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Original Deftones bassist Dominic Garcia recently went to see his former band play a hometown gig in Sacramento, California, and was kicked out of the show for “being too aggressive in the pit.”
Garcia was interviewed by Metal Hammer for a feature spotlighting former members of prominent bands. The musician first clarified that he was a founding member of Deftones, which at that time went by The Deftones, while also affirming that he never actually left the band, but was replaced after he switched from bass to drums.
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After recalling his time in the band from 1988 to 1991, Garcia mentioned that he took his daughter to a recent Deftones show in Sacramento, where he was thrown out of the venue. His full story reads as follows:
“I’ve read on the internet that I was invited to play with the band as the first bass player. That’s not true – I’m a founding member. [Drummer] Abe [Cunningham] and I met in high school together. We were in the marching band, and every day we would go to his house after school and jam.
[Guitarist] Stephen [Carpenter] lived in the neighborhood – he was 18, a couple of years older than us. He’d ride around on his bike, and one day we were jamming out and Stephen must have heard us ’cos he poked his nose through the window and invited us to come jam with him at his house.
At that point, it was the three of us. We were mostly just making noise, but Stephen was the riff master – he came up with all these amazing riffs. It was Stephen who came up with the name The Deftones, because he loved Def Jam Recordings so much. It was always The Deftones when I was in the band, from what I can remember.
After a year of jamming, we started auditioning for singers. Stephen wanted somebody who could rap. The first guy we auditioned was named Gilbert, he was strictly an emcee. He was really good. But the other guy was Chino [Moreno]. I knew Chino since first grade, maybe seven years old, though we weren’t really close friends. Word had got around that he could sing – he’d go to parties and sing The Smiths. We auditioned him with a Danzig tune. I can’t remember which one, but it was great.
We’d started writing our own songs. We had one called ‘Butt Booty Naked,’ which had a total Chili Peppers vibe but with a really heavy riff. There was another song called ‘The Vegetable Song,’ and another was called ‘Cold’ – that was a real banger.
The first show we did was at a place called The Cattle Club in Sacramento, where all the big acts would play. It was a pay-to- play gig – we had to pay something like $100 for a hundred tickets, and we wound up giving them away to our friends. The place was packed. It was just a crazy show.
Around 1991 or 1992, Abe actually left The Deftones to join another local band called Phallucy, who were really hot at the time. I took over on drums and that’s when [bassist] Chi Cheng joined the group. I loved Chi, he was really cool – he was into poetry and all this stuff. Just a wonderful, kind-hearted person.
I never actually left The Deftones. Phallucy’s bassist left, so I figured it’d be super-cool to play two different instruments in two different bands. I found out from a third party that Stephen had got a guy named John Taylor to play drums in The Deftones. I was a little bit heartbroken because I’d started the band, but we were still friends. I used to give Stephen a load of shit because he wasn’t a shredding guitar player like Eddie Van Halen. I was just being a snob, a cocky kid, but maybe it was low-key bullying.
Phallucy wound up breaking up because of management stuff, but I was kind of moving away from rock music at that point. I took a world music class at Sacramento City College and started getting into ethnological music – that touched my soul. I started digging into the roots of Latin music and that’s been my passion ever since. I recently got a grant to learn how to carve sacred Bata drums, which are used in spiritual Yoruba ceremonies.
I don’t have any regrets about leaving the band. I went to see them the last time they played in Sacramento. I took my daughter. I enjoyed the show a little bit too much – I wound up getting kicked out of the show ’cos I was being too aggressive in the pit. I got escorted out! It was funny – I was like, ‘I used to be in this band!’”
The exact gig where Garcia was kicked out is uncertain, but Deftones did play two shows in Sacramento in 2025, including a March 1st concert at the Golden 1 Center, and an October 3rd gig at the Aftershock festival.
Deftones’ current lineup includes founding members Moreno, Cunningham, and Carpenter, along with turntablist-keyboardist Frank Delgado and bassist Fred Sablan.
The band is currently in the midst of a Latin American tour that wraps up with a couple of shows in Mexico this Friday and Sunday. After that, Deftones will embark on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan in May (pick up tickets here).
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