Immigrant Song

"If this really is my last show," says Leonardo Zayas, aka Leo 7, "that's what I want to see: happy faces having a good time, not a lame one."

Rubber Planet's ace timekeeper has been living on borrowed time since his visa expired almost a year ago; in a little over a week, he'll go back to his native Mexico and work on returning to this country legally. And so at the end of what should be a festive weekend celebrating El Grito, Zayas and I are discussing his impending departure and what could very well be his last show with his band this coming Saturday.

The drummer is wistful as he recounts his early days in Colorado. Zayas came here in 1998 on a student visa and attended Ames Community College in Greeley. While there, he acquired a drum kit with his mother's help and found some like-minded musicians. The members of the newly formed group soon realized that in order to make any headway, they had to relocate. So they headed south, and Zayas transferred his credits to Arapahoe Community College in Littleton.

"I was with them for about a year," Zayas remembers. "That band didn't work out. We got a house together, and it just kind of went downhill. I ended up moving out. At the same time, I found Rubber Planet. And that's when everything just totally changed."

Zayas was so consumed by his new band that he ended up taking a semester off to focus on the group, so immersed that he allowed his student status to lapse. "At the time, when I transferred all of my credits and all that stuff, there was a problem," he says. "My advisor forgot to mail all of my information. So it kind of got backed up with all the 9/11 stuff. A lot of the regulations and laws changed. A lot of the paperwork changed. So I had to reapply in-state. I just fell so in love with the band and all the stuff that we were doing, that I totally put it on the back burner and forgot about all that."

Fortunately, regaining his student status was just a matter of filling out the appropriate paperwork. "As long as I was a full-time student," he explains, "I was okay with school and with immigration. So I just kept going to school. At that point, the band started supporting us; all the gigs paid for rent and other things. It was a roller coaster, playing gigs left and right. With Rubber Planet, I played about six gigs in one month; with my old band, I played six gigs in about a year. So it was a big difference. We started touring and started meeting a lot of people. At the same time, we hit MP3.com at number one. Back in the day, MP3.com was a big reference point for a lot of labels. They started e-mailing and calling, and we thought it was going to happen."

The major-label interest waned, but Rubber Planet kept grinding. Over the past few years, the band has amassed a large and boisterous local following, toured the Midwest extensively, recorded two more full-lengths and gone out to L.A., where it recorded demos with Porno for Pyros' Peter DiStefano -- the results of which will be unveiled this Saturday, September 24, at Herman's Hideaway, at a release party for the group's latest effort, Cosmic, a six-song EP.

Although Zayas was aware that he had overstayed his welcome after he finished school last year, he didn't give it much serious consideration until earlier this month, when Rubber Planet won a trip to Mexico in a battle-of-the bands competition. That's when he and his bandmates realized that if he went to Cabo with them, he couldn't come back. Zayas knew it was time to face the music, so he hired an immigration attorney and started making plans to return home to Gomez, Mexico.