, but he didn’t get me by that point anyway.
In my family, my mother responded by asking me if I thought I was “better than Jesus” [laughs]. Which, in retrospect, is a very classic South American response.
SERGIO: That’s funny because even when the Jamaicans went Ital they were like, “I guess fish is OK. Jesus ate fish!” [laughs]
All right, I thought we could end like this: You have as many albums now in the second iteration of Quicksand as you did in the first. There doesn’t seem to be a sign of a breakup forthcoming. Most people would look at this project as a primary piece of your legacy. But is legacy something that’s even important to you?
SERGIO: I don’t think about legacy very much, no. What I think about is being able to be creative and being able to stay creative and being able to have the opportunity to share that. Quicksand, to me, feels like home. It feels like my family. I don’t like to be self-referential. I just like to be in it. I like to ask: Foundationally, what am I about? And what’s it about for me? And it’s about affirmation, and sharing things, and excitement, and just keeping this level of energy. I feel like everyone in the band right now is so excited and active in music. We’re still learning. We’re still people who are actually trying to grow and seek new things. We have so much more story to tell. The thing I’ve learned most through all of this is that if you’re lucky enough to have people that you love doing this with, keep them close and keep doing it with them for as long as possible.
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Thanks or givimg Sergio a spotlight! He is a real source of joy when you witness and hear him play. Always incredible and inspirational!
anti-matter continues it's streak of absolute WINS. What would THIS MUSIC be without Serg?!