RIK AVALOS Band

It started the way the best things do: unexpectedly, and with a guitar riff that wouldn't let go.

The summer Rik Avalos was thirteen, he and his best friend Toby were lifting weights, getting ready for football season, when Ratt's Round and Round came on. He set the weights down, looked at Toby, and said: "Imagine if we had a band." That question never left him.

Years later, it had become a life. Rik made his way to Austin, where all roads lead for Texas musicians, and in 1989 he started a band of his own. Austin had a way of making the imagined real.

Dirty Oliver

Dirty Oliver began with Rik on guitar and vocals, Jimmy Springer singing from behind the drums and Garth Faigley on bass. They were rehearsing in a garage when they met Lance Merkin, a brilliant, innovative mind who played keys (he still does), though his love of music never really ran through being a player. What he could do was open doors: Lance got them booked at the 6th Street Country Club almost immediately, and the gig was seven nights a week.

A schedule like that makes a band tight and makes it popular. It also wears people down, and in time Jimmy and Garth both left. Keith Dozier took over the drums, a long line of bass players came and went, and eventually Rik moved to bass for good. Of everyone who started the band, he was the only one who stayed.

In 1992, Rik called Toby, the same friend from the weight room, who was working the Dome Bar in El Paso, and asked him to join. Toby was in Austin within a day or two. The question from that summer at thirteen finally had its answer. When Keith left, Paul Ramsey took the drum chair, and with Toby on guitar and Rik on bass they brought in Brian Lee to sing (yes, that Brian Lee, later a founding member of Suede). Rik had known him since 1989, and Brian is a world-class singer, with a range beyond almost anyone Rik knows. He was gone after nine months, but he and Rik have stayed friends ever since.

That opened the door to the last lineup, and probably the most popular of them all: Rik, Toby, Paul and Brent Stone. Dirty Oliver worked the whole Texas circuit, played Hawaii in 1996 and went north twice to Koots in Anchorage, Alaska. They ran from 1989 to 1996, and in 2017 the band got back together for a reunion show, Brian included.

Jumptrain

In 1996, after leaving Dirty Oliver, Rik auditioned for Jumptrain and landed the bass spot, alongside Doug Wilson on lead guitar, Adam on rhythm guitar, Head Orona on drums and Paul Renna on lead vocals. Think the Black Crowes meeting Soundgarden, with a singer who could carry all of it. Paul is still one of the most soulful vocalists Rik has ever worked with, and today he’s a successful original artist in the Dallas area.

From 1996 through 1999, Jumptrain worked the Austin scene: headlining Steamboat, opening big shows at Antone’s, and holding down residencies at the Black Cat and the White Rabbit. It was Rik’s first original project, and writing alongside Paul and Doug is where he cut his teeth as a songwriter. In 1997 the band made an official video for “Faded.”

Seven’s Fears

From 2004 to 2013, Rik’s songs came out of a partnership with Joe Cieplinski. As Seven’s Fears, the two of them wrote constantly, chasing ideas for years, and put out three EPs that are still streaming everywhere today: Reconciliation in 2009, Introspection in 2011 and Malefaction in 2012. Every song on them was written by Rik and Joe.

There was no band behind them, because the two of them were the band. Rik sang and played guitar. Joe sang and played guitar and drums too, and on bass he was something else: a lefty on a five-string who learned on a right-handed bass with the strings upside down. Watching him slap is wild, because he plucks up with his thumb and slaps with his index and middle fingers.

What they never found were the players to take it live. The songs kept coming, but without a lineup to carry the music onto a stage, Seven’s Fears never got the momentum it deserved. The friendship outlasted all of it. Joe and Rik are still like family, and the chemistry they had writing together is the same kind Rik would find years later with Omar Vallejo. Joe’s name is still in the credits, too: he and Rik wrote “What You Want It To Be” on the 2025 Four-titude EP. Hear the Seven’s Fears EPs.

The Sound

The Rik Avalos sound lives somewhere between Radiohead's atmospheric tension, the ache of Stone Temple Pilots, and the raw emotional nakedness of Jeff Buckley, artists who understood that the space around a note matters as much as the note itself. Rik has long been drawn to jazz voicings and open chord positions, finding they create more room for a melody to breathe, to search, to land somewhere true. His songwriting process is less about construction and more about excavation: hours of abstract guitar exploration, hunting for the emotional tension and resolve that tells him a lyric is finally ready to be written.

"When I think of music alone, its complexity can be overwhelming. When I feel the emotion behind the artist, the music is easily understood."

The Voice He Almost Didn't Use

Nobody told Rik he could sing. Quite the opposite. For years, the desire to be a vocalist was met with doubt, from others and from within himself. He would practice alone, quietly discovering he could hit the notes that moved him, but in front of people, the fear would tighten his throat and steal the very thing he was trying to give.

It was Jeff Buckley who changed that. Listening to Buckley, to the way his voice moved through a song like it had nothing to prove and everything to feel, Rik found permission. Not to be technically perfect, but to be emotionally present. He wept listening to Buckley. He wept listening to Layne Staley and Scott Weiland, moved by the way both singers knew how to inhabit their band's sound with an ache that felt deeply personal. He went right along with all of them. And he realized that vulnerability wasn't a weakness. It was the whole point.

He never pursued formal training. He pursued truth.

The Same Fear, Different Stage

Long before any of this paid for itself, something else did. For seven years, Rik built the teams behind Tesla, working directly with Elon Musk through one of the most consequential stretches in the company's history, first as a recruiter, later in leadership, with every early hire he made personally approved by Musk himself.

That chapter is documented, not just remembered. He's named on pages 139, 162 and 163 of Tim Higgins's Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century (Doubleday, 2021), and quoted directly in The Washington Post's review of it, on his pitch to early hires back in January 2011:

"What if we hit 50 bucks a share?"

A second, independent account backs it up: an excerpt from Charles Morris's book on Tesla's early years, published on CleanTechnica, in which a former Tesla employee recalls messaging "recruiter Rik Avalos" on Facebook and getting an immediate reply: "can we talk?" Back in 2010, at the North American International Auto Show, AmericaJR.com interviewed him after he drove a leg of the relay that carried a Tesla Roadster from Los Angeles to Detroit, the same cross-country trip Tesla announced ahead of that year's show.

Elon Musk later recruited him again, personally, to lead talent at Neuralink, where every hire was once more reviewed and approved directly by Musk. A published profile on turning stage fright into strength put it simply: it's the same person, the same fear, learning the same lesson twice: once behind a microphone, once across a table.

The People Who Made It Possible

Behind every artist who makes it is someone who believed before it was obvious. For Rik, that person is Victoria Callor: his soulmate, his partner of 23 years, and the quiet backbone of everything he's built. Where others had asked him to quit, Victoria told him that music made him better at everything else. Many of his songs are written for her and because of her. The Rik Avalos Band, in its truest form, begins with Victoria.

Doug Wilson, who also played in Sounds Under Radio, is part of that story too, and he was one of Rik’s best friends. Just days before he passed, he called Rik with tickets to see the Black Crowes, one of Jumptrain’s biggest influences. He couldn’t go himself, so Rik met up with him, picked up the tickets and went to the show, then sent Doug videos from the night along with his thanks. A few days later, Paul called with the news that their brother was gone. Rik is usually grounded in an appreciation of life and an acceptance of death, but losing Doug hit especially hard. He plays Doug’s ’59 American Strat now, and every time he steps on stage, he feels Doug there with him.

The band itself crystallized when Rik connected with producer, bassist, vocalist, and engineer Omar Vallejo at Austin's 512 Studios. Their partnership accelerated what had been a solitary vision into something alive and collaborative: writing, arranging, producing, and working tirelessly until the music becomes what it always wanted to be. Through Omar, Rik recruited guitarist Chris Reyna, drummer CJ Fuson, and Bob Michaels, assembling a team built not just on talent, but on trust.

The Work

The Rik Avalos Band has been a consistent and growing presence on Austin's live circuit, performing regularly at Hanover's Draught Haus and appearing at storied venues including Continental Club, Shooters, and Buck's Backyard, with The Mill coming next on the horizon.

In a Documentary

"Together Again" (June 4, 2026)

The song is about the Camp Mystic floods, with lyrics by Tom Pattison. The director of The River of Angels, a documentary about survivors of the 2025 Kerrville floods, chose it for the film. That the song found its way into a film about resilience and community feels less like coincidence and more like character.

His signature song, Mercy, says everything about where he stands. Written against the backdrop of a divided country, it asks for exactly what the title suggests: the willingness to help one another before the moment passes. It is the song that started everything for the Rik Avalos Band, and it remains its moral center.

The Message

"I want to identify with others in a way that's meaningful. I care about people. I care about helping, supporting, doing the right things."

To anyone who has ever put their dream on the shelf, told by someone (or by themselves) that they weren't good enough, Rik has something to say: Talent is beautiful, but desire is nearly everything. Take honest inventory of your approach, stay open to collaboration, and treat the push and pull of working with others not as friction but as a gift. Resilience is what remains when the glamour fades and the work gets hard. And it will get hard.

He knows what it costs. He paid it willingly. And he'd do it again.