Recharged and Ready

Last year, Jim Ward and his cohorts in At the Drive-In did the unthinkable: They broke up a successful band. After seven years and on the brink of a breakthrough, the El Paso, Texas, rock band packed it in, calling off a potentially lucrative career on account of boredom.

Although many of the band’s fans felt slighted, Ward insists it was the right thing to do.

“You can’t base a decision on money or success,” says Ward, 25. “I certainly never played in bands for that reason. We were doing it a long time, and whether or not the world knew it, we think it ended at the perfect time.”

Ward can afford to be philosophical about At the Drive-In’s dissolution, now that his new band Sparta--which features former Drive-In members Paul Hinojos, 26, on guitar and Tony Hajjar, 27, on drums, as well as ex-Belknap bassist Matt Miller, 28--is picking up right where his old band left off. The group opens Weezer’s concert Friday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

Aside from common band members, there’s a fair amount of continuity. The aggressive, abrasive sound of Sparta’s debut album, “Wiretap Scars,” due from DreamWorks Records on Tuesday, doesn’t differ much from At the Drive-In’s pile-driving approach, with tracks such as “Cut Your Ribbon” and “Sans Cosm” finding catharsis in barbed, neatly patterned guitar noise.

Yet the circumstances surrounding the writing and recording of “Wiretap Scars” were worlds away from the final days of At the Drive-In. According to Ward, the passage of time had drained all of the passion out of his old band.

“We all made a deal that if any one of us wanted to stop, we would stop,” says Ward, who started At the Drive-In as a high school student in El Paso. “There wasn’t a lot of drama involved. We just wanted a change. If you’re done with loving playing, you gotta stop, no matter how big or small you are.”

Ward was ready to shed his teenage skin and make the move into adulthood.

“The kind of change you go through between the ages of 17 and 24 is huge,” says Ward, who got married in March 2001--the same month the band broke up--and enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso in a short-lived attempt to get a civil engineering degree. He even taught himself how to build radio-controlled airplanes.

“I was doing the stuff I wanted to do,” he says. “Then Paul and Tony came over to the house and asked if I wanted to just hang out and sing.” Ward thought he might be through with bands, but the allure of playing with friends was pulling him back in. “I had been playing in bands since I was 12,” says Ward. “It felt weird not being in one.”

From a few informal jam sessions emerged Sparta. Ward, who had been relegated to backup vocals behind the dynamic Cedric Bixler in At the Drive-in, was now up front as the lead singer. (Bixler and former ATDI guitarist Omar Rodriguez are attracting attention with their new band, Mars Volta.)

“Any time you change members, the chemistry changes,” says Ward. “To me, it has made all the difference in the world. But I still think we should look for a singer. It’s a little more stressful. I can never remember lyrics. I’m going be the youngest singer in the world with a TelePrompTer on stage.”

Sparta, according to Ward, is that rock rarity: a functional democracy. All of the songwriting is collaborative. “We had eight songs in a week,” says Ward of Sparta’s initial convocations. “We all contributed bits and pieces to all of the songs. It’s really fun to paint over someone else’s painting, so to speak.”

Most of this material found its way onto a demo, and the response was overwhelming, he says. Four majors were eager to sign the band, with DreamWorks eventually closing the deal.

“We got a lot of flak from people who said we were trying to capitalize on the success of At the Drive-In,” says Ward. “But it wasn’t like that. It was just a very easy and organic process.”

The four members of Sparta were all reared in El Paso, a city where the Third World impinges on the First World in ways that are impossible to avoid. From this vantage point, Ward, who grew up in an area he classifies as “lower middle class,” bore witness to an uneasy clash of Western values and Hispanic culture.

“It’s very Catholic, and there’s lots of machismo going on,” he says of his hometown. “Mexican women have a tough time there.”

There were no all-ages nightclubs to speak of, so local promoter Ed Ivy, whom Ward considers a formative influence on his life, would book punk bands such as Jawbox into hotel ballrooms and school auditoriums. “We were really lucky to have Ed around,” says Ward. “We all met each other at those gigs.”

To this day, Ward resents the increasing popularity of Austin, the unofficial music capital of Texas, which he feels has lured all of the talent away from El Paso. Last year, Ward established a label called Restart to help El Paso bands nurture a music scene there.

“I really have a twisted love for the place,” says Ward, who still lives in El Paso with his wife, Kristine, an education major at UTEP. “If a few bands from El Paso get popular, people will move there. It may not a huge deal, but things are always happening.”

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Sparta, with Weezer and Dashboard Confessional, plays Friday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, 8808 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine, 6 p.m. $22.50 to $27.50. (949) 855-8096.