Written and Interviewed by David Booth
Photos Courtesy of Jeremy Saffer
On the buildup to Monster Magnet’s first extensive tour of North America in over a decade, we jump down the rabbit hole with Dave Wyndorf to talk about the new album, his inspirations and the larger than life stories behind the music of Monster Magnet.
You can learn a lot about a person by the sound of their scream. A scream is a person at their least composed. Fuck handwriting analysis. Show me a person screaming and I’ll show you their soul. Take Dave Wyndorf from Monster Magnet. This isn’t some angsty call for help or wail bereft of hope like many of his 90’s contemporaries. Listen to any Monster Magnet song and you’ll hear Dave Wyndorf scream. It is the sound of pure rock and roll in its natural habitat. This isn’t a rehearsed cry for sympathy. It’s primal and dripping with attitude. It’s a recordable middle finger reminiscent of the MC5. It sounds like denim and leather and wide open throttle on a canyon road in something fast enough to kill you. In the case of Dave Wyndorf, it’s a scream that hasn’t lost a thing in the last 25 years. I had the opportunity to talk to Dave about his writing method, his influences and inspirations, and the stories behind his biggest songs and albums.
Visually, the band is and has always been unapologetically rock and roll straight out of the 70’s. Monster Magnet was sporting leather pants and aviator glasses while the rest of the music industry was scrambling into thrift stores to find plaid flannel shirts and Chuck Taylors. They were rock star excess when the cool thing to do was mourn your own stardom. A drawing of the Bullgod finds its way into almost all of the bands album art. It appropriately sits somewhere between comic book fantasy and an acid trip visual. The details of the Minotaur head change with every album, but the snorting, 4-horned monster baring teeth is a constant visual theme. “Before we put out our first record, I wondered if record execs were actually listening to all of the stuff they were being sent,” Wyndorf stated when asked about the origin of the image. “So I started re-sending out the demos, changing the band name and cover art. I was working at a comic book store at the time, and saw a comic book story with the title Wrath of The Bullgod! I said to myself “Yeah! Pagan idolatry!” And later on I found this He-Man action figure that was a Minotaur type character and that seemed to tell me the Bullgod was here to stay.” The love between Monster Magnet and comic books run both ways. Their lyrics name drop villains like MODOK, Ego the Living Planet, and the X-Men with a Children of the Atom reference. Marvel comics writer Grant Morrison returned the tribute to the band, naming one of his characters “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” after a Monster Magnet song. When asked about aspirations to write a comic, Wyndorf said “It’s come up before, but I have such a respect for comics. I can be creative and write a story, but I’d rather not do it than do a bad job at it.”
In a way reminiscent of a comic book, Monster Magnet lyrics can be very direct to quite random and surreal when looked at in pieces, but taken in song sized, or particularly album sized chunks, they have themes and narratives that are easy to get drawn into. The combination of fantastical themes and a warm, pulsing, cyclical nature to the songs make the better Monster Magnet albums easy to slip yourself into. On what makes stoner rock what it is, Dave stated “I think it’s the constant droning notes and rhythm in the background. Hawkwind and Grand Funk Railroad are completely different types of music, but when you look at them, they both have that thing to them; rolling bass lines. If you listen to the Eastern stuff the Beatles were listening to during their psychedelic phase it also has that constant drone of sound. Sitars, tamburas.” Wyndorf states that he was pretty much done with drugs in general including hallucinogens by the time he had started Monster Magnet.
“Back when we were kids I lived in that ‘black light’ world of early 70’s head shops and record stores. Posters were everywhere. It really was a world where parents had absolutely NO idea of what all this stuff was about. Not a clue. There was no precedent for kids taking ‘mind expanding’ drugs. What the hell was a mind expanding drug? (Laughs) And this was post Manson murders. It was a crazy time in America. Flower power was dead and general psychosis took over. Lots of cults, satanic and otherwise. Modern porn was in its infancy. I read books by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. I read comic books like Zap and Doctor Strange. I loved the art of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko and Gene Colan. I saw Russ Meyers movies at the drive-in. My psychedelic mindset was formed before I ever took LSD. It was the music and images that propelled me, my IDEA of an acid trip. Of course I dove in head first and soon experimented with the actual drug itself. It was a different time in those days. It was sort of a badge of honor to just blow your mind out on acid and come back in one piece! But it was heavy, you know? You’re really playing Russian roulette with your sanity with that stuff. You can go out there and never come back! Not to say I didn’t have a lot of fun with it—out of body experiences, insanity for insanities sake. But I was done with the drug by 19 or 20. And I still prefer my preconceived idea of an acid trip over the real thing. I wouldn’t take it now, too many accrued demons from a longish life, you know? (Laughs) People think as you get older you grow up, settle down in your head. Not me, I get weirder! (Laughs) I think it would be too risky for me now.”
When asked how Monster Magnet would be different if he had never taken LSD, Wyndorf said “There wouldn’t BE a Monster Magnet without my psychedelic childhood. Hopefully I’d still be a musician or doing something with music, but it wouldn’t be Monster Magnet. That ‘black light’ world I mentioned was only 3 or 4 years of my life but they were formative years. Like I said, it was a crazy time to grow up and I wrote all about it on the first few Monster Magnet albums.
In response to questions about his overdose in 2006, he explained “Touring was affecting my sleep and my lack of sleep killed my voice. No voice means no show. Disaster. So I went to the doctor and he gave me massive doses of benzos, basically. They’re anti-anxiety meds but they really did the job. While I was taking them it was fine. I was getting sleep and I was doing well. I wasn’t ‘high’ during the day or anything like it. Other than that I was straight, you know? Just making albums and touring like crazy. I didn’t even drink. Anyway, the guy ended up being a pill pusher. He was overprescribing stuff to a lot of his patients and was being investigated. The DEA was sniffing around the doctor and without any warning to me he pulled me off the stuff because, I found out later, he didn’t want to get busted. I walked out of his office saying to myself “OK, I can live without this stuff. How hard can it be?” Boom! Total psychosis! Worse than any bad acid trip I could possibly imagine. A true living nightmare. We had just finished recording the music for 4 Way Diablo. I hadn’t’ done the lyrics or vocals yet but I had to shut the whole album down at that point. It took me a year to pick up the pieces of my brain.”
Wyndorf opened up about his recent release, Mindfucker, and the stories behind his past and current albums. “’I wanted an album that would rock it live, right out of the gate. Last Patrol was headphone album, you know? Moody, melancholy and just plain weird. Mindfucker was written with more of a punch in the face vibe with shorter songs, bigger choruses. I pictured it as a live set when I wrote it.”
Dave also spoke about the circumstances behind the writing of some of his other albums. “I remember writing God Says No in a hotel in Vancouver near Gastown and Skid row. It was written in a state of fear of missing my deadline. I had the album pretty much completed, and the car of the girl I was dating at the time got broken into and they got everything. This was before the age of backups and everything being on computer. I remember being in that hotel, looking out the window at the junkies on methadone day, writing the whole thing over again from hazy memories of almost two years on the road. Weird stuff happens when you just roam all over the world with no end in sight. Weird thoughts. (laughs) Dopes to Infinity was written in New Jersey in the winter. You can hear a few references to the weather in it, and that sense of everything being snowbound and stuck inside with all this snow outside. Mastermind was written in a hotel in Berlin after a tour there.”
The bands biggest record, Powertrip, was written to follow up Dopes to Infinity, an album that got them closer to the mainstream and netted them a few videos and radio hits. Powertrip included the bands breakout hits, including “Temple of your Dreams”, “Powertrip”, “See you in Hell”, and of course “Space Lord”, the song they are most closely associated with. The album was written in a hotel room outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, and the spirit of the city can be seen in the sex, drugs and themes of rock and roll excess in the album. I don’t mean passing references to the strip and casinos and shiny stuff. I mean lyrics dripping with swagger. Powertrip is the perfect soundtrack to partying so hard you won’t live to see the bill. What can you say about an album that starts with the lines “I was born underwater, I dried out in the sun. I started humping volcanoes baby, when I was too young”, and kicked off the second half of the album with a song that could be the motto for the whole album, with “Sucking love from wherever I can/Cashing Satans’ cheques with my dick in my hand”? It’s safe to say there is absolutely nothing in this albums attitude, theme or content that your mother is going to approve of. In 1998 after the music scene spent half a decade marinating in its own disillusionment, this album comes out with an American flag obscured by flames, covered in women, money, leather, gold, skulls and a reference to Galactus, the Eater of Worlds. It was rock and roll with a capital Fuck you.
“The crashed American dream was on my mind a lot back then,” says Wyndorf. “What better place than Vegas to write about it?”
There are a number of standout stories about the writing of this album. Easily the creepiest is about the song See you in Hell, which references a disturbing conversation with a person Dave Wyndorf met on a commuter bus. This is why people are willing to pay for parking in New York City. As described by Wyndorf:
“I’m taking a bus from Manhattan back to New Jersey. This old hippie guy next to me starts telling me his life story, like he’d been waiting his whole life to tell someone. He told me about how he and his wife had a baby that they didn’t want, and they didn’t know what to do with it, and so she smothered it with a pillow and buried the body! The way he was talking about it, how he sounded, I believed him. In an hour this guy pretty much told me the story of the fifties, sixties and seventies. Sock hops, The Beatles, peace rallies, rock festivals, all this great stuff and then murder! I was in slow, mounting shock. I tried to get it out of my head but it wound up in a song.”
It’s easy to let the up-tempo sound of the Farfisa organ and the 60’s inspiration slide the creepy tale past you, even with the straightforward lyrics references like “You were like a zombie when you told me what you did that day/And I drove out to the Meadowlands to throw our baby away”, and the judgment of Wyndorf saying “I guess I’ll see you in hell”, but it’s one of those stories that is unforgettable, and once heard, underscores the ability of Wyndorf’s songs to go from over the top libertine to haunting storyteller without skipping a beat.
As far as “Space Lord” how can there be a story about a song that starts with the lines “I’ve been stuffed in your pocket for the last 100 days/When I don’t get my bath, I take it out on the slaves”, and constant references to a space lord? Apparently, all it takes is a German Journalist, a tour accident, New Orleans, a Dominatrix, and the need for a little payback. And here, you thought this was going to get weird.
According to Wyndorf, “We were in Europe and there it was; my photo on the cover of a rock magazine with the headline Dave Wyndorf, the Space Lord. (laughs) Space lord! Sure, fuck yeah! That’s kind of cool. So a bit later on, when I was (still) touring Dopes to Infinity I met this classy woman in a clothing shop in New Orleans and we were immediately attracted to one another. We didn’t really talk much about our jobs or our lives. She didn’t know Monster Magnet from a hole in the ground. And she was doing ok, better than me. She had a big, fancy place in New Orleans, She had two cars, the whole thing. Turns out she was a high paid Dominatrix! Whatever, we got along really well on our own terms and we spent a long weekend together. Flash forward a few months and I injured my knee on tour and was told by doctors to sit out for a few months. So, of course I phone my new friend in New Orleans and she invites me to stay with her while I recover. Woo, let’s play house! I grab my guitar, my 4-track recorder and a few pedals and and move in. I figure I’d write songs while she was working. I’m down there and I’m loving it. I can’t move around that much but that doesn’t stop my new friend and I from having fun. Things are hot and happy for a while. After about a month, I’m writing up a storm and there’s paper all around and guitar chords everywhere and I’m in the ZONE, you know? And I’m the phone a lot—I should say HER phone—band members, manager, record co., long distance stuff, and I’m also getting mail delivered.
One day she comes home at 4 in the morning after a hard night whooping some high powered executives ass and I’m there on her couch surrounded by empty coffee cups, full ashtrays and with my guitar in my hands busting some horrendously loud fuzz lead into my 4- track. That was it. It all came out. Questions like “Aren’t you ever going to get a job? Do you know how hard I work only to come home and find you always on that stupid machine of yours?” and “Is that leg ever going to get better?” Uh oh.
So of course I get into it with her. “I have a job! I’m a rock musician, goddamnit!” (laughs) And she’s not buying it. She’s got the idea I’ve been playing her the whole time like some long haired lover/grifter she saw in a movie once.
Then she really pushes a button by saying “If you were a real rock musician I would have heard of you. None of my friends has ever heard of you.” So I flip out and show her the European magazine! I’m yelling now. “There, you see? I’m the Space Lord! Look at it! I’m the Space Lord, see?!” So she goes, “Well Mr. Space Lord, I think I’ve about had enough” and that was it. Back to Jersey for me and then to Vegas where I wrote “Space Lord” in her honor. “Someday she’s gonna hear this and be sorry!” (laughs) I guess I’ll never know if she did or not.”
For a song like “Space Lord”, you know that the video was going to have to be something special. Great rock videos were in short supply. The wild days of rock and roll seemed to be gone by the late 90’s. The hip-hop artists were the ones who were living hard and blowing their royalty checks doing it—the path for Monster Magnet was clear.
“I wanted to do something like the rap videos that were coming out at the time. They were more rock than the rock videos were! And I wanted to do it right. We reached out to the biggest rap video director in the business and asked him to do a Monster Magnet video. He turned us down. He didn’t get the joke of “dirtbag rock band” takin’ it back! (Laughs) So we went to the second biggest rap video director, Joseph Kahn. A very talented man. He got the idea straight away.”
When asked if his goal was to poke fun at Ma$e by doing a near shot for shot recreation of key parts of his “Feel So Good” video, Dave chuckled as he explained, “I didn’t have any idea! I didn’t know until afterwards. I wanted a video and he shot and directed a video. I didn’t know it was almost a shot by shot rip off of Ma$e till a hip-hop fan accused us of stealing it!”
The video starts with just Wyndorf’s face against a dark curtain, with a distinct “Enter Sandman” vibe for the quiet opening chorus of the song. When the chorus hits, the sheet drops, and Wyndorf is standing in front of a Vegas casino in a shiny blue suit with a crew of dancers in matching booty shorts and tops. As far as 1998 rock videos go, it’s like they told over the top that it wasn’t applying itself and needed to work harder. The obvious homages to the Ma$e video get more entertaining in the minor differences. Instead of Puffy and Ma$e in an S class Mercedes, Twiggy Ramirez, the bassist for Marilyn Manson, and Wyndorf are throwing horns up in a shiny black, T-topped late 70’s Trans Am Disco Bucket. Instead of standing in a room in a sequined suit, Wyndorf is wearing a white suit with lit light bulbs stitched onto it, with a cord coming out of the ass of the suit pants like a tail nailed to the wall. As Monster Magnet has the tendency to do, they engaged in glorious overkill, and went for it without any sense of shame or irony. What keeps it endearing and fun instead of smacking of the self-important sanctimony that killed 80’s rock is that Monster Magnet gets the joke. Rock and Roll is about the spectacle, and selling the image of the band is at least as important as the presentation and visuals of the merchandise or albums.
When talking about the image of rock, Wyndorf said, “The Seattle scene got me back into music. Rock had gone stale, and I was out for a while, just listening to sixties garage and 50’s rock and roll. But then music got reinvigorated by the indie scene—but I’m talking about the early guys like Mudhoney and Soundgarden, Screaming Trees and The Butthole Surfers. Also in England, Loop, The Cult and Spacemen 3. It was cool and then Nirvana hit and it seemed to encourage a kind of “beautiful loser” type of vibe in a lot of bands. What followed was people who didn’t think it was cool to be a rock star at all. Suddenly doing anything on stage was considered uncool, and you’ve got people killing themselves because they’re so miserable about being successful. I mean, that was the takeaway to me. Everyone was afraid of being seen as “Metal”. I get it, but guys were starting to get up on stage and not move at all. Shoe gazing, whatever. Even bands like Soundgarden were worried about coming off as too metal.
We toured with Soundgarden on the Badmotorfinger album. Un-fucking believable band. Those guys were amazing, and totally cool people. They helped us out so much. I saw them do their early shows in NYC and they rocked it. Then they got popular and seemed to fold up a little. Like they didn’t want to be the obvious rock stars they were actually becoming. Chris wrote the song “Jesus Christ Pose” about guys up on stage being messianic rock stars, and there I was backstage telling him, “Chris, that’s you! You’re that guy!” He was honestly embarrassed about it. I kept thinking, man if I had that guy’s voice and looks, holy shit. After the show you’d hear the guys discuss whether it was “too rock” or not. Yeesh!”
Monster Magnet have been touring Europe almost exclusively for over a decade, with the exception of some local shows and a short North American tour stint for Last Patrol. The band will be changing that, however, touring North America in the fall of 2018. When asked why they had cut down on touring in North America and the reasons for this tour, Wyndorf said “I love touring America and I’d love to tour here more often, but it’s all about timing and finances. We might have to do two or three European tours to be able to maybe lose some money on a North American tour. Whether a tour is paying well or not, we still have our expenses and everyone still needs to get paid. You can’t do a tour night after night in good venues with large crowds with good sound and equipment in the U.S.. Not without flying from place to place, anyway. In Europe, I can do 12 different days of shows in a row over two weeks in great venues that are packed. You can get more people out. It’s more of a live culture, I think. There is a different view of music venues there. A lot of pride. It seems to me that in the U.S., music venues are seen as bars that also have bands and in Europe, they see themselves as performance halls that also serve alcohol. That’s been my my experience anyway.”
You can hear the huge influence of Detroit rock in Monster Magnet’s music. Shades of Nugent, the MC5, the Stooges, and Alice Cooper reflect the band’s spiritual roots in Detroit music, if not physical ones. Through the years where Detroit was booming, through its decline, and during its current rebirth, Detroit has contributed more than its fair share of music to the American soundtrack.
When asked about his thoughts on Detroit and the music that it inspired, Wyndorf said, “Music spreads person to person. People pick up and share the little things with each other, where musicians meet and play together; in studios, and shows, and record stores, and getting together to play. I always had this idea in my head (right or wrong) that in Detroit all the bands knew each other and copped each others riffs and that organically a Detroit “sound” evolved. Just like the Motown sound had evolved before that. I love that idea. Unfortunately, I think it happens less now as there are less music stores, and people record at home, and “hang out” on their phones. Closer yet further apart than ever, it seems. And rock’s at weird stage, man. It’s been around a long time and it’s something that was created more or less by kids FOR kids. Well, there’s less kids around now. When I was younger, almost half the population of America was under 19. The baby boom. I think it’s like 20 percent now.
When Monster Magnet puts an album together, the basic structure of the song starts with Wyndorf. “It’s important for someone to have an overall understanding of where the song should go. A lot of people don’t want to do that. They’d prefer to just focus on what they’re doing on their instrument. It often makes sense for the guy writing the lyrics to direct and arrange the music, but we work as a band. All the final arrangements are done together. These guys build on what I bring. I couldn’t do it to such effect without them and their talent and individual nuances. They’re better players on their instruments than I am, that’s for damn sure!” (laughs). In addition to his Rhythm guitar parts, Phil Caivano has been largely responsible for the bass on the last few albums. I had a problem with our old bass players execution and I asked Phil to play bass on Mastermind, Last Patrol and Mindfucker, but now that Chris Kosnik is on board, he’ll take over.”
As far as future albums, when discussing what direction the band was going to take on their next album, Wyndorf revealed, “I could go several ways. I like different vibes—I wrote some new stuff and it’s everything from spacey to full on rock. As usual, I just kind of vibe it out. The music has a way of telling me what to do.”
The lyrics to Mindfucker are the second set written, with a rewrite being done to change the lyrical direction.
“With all the stuff is going on in America when I was working on the lyrics, it worked its way into a lot of the songs. When it got time to do them in the studio, they sounded like an Op-Ed for a newspaper. It’s such a fucked up political situation right now. And the information age collapsing on itself. A million ways to lie. Stupid is the new smart. I’m from the New York area. We’ve seen Donald Trump here since the 80’s, and he’s always been a fucking joke. He’s always been that guy, a great big man baby, totally full of shit and a probable racist and criminal to boot—but now he’s the president. Anyway, I wanted to convey more of an emotional vibe in some of the lyrics rather than just a set of political bullet points. I wanted Mindfucker to be of its time but not ABOUT its time.”
Whatever your politics, throwing fists in the air and shouting larger than life lyrics about slapping a tornado or riding a river of flame might be the most fun you can have traumatizing you eardrums. Just like Powertrip 20 years ago, Mindfucker is Monster Magnet showing rock music that it needs to remember where it came from. This time, however, it’s not the sound of Vegas hotel room trashing excess. The sound of this album is decidedly more rust belt. It’s familiar, with a Spine of God vibe, but not derivative. Think of Wayne Kramer fronting a band who has Ted Nugent with duct tape over his mouth on guitar. This album sounds like fury and adrenaline The feeling you get that moment before you tell someone who has desperately needed it for some time to go fuck themselves. This album sounds like that feels. Righteous anger is a wonderful thing. It’s a Mindfucker.
CHECK OUT MONSTER MAGNET LIVE
SEPTEMBER 28 AT LEE’S PALACE IN TORONTO, CANADA
SEPTEMBER 29 AT THE EMERALD THEATRE IN PONTIAC, MICHIGAN
