Monster Magnet

Wot's the big deel with Pentagram?

Great band, and the best live rock show I've ever seen.

Monster Magnet are a shtick. Pentagram are a shtick. Shtick = a comic scene or vaudeville act. Many people like shtick. I often enjoy shtick. Pick your flavor. In this manner of shtick, mine is Pentagram.

dopes to infinity is awesome, top to bottom. "negasonic" should've made 'em famous. it's a shame. but at least you can count on MM for a coupla lines per album that make great metal sludge message board sigs. i prefer "cashing satan's checks with my dick in my hand."

Entire cattle cars of stoner bands have hoisted themselves upon this shtick.

We could do a whole thread of Wyndorfisms....sigs:

"I need a fistful of medication just to keep it in my pants"

"It's a Satanic drug thing, you wouldn't understand"

"I think I wet my pants doing whippits"

"I'll never trust myself again, but I don't care"

'bummer' is a fantastic song. i very much prefer the stuff they do that is of the mid-paced variety. slow, groovable hooks all over the shop on 'powertrip'

saw them on sunday night. dave wyndorf is a huge physical mass now - i was a little bit shocked. he had a guitar strapped on the whole time and barely played it. great show though and a true breath of fresh air. some awesome riffs and the occasional scorching guitar solo for good measure. plus the songs that i knew (mostly from "dopes to infinity' and 'powertrip' really held up).

a huge physical mass now

As in fat or musclebound?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3194/3078822468_c47559fc32.jpg

well as the picture shows, he's gotten very fat. he was actually wearing the same kind of hoodie as the one above and while it did a reasonable job of masking the size of his gut, there was little doubt that he's now a very large man.

hes been like that since he came off heroin

apparently a lot of people are fascinated...

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/wyndorf_google.gif

c'mon google, dude is in his 50s, cut him a break

His Wikipedia entry has an odd table of contents:

* 1 Biography
o 1.1 Early life
o 1.2 First years as a member of Monster Magnet
o 1.3 Short-lived commercial success
o 1.4 Monolithic Baby!
o 1.5 Drug overdose and recovery
o 1.6 4-Way Diablo
* 2 Opinion about drugs
* 3 References

holy crap

wow, dude was well into his 30s when he founded monster magnet. that's quite a revelation for me. where there's a will...

If nothing else this revival is inspiring me to replay Dopes to Infinity.

had no idea dude was nearing AARP eligibility

nearing AARP eligibility, but still having an absolute ball on stage. :)

yeah, i dug out dopes to infinity and gave it a good spin in advance of their show. seems i'd forgotten how much i enjoy it. 'negasonic teenage warhead' proved to be my personal highlight of the show.

weirdly, im really into this band

weirdly, im really into this band

"I went to see a heavy metal band in New York ... called Monster Magnet. Man, they were heavy, boy. The lead singer got on the monitor, and he said, "How many of you people feel like human beings tonight?" Then he said, "How many of you feel like animals?" And everyone cheered after the animals part. But the thing is, I cheered after the human being part because I did not know that there was a second part to the question. "Yes, I do feel like a human. I do not feel like a tree."

you can't cover it with your hair
you can't hide it in your army coat
you got the miltown demon stare
you forgot all the letters that you wrote

i love u, monster magnet

i like superjudge and 25...tab

mm vs. fu manchu

\m/ (-____=) \m/

A fan since Spine of God.

Anyone heard the new one?

It's fucking awesome.

In 1991 Wyndorf went on to birth his first child, the delight[citation needed] Betty.[3]

new album got a very good review in Terrorizer

just listened to god says no. couldn't be more excited for this new one

I listen to 25..... Tab about once a month at least.

What I mean to say is, is the new album anything like that?

no.

Can you describe what its like, then?

ha, I remember when betty was born

viceroy, have you ever heard the original version of tab?

bought another copy of fragile, seeds were busting up the spine

you can never have too many copies of fragile

I'm liking this album so far. Their last one was alright, but the new one feels a lot more spirited..."Gods and Punks" is a great little tune.

Christ I'm a good looking man

cool video too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ofFFrx8QI

I interviewed Wyndorf the other day - nice guy. We talked about Hawkwind.

if satan lived in heaven he'd be me

always excited by tales of new magnet, though i've kinda jumped ship since powertrip. that early glitterhouse EP is still one of my favorite things of ever.

New album is fantastic, particularly "Gods & Punks" and "Ghost Story."

"You can fuck recovery / 'cause you're already gone . . . "

i jumped ship after 'Superjudge' .. it just wasn't , i dunno, it just wasn't the same maaaaaaan

^ can totally understand this, but dopes and powerslave are awesome albums, so long as yr willing to meet the cheeze halfway

lol @ powerslave duh

anyway, "god & punks" is excellent, right in line with "negasonic", "space lord", "crop circle", etc. love the video too. "homeless, hungry, EVIL." ending bums me out though cuz i can relate to evil hobo dude. fuck the kids.

this was a band I had been meaning to check out for years but got turned off in the late 90's by "Space Lord" (which I realize isn't representative of their sound, but hey I was 18, and I hadn't discovered mp3s yet).

finally picked up Spine of God and holy crap is this thing awesome. not just the sludgey goodness I love in stoner-psych music but really nice trippy melodies, and Wyndorf's voice is incredible for the style. not just droney, it really has character and adds a lot to the music.

yeah, spine of god/tab and the stuff that led up to 'em = the peak, when john mcbain was still playing guitar. groovier, sludgier and WAY more psychedelic than the stuff that came after, though superjudge retains a bit of that flavor. i like both dopes to infinity and powertrip, though, and i'd say that "space lord" represents that phase of the band pretty well. it's dumb, cartoonish cock rock polished up for 90s radio, but catchy, funny & surprisingly clever within the parameters. a guilty pleasure.

the best version of monster magnet was the 5 piece w/ tim cronin on vocals, but that alignment recorded almost nothing that conveyed their live power

anybody tripping off spine of god should do themselves a favor and track down their first cassette, forget about life I'm high on dope, which contains a massive version of tab (funny story: I actually have the 2 track mixdown master tape of this)

would love to hear that, edward. have a boot with an early demo of tab, maybe the same version you mention, maybe not. it's damn good.

almost certainly one and the same, it's pretty widely available. the original track listing was:

side A
lizard johnny
black wahwah
8-ball
brainstorm

side B
tab

when it got bootlegged in the 90s, somebody tacked on "freakshop USA" from the circuit 7" after "brainstorm", and that's the version that most frequently circulates.

those guys were from my hometown, we were all in the same incestuous scene, forming one absurdly-named concept band after another and releasing cassettes left and right. but there was something special about that first monster magnet tape. they rode it up and out of the local scene, it was kind of wild to witness.

love this story, Edward. anything else i might have heard of come out of that scene? anything i should have heard but haven't? sounds like a blast. and yeah, i remember watching nirvana come up out of the oly punk rock house party scene in a similar way. strange, but more power to em.

"Gods and Punks" totally reminds me of The Four Horsemen.

Ehh.. you mean the song? Or the horsemen?

The band. The great early-90s band with Dimwit on drums.

Release day! Reserved my copy

love this story, Edward. anything else i might have heard of come out of that scene? anything i should have heard but haven't? sounds like a blast. and yeah, i remember watching nirvana come up out of the oly punk rock house party scene in a similar way. strange, but more power to em.

― naked human hands and a foam rubber head (contenderizer), Thursday, October 21, 2010 12:37 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark

just stumbled across a lengthy interview with mcbain where he talks a lot about the red bank weirdo tape scene. I have a copy of the chigger tape he mentions, it is amazingly hilarious, intentionally bad music. my favorite magnet offshoot was evil acidhead. blackjack was gonna put out their single at one point but they dropped the ball. it is some of the most heavily oppressive psychedelic music I've ever heard.

http://www.nowinvisibly.com/wwc/content/article_fsusa.html

YSI?

I can leonardo my rips of the tapes. I know mcbain remastered the EA stuff a couple years ago with an eye towards getting somebody to release them but that never happened. if you guys know any psych labels with some loose change in their pockets please send 'em his way.

leo

acid reich did a great version of "set the controls for the heart of the sun" with made-up lyrics like "bathe in the light of the unholy one / fry like a pig in the heart of the sun"

We then recorded the second demo and decided, along the way, that Ozium didn't quite fit.

Did you shop that tape around to the labels (including Primo Scree/Caroline)?

No. It was made strictly for the band. I don't recall how The Ugly American got involved. As I see it, it's far superior to anything we ever did. I love how raw and grating it is.

mcbain otm

I still kick myself for losing my copy of this, and for not bidding on one that showed up on ebay a few years ago

i lived at the shore at the time and always assumed the red bank weirdo tape scene, of which i'm pretty sure i still have some cassette mementos in a box somewhere, was basically three or four guys in a basement somewhere making it up as they went. which i guess, skimming through that mcbain interview, isn't that far off the mark. i can't imagine the audience for most of that stuff exceeded a dozen people. the brighton bar was a fantastic shithole of a club. i loved that place. big nurse, who mcbain mentions as having headlined the brighton bill that was monster mag's first gig, were fantastic for awhile. they released a single on heat blast records, which was THE local label, which was pretty good in a husker du-ish way, not sure if they ever released anything else. they weren't a red bank band; they were from somewhere else on the shore, i forget exactly where. nudeswirl, from new brunswick, was another good one, them and their silly-yet-quite-catchy drum-machine-and-guitar offshoot they might be vaginas. nudeswirl signed to polygram records, back when the grunge dollars were starting to flow, and promptly vanished. monster magnet were really something else when they started playing at the brighton bar. they just kinda walked in as rock stars from the start. and, yeah, i loved them with tim cronin on vocals too. tim was also an all-time-great record store clerk.

ha, I was one of those guys in the basement

there were more than three or four of us, but me + 3 other guys probably generated 50% of it so

it depended on the release but those cool beans tapes did decent business through jack's and blowyourselfup. I'm sure some of the bands with local followings like laughing soup dish did pretty well.

otm re: tim as all-time-great record store clerk. "if you don't like this, I'll buy it back from you." the guy was hugely influential on my musical education. he's actually in chasing amy, stocking the shelves in the record store scene.

Monster Magnet is one of my Top 10 All-Time Bands so huge bong-tokin' grin at Mastermind. I still wear my Dopes To Infinity tour shirt weekly but almost didn't care anymore after the last few. currently Diggin' That Hole \m/

there was another clerk who worked with tim when i first started going to jack's, whose tastes were a lot more poppy, and they used to fight over how i should spent my money. "you need this sex clark five album." "no, no, what you really need is this scratch acid record." i needed that balance in my life. i learned a lot from the two of them.

that would be gary

he and tim started cool beans

yes, gary, that's it. thank you!

Interview w/Dave Wyndorf (part 1 of 2; the rest, including Wyndorf talking about Hawkwind, will be posted on Thursday)

I'm sure some of the bands with local followings like laughing soup dish did pretty well.

Ha, I got a request for these dudes on my show once. Couldn't find their records though.

dave's wrong, he's a great drummer

xp

Tim's still at Jack's and also currently in an excellent band called The Ribeye Bros along with some Magnet alums. Excellent, straight up garage rock with really good and funny lyrics.

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs444.ash2/71727_1615896193108_1107423051_31715939_2434131_n.jpg

Having finally heard that early demo cassette Edward rightly praises above, it's pretty great to hear that legendary Freddie Hubbard rant used as a sample.

I've had 'Space Lord' (& all of Powertrip, really, but especially that) on constant rotation lately & I'd been thinking "how in the hell, at a time when White Zombie could fill stadiums, was this not a gigantic single?" And so I looked it up & it turns out it actually kinda was, in its own modest way:

The song peaked at number three on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart..The music video is notable for being the first video ever aired on MTV's Total Request Live on September 14, 1998.

I guess I just wasn't paying any sort of attention at the time! At any rate, it is a JAM

this band totally rules btw

Scharpling interviews Dave for ninety minutes. Absolutely a must listen... http://www.lowtimespodcast.com/lt_episodes/009/

Aw man, his story about playing Norman Mailer's place is hilarious!

I heard "Teenage Negasonic Warhead" for the first time in ages and was struck that it was a major cop of "Tales of Brave Ulysses" by Cream. Or am I insane?

I'M SO FUCKING STOOOOONED

if satan lived in heaven he'd be me

Scharpling interview was so great. Totally like listening to any old Jersey dude except he saw good bands and had an interesting life.

watching this right now and it's kinda blowing my mind! :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CpmTYVqe1Ig

I mean, wow, right? that vid is crazy stupid rock dumbshit in a bottle, absolutely amazing!

wow, that starts out like a good cover/version of "spine of god", but by the end, holy shit

19 years before hanging with marilyn manson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ipU93aDQiw

awesome, thanks EIII

lead singer in that clip is Daniel Rey, who produced and co-wrote much of the best late-period Ramones stuff.

You mean guitarist?

Sorry, yeah. That's exactly what I meant.

that scharpling interview is awesome. even if you couldn't give two shits about monster magnet, there's great stuff on the 60s/70s music scene, early NYC punk, the similarities between hawkwind and the ramones, etc. I'm 30 minutes in and they haven't even started talking about monster magnet yet.

kinda weird listening to this thing cuz I grew up around the corner from dave, and I spent a lot of evenings in that exact kitchen having the same convos with him. and y'know I still haven't heard most of these chestnuts, he's a bottomless pit of wry observation and batshit rocklife stories.

john mcbain has been throwing up some MM rarities on his soundcloud

http://soundcloud.com/john-mcbain/mm-murder-court-tavern-1991

including the greatness that is CHIGGER

http://soundcloud.com/john-mcbain/chigger-chigger-alive-live-at

speaking of throw up

Nice!

high school me can be heard on them donuts are talkin' to me... I'll never tell where tho

wow, thanks for the heads up, EIII!

np

so, is everything my mm as fucking brilliant as 'monolithic' ?

i cant get enough of this track ..

Pretty much, yeah.

dave wyndorf was on the best show last week. him talking about going to see suicide is pretty special.

new video directed by... tom scharpling?

http://vimeo.com/76112773

He's a big fan!

Yeah that interview he did with Wyndorf was fucking great, too.

yeah I know scharpling loves MM, I just missed his whole second career as a video director

last patrol might be the best one since god says no -- even the bonus tracks are killer

great bunch of record picks here:
http://thequietus.com/articles/14851-dave-wyndorf-monster-magnet-favourite-albums?page=1

great article ..

i have had that blue cheer album on my watch out list for ages ..

(not to mention MM themselves as i clearly need more MM in my life)

Dave really likes that hysterical too-fast vibrato a lot of late 60s lead guitarists use, and I like how it makes him think of insanity.

Oh my god I love Wyndorf. Dude's so enthusiastic about that shit, it's great.

that is an awesome list . . . but where's hawkwind?

Hmm. Maybe he just figured we all know of his deep, undying love for them. Personally I would've replaced Granicus with Hawkwind.

i've listened to that granicus album a bunch and never really got the fuss. love what he has to say about captain beyond though. \m/

I'm glad someone else wasn't bowled over by it. I'm actually way more partial to the Pandora "Space Amazon" album that had some vague connection to Granicus.

"A lot of the records in this list, I just gave it a try because I liked the cover," the man says about Nuggets. i know what he means; that granicus cover is amazing. four rock bros with flares jamming in the sun! still it just hasn't clicked for me yet, after years of chances. never heard of pandora. what's 'space amazon'? i'd give it a try because i like the name!

It was a glam/hard rock band from NYC 1974 produced by Granicus' drummer, but it really leans towards the HARD side of the spectrum, outside of the vaguely Bowie-esque title track. Which is still pretty hard. They originally did a flexi disc sampler but the full album wasn't released until the 90s on Arf! Arf!

Stupid Question: Was there ever a version of "Space Lord" that goes "Space lord motherfucker" or was the actual lyric originally supposed to be "Space lord mother, mother"?

got this album a few weeks ago, its fucking immense.

however, tonight while listening on headphones this exact question hit me.

anyone know the answer ?

also, i now have monolithic baby and power trip .. what next ?

Dopes to infinity and spine of god, not necessarily in that order.

:-)

cheers.

just needed a pointer.

fucking brilliant rock and roll band.

god says no is fucking awesome. do yourself a favor

Dopes to infinity and spine of god, not necessarily in that order.

not the only person to suggest these additions to the archive.

so in the last 7 days this has become a reality.

summary : f*ck yes !

thank you to those that pushed me to get myself sorted.

(i guess 'god says no' is next on the list .. )

\m/

Anyone heard Milking the Stars? I actually haven't heard Last Patrol yet but I'm intrigued by the idea of the songs being redone with a "weird 60s vibe."

me too.

So, for the record, I think I dig Milking the Stars a little bit more than Last Patrol. Last Patrol is mixed like what you expect a Monster Magnet album to sound like; MtS definitely has a more expansive, psychedelic quality to it while still having some pretty heavy stuff. Doesn't sound 60s, exactly, but if you dig the early albums idea of psych it's worth checking out.

Not quite Monster Magnet but the Acid Reich tapes from 1989 are resurfaced:

https://guerssenrecords.bandcamp.com/album/mistress-of-the-perpetual-harvest

Not sure how I missed Ned's last revive, but I definitely need to check that out!

I actually really like both of their full album reworks, both the Milking the Stars redo of Last Patrol and Cobras and Fire: The Mastermind Redux, they both injected the weirdness and unexpected turns that had been missing from their more recent albums. Of course this approach led to the natural conclusion of last year's A Better Dystopia, on which they just straight up tackled a batch of proto-metal and psych-era covers.

I think my post 6 yrs ago sounded a little lukewarm but Milking the Stars really stands out as a late peak to me, easily beats out Last Patrol, great stuff and he even rewrote some of the lyrics for the better.

hard to beat the original, but any unearthing of "Tab" is always a good thing.

you know about this cassette from 1989 (unless it isn't, things aren't very clear) too? https://heavymetalrarities.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=105&t=41958

I need to check out that new demo version, wish this wasn't a vinyl only thing tbh.

It isn't. It's on Bandcamp digitally too.

https://godunknownrecords.bandcamp.com/album/test-patterns-vol-1

Oh, thanks! Was misinformed by the announcement I read that said it was vinyl only. Thought it might have been released on Napalm, where their recent stuff has been released and only checked their bandcamp page.

RIP tim cronin :(

oh no :(

That's terribly sad news for sure. I had missed the earlier announcements this year.