INTERVIEW: Monster Magnet
- Al Muzer
"It's important for me to remain simple in rock 'n' roll," Monster Magnet's Dave Wyndorf diplomatically replies when asked how he thought his band's new A&M Records release, Powertrip, stacked up against what was on the charts at that moment, "because it really is a physical thing that works best live. If it gets into anything more than that, well, then, to me it's just a waste."
"Ya' know, if what we do is looked at as nothing more than simple, knuckle- dragging stuff," he says in an attempt to explain the appeal of his Red Bank, NJ, four-piece's eighth (see discography) release, "well, then, I like that! It's okay. Really. Although for me, it's almost evangelical. That's what Monster Magnet is to me, [chuckles] It's like I'm an evangelist or something."
"I like a lot of different music and I listen to everything," the guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, band founder and guiding light continues as he zeroes in on what makes Monster Magnet Monster Magnet. "But, as far as the group is concerned? It all keeps coming out of the same place for me. Stuff that I heard when I was really, really young that my brother would play, Blue Cheer, Frijid Pink, Steppenwolf, Hawkwind a lotta Hawkwind Black Sabbath, ."
"When it comes to down to me looking at my limitations and at what I can do and how I can put my message across in the shortest period of time, well, then," he says as if he never seriously contemplated any other answer, "that means being really physical which is why I'm such a big fan of the guitar."
"I mean, the guitar is an instrument that you actually wear. It becomes a part of you. If you don't like someone, you can hit them with the thing, ya' know?" offers the man who sings, "I'm squeezed out in hump drive and I'm drowning in love," on "Space Lord." "I can go over and stab somebody with the motherfucker. I can fuck it. It can do anything, I just love it! I love the guitar."
"It's [music] gotta be a human experience," Wyndorf says with finality, "Something's gotta be connected. The instrument has to be connected to the body the body has to be an extension of the penis all that stupid shit, ." [laughs]
Propelled by a super-tight, amazingly heavy blend of Sabbath-informed power riffs, crunched out hardcore beats, swirling psychedelia, frequent-flyer space travel miles, a late-'60s garage-rock looseness and an intense, skull-crushing blend of barely harnessed energy coupled with an insatiable demand for more noize Monster Magnet has worked its furrowed-brow magic on folks hungry for lunatic-level, full-body mosh contact as well as it has those in the throes of slack-jawed acid flashbacks since the group's first self-released cassette, Forget About Life, I'm High On Dope, way back in 1989.
Committing it all to tape between 1990 and 1993, the band (which featured guitarist John McBain, bassist Joe Calandra and drummer Jon Kleiman) checked in with another cassette-only blast of cannabis-fried freak-outs, a German label CD release, the wonderfully toasted Spine Of God and 25............tab, a three-song, 49-minute acid romp through a brain- imploding metal and drone mix that was as psychotically perfect as anything they'd done up to that point.
Local lore has it that the group (which now featured former Daisycutter guitarist Ed Mundell in McBain's place) blew Soundgarden's mind when they opened for the Seattle grunge-meisters at The Fastlane in Asbury Park, NJ. One truly amazing performance, so the story goes, led to a Soundgarden-arranged meeting with A&M Records, which, in turn, led to 1993's brutally uncompromising Superjudge and 1995's surprisingly subtle (yet just as completely "out there") Dopes To Infinity.
With Beavis and Butthead, Howard Stern and a huge chunk of America taking to "Negasonic Teenage Warhead" in a big way; a video in rotation on MTV; another song, "Look To Your Orb For A Warning," that actually received a bit of radio play; and a truly relentless touring schedule that helped turn the band into headliners overseas and major attractions here, Dopes To Infinity set the bar pretty high as far as follow up efforts was concerned.
Rising to the challenge, Wyndorf took his creative muse to new heights of decadence and explored brand new lows as far as the humanity that inspires it goes by venturing deep "into the belly of the beast," when it was time to write the songs that wound up on the Matt (Porno For Pyros) Hyde-produced, Randy (Metallica, Veruca Salt) Staub-mixed Powertrip.
"I booked myself a flight to Las Vegas, the heart of the failed American dream," the singer has said, "and got a hotel room about 10 miles outside of town. I would watch 'Vegas from the balcony of my room, it looked like a big nuclear sunset in the distance. I made myself= get up every morning and complete a song before I let myself go into the city to watch naked women and see everyone lose all their money. I did this for 21 days and, by the end of 21 days, I had 21 songs. I was pumped nightly by all this artificial craziness."
Exposed to a bizarre array of middle America gone bug-eyed and freakish with greed, glitz, glamour and the surreal glow that comes from a lack of sleep, too many vodka and tonics and a few new dark secrets to file away; Wyndorf matched weirdness for weirdness by stepping back from his 'Vegas experience and coming up with songs such as "Crop Circle," "Space Lord," "Baby Gotterdammerung," "3rd Eye Landslide," "Bummer," "Your Lies Become You," "19 Witches," "Temple Of Your Dreams," "Tractor" and "Goliath And The Vampires."
"I was as honest as I could possibly be when I wrote those songs," he says of lyrical observations such as, "When you get tired of their crap, baby move over here and maybe buy some of mine," "Some people go to bed with Lucifer, then cry when they don't greet the day with God" and "Cashing Satan's check with my dick in my hand." "I wrote 'em all really quickly I don't think any one song took me more than say, an hour-and-a-half to write. I just said to myself, 'I'm not gonna try to polish them and I'm not gonna try to do anything to them.' I wanted this album to be an honest statement of where I was in Las Vegas and the way I felt while I was there."
"I guess that could be me," Wyndorf agrees when asked if he was the "lame dope sucking little slacker" addressed in the title track, "or, it could be somebody I met on the road somewhere. Some poor American fucking bead-person, ya' know? With a tam on his head goin' [imitates dumb stoner], 'Hey man! When's the show gonna start?' "
"Hey! It's 1998! Maybe you wanna stop smokin' pot for, like, two fuckin' seconds," he yells, " 'cause the world's gonna eat you up alive, kid!"
"Oh, I still do it occasionally," he adds when it's mentioned that a big part of A&M's Monster Magnet sales-shtick evolves around a dope-friendly band image. "Not nearly as much as I used to. It kind'a stopped doin' it for me after a while. It's really sad. It's just not growin' with me and I wish it did! It's not like wimmin! ya' know? Like, wimmin? Always! The pot thing, [sighs] when I was a teenager, man, it was, like, smoke pot every single day. It was 'Drug Athlete Time.' Too bad they didn't give out awards."
"I'm very serious about not being serious," Wyndorf says of his off-beat creative muse and the spaced-out stoner image his band has accepted as their own. "Within one song there'll be elements of total wish fulfillment, delusions of grandeur, moments of terrible despair and moments of flat-out rock out with your cock out stuff. So it actually gets pretty complicated. I just never thought anyone would be interested in knowing that kind of stuff about me or, if they would buy it if I explained it that way to them [laughs] so, I always tried to keep it [the public perception of the band] really simple, which is, you know, like, 'Fuckin' take a lot of drugs and fuckin' freak out!' "
The most unsettling track on Powertrip and a song that has absolutely nothing to do with sanity, Wyndorf's 'Vegas adventure, drug athletes, band image or the law as we know it is the Farfisa organ-driven, Question Mark & the Mysterians-meets- Strawberry Alarm Clock-surf-throb of "See You In Hell." A pleasant musical counterpoint to the rest of the album, the song sounds a little like something even mom would enjoy until she figured out the lyrics, that is.
"That's such a weird, ," Wyndorf begins before pausing a moment to collect his thoughts. "I took a bus from the Port Authority (New York City) to Red Bank just before I left for 'Vegas and I got on with this freak! This, like, total hippie guy, who starts telling me this story about how he and his hippie wife killed their baby. Like, they had a baby and they couldn't handle it?!?"
"The guy said he buried the baby in the Meadowlands," Wyndorf says in awed wonder before continuing. "He went down the whole thing like [imitates dangerously insane dumb stoner], 'You know, I didn't do it. She was the one who killed it, but, I had to bury it. She wouldn't do it, so I had to do the right thing and take it out and bury it.' I was, like, 'Holy fuckin' shit! Holy Christ!' I got off the bus." Monster Magnet Discography 1989 Forget About Life, I'm High On Dope [cassette] (Cool Beans) 1990 I'm High, What're You Gonna Do About It [cassette] (Cool Beans) 1990 Monster Magnet [German release] (Glitterhouse) 1992 Spine Of God (Primo Scree/Caroline) 1993 25............tab (Caroline) 1993 Superjudge (A&M) 1995 Dopes To Infinity (A&M) 1995 I Talk To Planets [CD-ROM] (A&M) 1998 Powertrip (A&M)
