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Monster Magnet, led by frontman Dave Wyndorf
(seated), are back with a new record, God Says
No, and sober outlook.
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Since coming on the scene with the 1992 album Spine of God, Monster Magnet has gained the reputation as the leader of the psychedelic-tinged heavy Rock style that's affectionately called "stoner rock."
Band leader Dave Wyndorf acknowledges the label with good humor.
"I asked for it a long time ago. You know, when we first started out we were all about Drug Rock," he says, owning up to the fact that for a time the group lived the kind of life associated with the musical style. What's ironic about the 'stoner' label now is that Wyndorf's life no longer has anything to do with drinking or drugs. He's been clean and sober for more than six years. It's a change he thinks has not only helped his lifestyle, but his music.
"I've never been a big one on the glory of the drunken writer," Wyndorf says. "Because I know that half the geniuses that did get drunk and or high and write probably would have written much more if they just got over their damn drug problem. To me, I write more. I write better. I never wrote an album or produced an album on drugs in my life. I mean all those early records, they were all written completely straight. I might have gotten high afterwards, but never while I was doing it.
"So it's better," Wyndorf says, turning his thoughts to how getting away from drinking and drugs improved his life overall. "I like it (being sober). It doesn't inhibit me socially, which is really the thing I was most afraid of. I thought I was just going to be a wallflower. But I'll tell you the truth, once you're straight, once you're clean and you're in your mind, the other demons take over. You can't hide anything. So I have my vices. They just don't happen to be drugs."
Another irony about Wyndorf's state of health is that Monster Magnet may hear the stoner label used even more often to describe the band's latest CD, God Says No. That's because where the 1998 CD Powertrip featured more of a straight-ahead heavy rock sound, God Says No brings back more of the Psychedelic Rock edge that defined the band's first three CDs.
The shift in musical settings was completely planned, Wyndorf says.
"It was a definite decision on my part to bring psychedelic back," Wyndorf says. "Powertrip was a record I wanted to make because we had never been really truly represented in a Rock way (on album), only live. Live it's a very, very rocking affair, as well as psychedelic, but we never really got that on a record. It's like I love psychedelic music and I love Rock music and I love to mix the two."
But getting to the point where Wyndorf could put his blend of 1960s/1970s-rooted Hard Rock and psychedelia on tape was anything but a smooth adventure.
Monster Magnet, which includes Wyndorf (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Ed Mundell (guitar), Phil Caivano (guitar), Joe Calandra (bass) and Jon Kleiman (drums), had scored something of a breakthrough when Powertrip topped the 500,000 in sales needed for it to be certified a gold album.
But to amass those sales, the band needed not only the popularity of the radio single "Space Lord,' but a round of heavy duty touring that eventually lasted 15 months.
Worn down by the grind, the band dispersed for a five-month break that was to precede the recording of God Says No. Wyndorf, who prefers to use his time off to get away from his bandmates and the distractions of home, decided to spend his break in New Mexico. There he visited his 9-year-old daughter, relaxed and did most everything except begin writing new songs. With the deadline looming, he finally dove into the songwriting, and in one week finished nine full songs and rough versions of six more tunes. He hopped in his car and headed for Red Bank, N.J., confident he had the makings of the next Monster Magnet record.
Then disaster struck. At a rest stop along the way, Wyndorf's car was broken into and the bag containing tapes of his songs and notebooks full of lyrics were stolen.
"I totally panicked, are you kidding?" Wyndorf says. "It scared the shit out of me. I drove home, set up a four-track in the kitchen and I just started writing."
After a couple of difficult days, the creative floodgates opened, and within two weeks, Wyndorf had written the 13 songs that would make the final cut for God Says No.
Overall, Wyndorf suspects God Says No lost a little of the psychedelic edge it might have possessed had the first batch of songs not been stolen.
"It was like all of this stream-of-consciousness lyric stuff that I had written, that's the stuff I lost," he says of the lyrics that he felt gave the initial songs a trippy edge. "That actually (was) worse. It made me mad because that stuff, I thought, was pretty cool. I can't remember what it was because it was written so fast. So that's the thing I miss. I think the music, I probably remembered, not most of it, but a lot of it -- enough. The lyrics I missed."
MONSTER MAGNET performs on Monday with Adarma and Dragpipe.
