Carnival of Soul

In an attic filled with at least 60 stringed musical instruments, Marzi Montazeri can’t find the one he’s looking for.

An army of bright, white and black Washburn Parallaxe guitars stands upright like a formation of “Star Wars” stormtroopers. Montazeri pulls out a case bearing a pink paisley Fender Telecaster. He moves it to the side and opens another guitar case that holds an identical pink paisley Fender Telecaster. “Hmm,” he grunts. Then he uncovers a Turner Model 1, the guitar closely associated with Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, then a mandolin, a dobro and also a modern take on the oud. He pulls out an old, gold Gibson Les Paul and a beloved cream-colored Gibson Firebird.

Finally, he finds the one he’s looking for: a black guitar that looks all wrong — a Fender Stratocaster body attached to a left-handed Explorer-style neck and headstock that whips upward grotesquely like the eyebrow of a comic-book villain. He was 14 when he found it at Rockin’ Robin Guitars and Music for $900. Montazeri had $400. But he played it for the owner and walked out with a discount.

“This one is iconic,” he says. He leans in a bit, which he does to emphasize a point. “I played it forever and ever and ever. This guitar … I feel like I’m related to it.”

Montazeri speaks of the guitar like Peter Parker might his spider bite. It changed everything. He says his affinity for the upturned headstock on his signature guitars goes back to that first instrument, which he played so many hours he couldn’t begin to tally them.

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His affinity for the odd instrument feels genuine. Montazeri, too, stood out in Houston when he arrived at age 9: an Iranian who didn’t speak any English. Four decades later, he’s made a name for himself as a top-flight guitarist, but even then, his reputation among guitar heads is greater than his renown among music listeners. After a few years of false starts and various projects that didn’t work out, Montazeri finally appears to have everything in tune. This week he presents his latest band, Heavy as Texas, and its debut album, also “Heavy as Texas,” which he hopes will finally allow more people listen to what he can do with a guitar in his hands.

Meet the parents

Near the end of “Heavy as Texas,” Montazeri stretches out a bit. “From This Day On” is a striking piece of music. Singer Kyle Thomas growls in an unnerving way in a song that captures the push/pull of fatherhood: the joys, sure, but also the anxieties.

“We have a lot in common,” he says. “We’re both parents, we both love this music and we’ve both spent time struggling to make a living making it.”

Thomas is a veteran of heavy music, having co-founded the New Orleans metal band Exhorder in the mid-1980s. He’s also disarmingly honest and vulnerable talking about it.

“When I heard the music Marzi wrote, it hit me right in the feels, as they say today,” he says, chuckling. “I know that makes me sound like an old dad. But it did. It reeked of emotion. And I’m a writer of different cloths, but I do try to put emotions and feelings out there on the paper. I think when you’re younger, you try to talk over your audience. That doesn’t do anybody any good. I wanted people to know this was a song inspired by real life, about the roller-coaster ride of being a parent. The joy and love of being a parent is immeasurable. I had great parents, so my first dream in life, more than being in a band, was to be a parent. And there’s also anxiety and hurt that comes with it.”

The idea of parenthood as a hard-rock theme feels jarring, but, look … despite where one defines the birth of hard rock and/or heavy metal, generationally, we’re deep into it. Montazeri and Thomas both have teenage kids. The stakes feel higher when one writes about such connections.

And Montazeri’s gifts are on full display with this song. He slashes his way around an introductory theme, before pulling in a pretty acoustic guitar figure for the verses. Then he slashes again, but with a nastier edge.

All of the sonic data leads to a two-minute guitar solo that has the sweeping dramatic dynamic of a novel. Montazeri chops aggressively before gently migrating to a dreamy sequence of notes and tones that is simply gorgeous at the heart of a seven-minute song.

Montazeri can talk about that solo for a while. And he does.

“Sixteen-hour days,” he says, and nods to emphasize the point. “I asked a lot of myself, and it didn’t come easy. I don’t know how to explain it other than that I dissected the guitar part to the smallest specks and looked at them. I wanted to triple track it, like Randy Rhoads did. It had to be just perfect. It was like taking a chisel and chipping away at rock like a sculptor. So we spent hours on it, and I thought we had it and I listened. And the engineer thought we could touch it up. So I said, ‘No, man. I need you to throw it away. We have to start over.’ We did it again, and I threw it out. And again. I had a vision for it. And I needed to get to that vision. It was tension and heartache and confusion. But I needed to convey thoughts, and it felt wrong in my heart.”

Thomas took three days to get the vocal just right. But the resulting piece proves the labor was well invested.

And the patience getting that one song right sort of reflects how Heavy as Texas came to be. Montazeri didn’t want to rush anything about the band.

Struggling in Houston

Montazeri has spent years lauded among guitar heads. And he always felt on the cusp of something bigger. He started kicking around the idea for Heavy as Texas about a decade ago but took a detour playing with Pantera frontman Philip Anselmo’s bands Superjoint Ritual and, later, The Illegals on a 2013 album.

But Montazeri split from Anselmo and started focusing on his own work. He made an EP with Tim “Ripper” Owens, the Judas Priest singer who for years stepped in for Rob Halford. Montazeri was excited about that project but says “Ripper ghosted us” between the release of an EP and a tour. The band looked like a stalled project.

Trials recur as a theme when talking to Montazeri. His parents split almost immediately after arriving in Houston from Iran. Acclimation came slowly, and he describes a push/pull between pride in and frustration with Houston. On this day, he’s bounding about wearing bright red Rockets socks. But he also mutters at one point, “I’ve done nothing but struggle in this town. But look … I love this city. I’ve loved playing here.”

When he was first developing ideas for Heavy as Texas, Montazeri reached out to Thomas via Facebook, asking if he’d like to sing a few songs with him. With Exhorder, an influential New Orleans metal band, Thomas released two albums in the early-’90s before hibernating for most of 25 years. Thomas agreed, and the two clicked immediately.

After a brief reunion around 2008, last year Exhorder reassembled for real, though the band was in need of another guitarist. Thomas recommended Montazeri to Vinnie Labella, guitarist and co-founding member of Exhorder.

“They both texted me almost at the same time,” Thomas says. “And they pretty much said the same thing. ‘I don’t want to touch a guitar around this guy. He’s too good.’”

Montazeri spent three months learning the band’s songs. He ended up with a job playing guitar with the band on tour and on the group’s first album since 1992. And Thomas found himself with a second job singing in Heavy as Texas.

“Bringing Kyle in allowed me to step away from any idea of being a vocalist/guitarist,” Montazeri says. “Which is a big deal because I was limiting myself. I wasn’t able to do the things rhythmically because I had to think about doing this or that with the vocals. He took the songs and looked at them in a completely different way. He added parts, subtracted parts. I started to match what I was doing to what Kyle was saying and singing.”

In the groove

So a guitar whiz sufficiently prominent to have his own nickname — the High Priest of Distortion — was approaching 50, and after years of clawing, found himself with two functioning bands. Montazeri plans to make this one count. He finally secured new management that resulted in an overhaul of all his creative activity.

Years ago when we spoke, Montazeri was crashing at his girlfriend’s west side apartment, and he had “guitars stored in people’s houses from here to New Orleans.” Now he has a steady base of operations. And better help marketing his prodigious talents. The Heavy as Texas album has an instantly iconic cover image created by Houston music legend Michael Haaga, who now plays bass in the band. Montazeri has rejiggered the way he creates and sells his merch. But he also finally has a record he can take to listeners of the hard stuff and pull them in. He’s branching out into the condiment business, with a line of hot sauce and salsa.

He still gets calls to punch in solos for other acts. Recently, he cut one for Prong and another for Michael Sweet.

“But for me, I’m just proud of this ‘Heavy as Texas’ album,” he says. “Sonically, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

And before he hits the road this fall with Exhorder, he’s going to take Heavy as Texas out, starting with a hometown gig. The Friday night gig is all ages and free. And Montazeri sounds particularly excited about the inclusion on the bill of JunkBunny and Posers, two bands featuring young players he’s mentored.

He’s also excited to see where his new-ish band takes him. He recalls Heavy as Texas’ first proper gig, a 2016 date opening for Anthrax in Lafayette, La. The band took the stage without a rehearsal and without a sound check.

“The stage was so small, we couldn’t look to our right,” Montazeri says. “There wasn’t room to headbang without falling off the front of the stage. But I’m telling you, we started playing, and I was just showered with this feeling of joy.”

Thomas offers a little grounding for the live-wire enthusiasm.

“It was a good-size music club, maybe 500 or 800. But it was still small enough to where you feel that connectivity with the audience. Everyone becomes one for a moment. And we felt it. Our job as opener was to warm up the crowd, and I feel like we did that. We weren’t nobodies. We had people with a strong reputation in the music community. But it was still a warm welcome.”

Regardless of perception about the crowd, Montazeri felt like he’d found his place.

“That’s what this is for me, after all this time, after years of getting in my own way,” he says. “Just playing and feeling that joy.”

andrew.dansby@chron.com