Very special thanks to Birgit and Mörat @ Kerrang! magazine.


LONDON ... JUNE 2000 :

Must be monsoon season huh? Quite frankly, it's hosing down like the gods themselves are having a water fight that's turned into a grudge match. Raindrops the size of your hand hit the pockmarked pavement and bounce up to about knee height before joining the flow of mini-rivers that once was a drainage system. Monster Magnet frontman/guitarist Dave Wyndorf hustles along, his head buried under a grey and black leather jacket as he tries to shield himself from the rain, but there is little respite, no shelter for the wicked.

Welcome to London in the summer time.

"London? Whaddyamean London? We're supposed to be in Vietnam soaking up that crazy war vibe and the smell of napalm in the morning. Wasn't the follow up to the awesome 5K 'Las Vegas' album 'Powertrip' supposed to be the one where Monster Magnet finally get off the boat and revel in the horror? Saigon shit indeed, what the hell are we doing in London? I just didn't have time," shrugs Wyndorf once he's safely inside the north London studio where, it transpires, he's busy mixing the new, as yet unnamed, Magnet opus. "This one was written at home in New Jersey very, very quickly and some of it was written in New Mexico and on the road. I wanted to make a record very quickly, but I slacked off on the writing and didn't write a fucking thing. We were on tour for 14 months and off for six and about month five I freaked out and just wrote the whole thing, like, no Vietnam, no nothing, I've gotta get this record out now! We went to this awesome place in Vancouver called the Warehouse to record it and we came out with about twenty tracks probably about 12 of which will end up on the record.

MÖRAT : What were you hoping to get from writing it in Vietnam?

DAVE : "Well it's always been one of those places that's like a deranged fairy tale. I missed the Vietnam war obviously, but what with Apocalypse Now and every war book that I ever read it just seemed like this weird war in American history and pop history too. It was this strange aberration of the media finally cutting it's teeth on something. It was the first televised war or mass communication war and it had so much to do with the spirit of music at the time and the united states general attitude to rock n' roll. When I was a little kid all this was going on so it's always been an obsession with me. I'll still get there though."

MÖRAT : In the past you've brought in smoke machines and strobe lights to give the studio more of a Magnet vibe. What did you do this time?

DAVE : "Besides filling it up on a daily basis with anybody I could find of the street? This was such an intensive work that I spent all my time in the control room writing as it went along. In the other room there were girls and stuff going on..."

MÖRAT : Wyndorf trails off, making it clear that he wasn't there to fuck about. You seem to very focused, almost blinkered when it comes to work?

DAVE : "Yeah. I'm responsible now so I can be very irresponsible later. That's why I love my job so much because I get to be very thoughtful and mechanical about recording music the right way, I get to be very emotional about writing it and then after all that my job is to get on the bus and go fucking apeshit. There's no relaxing even in London. I'm here to work. It's not like I wanna work that hard, I just know that if I don't do it now, anything could distract me later."

MÖRAT : Why are you mixing in London?

DAVE : "I'm here working with Alan Moulder who mixed 'Dopes To Infinity' with me and is a huge talent. I couldn't get him for 'Powertrip' because he was working on Nine Inch Nails. He's just a really talented guy who knows what I'm talking about."

MÖRAT : And you had to come to him?

DAVE : "Yeah. I wanted him to be comfortable. It's my crusade and I'll go anywhere to get it done. I want the people that work for me to be comfortable so if he wants to stay at home he can stay at home, that's cool. Plus I love London, it's the rock n roll capital of the fucking world. Every rock band at one point has got to come to London to do something. I've always been a huge fan of London just for the rock n roll."

MÖRAT : We adjourn to an upstairs room where Wyndorf, smoking heavily, scribbles unintelligible notes as he listens to his latest work at ludicrous volume. But why come up here to listen to it on a shitty stereo when you've got thousands of pounds worth of fancy equipment downstairs?

DAVE : "I always do that. If it sounds good on a shitty stereo you know you're all right, though it's gotta sound good on both. It's tough now because there are so many bullshit stereo systems out there and MP3 shit, people going "hey, it's digital, it's great!" I love digital as much as anybody but people getting their music over the Internet? It sounds like shit. It's almost like the standards are going backwards. It's free! Yeah, but it's free shit! And it makes my job harder because it's gotta sound good on this system and that system, but I draw the line at MP3. And hey, the future isn't free pal, somebody's gotta pay for the studio time and the bands van. You want free music, you go out and make your own."

MÖRAT : On first listen the new opus can only be described as very Monster Magnet, maybe more 'Dopes..' than 'Powertrip', overwhelming and powerful, but laced with subtleties and dashes of experimentation. The titles that stand out include 'Heads Explode', 'Doomsday' and 'God Says No'.

DAVE : "Things are getting a lot darker as far as my records go and I don't know why," says Wyndorf. "I tried to keep it upbeat, but increasingly over the years it's got more and more personal. A lot of the demons I used to imagine were in me when I first started writing music, I found out were real and I put them into practice, like gluttony as far as sex goes and drugs and emotional gluttony. It's constantly fascinating. On the last tour I touched on a lot of dark stuff that I'd hedged around before but never actually cultivated, bondage and domination, stuff that I know better, but you doing it anyway."

MÖRAT : Given that 'Powertrip' was the Vegas album what's the concept behind this one?

DAVE : "It wasn't made as a concept record, but 'Powertrip' wasn't made as a concept record either. I'll probably come up with some cobbled together concept, but it was written so fast that at this point that we're speaking I'm listening to it going "this is what I did for the last six weeks?" The theme that runs recurrent through it is disappointment with the state of entertainment, music in particular cos it's kind of a bummer out there. Y'know, I turn on my TV and everything's a fucking piece of shit. In an age where there's more information available than ever before why is everything so narrow?"

MÖRAT : Why do you think?

DAVE : "I think it's a cultural thing. Youth culture, especially in the states, doesn't stand for much. There's no stress, the economy's good, there's no pressure on kids to do anything, there's no feeling of oppression, there's no war that taking kids away into the line of fire: the culture is kinda lax and it's all about hedonism so they choose disco. And there's so many choices and things to look that they're not gonna go into the background or heritage of music, like, what makes this cool or what makes this person honest, it's quite the opposite, they look at the top and go he's successful, he's got the most money, he's cool. I mean, movie stars are more popular than ever. Rolling Stone magazine spends half it's time covering movie stars. That ain't rock n' roll, that's mainstream."

MÖRAT : And Monster Magnet, bless 'em are very rock n' roll. They were after all, last seen in the UK torching the Kerrang! stage at The Big Day Out.

DAVE : "Oh yeah. What a day. We did it really because it's fun to set stuff on fire as all Kerrang! readers know. But it was also because I didn't think we'd make any kind of splash. I realised that we were going on at four in the afternoon for half a fucking hour and hours later Manson and Metallica would have these huge light shows and stuff. I was like "Goddamit, we need something like that!". Given the Monster Magnet budget we can't afford lights, but we can afford gasoline!" And this was no preconceived pyro expert thing, this was just fire, real fire! You dowse something with gasoline and put a match to it. It's fucking crazy!"

MÖRAT : Indeed. And bloody dangerous. Have you had any mishaps setting stuff on fire?

DAVE : "Oh fuck yeah, really bad ones. One time we played in this club that had a back door to it at the back of the stage which allowed air to circulate through the club..."

MÖRAT : A backdraft?

DAVE : "Exactly, a backdraft. The door was closed while we were doing our show, but when I lit my guitar on fire one of the people from the club freaked out, like, "Oh my God, he's started a fire I'd better open a door!" The backdraft thing happened and it gave so much oxygen to the existing flames it was insane. I mean, I'd poured gasoline all over this guitar and it was burning a certain amount, but there wasn't enough oxygen in the room for it to really take so I was pouring more and more on it. When that guy opened the door that thing went like three times the size and all of us hit the deck. It was like napalm! I had burning hair and I remember laying on the ground looking up and seeing all these flames. It just exploded man, it was fucking cool. And of course the crowd thought it was great."

MÖRAT : Given that Monster Magnet are the real rock deal isn't it disconcerting to see the likes of Jonathan Davis, who let's face it is a bit of a whining pant wetter, becoming huge stars when Monster Magnet remain virtual unknowns outside rock cirlces?

DAVE : "Well when we first played with them I was like "oh man, this fucking sucks!" because there's no melody and stuff. But as far as the band's concerned, I don't blame the band, I blame the fucking audience. I don't know him so I can't pass judgement, but I can put judgement on a whole generation that choose to idolise whiners. And it's been going on for the last ten years y'know? There must be a serious lack of self esteem. When people aren't put into physically stressful situations like war they tend to go inward and start picking on little idiosyncrasies and phobias. It's a very phobic society, people are depressed and anxious because there's more information than ever and you can't keep track of it all and they're being prescribed all kinds of mood altering drugs. It's just a weird itchy time. The TV says everything's cool, but it's not that cool. And I don't buy all that information superhighway crap. It's a fantastic accomplishment, but..."

MÖRAT : People use it to look at tits

DAVE : "Exactly! The best thing it's for is gossip and porn. But it propagates staying inside and looking at a screen instead of getting outside and seeing the rest of the world. That's pretty telling. I don't think that's the machines fault. There's just not a barometer of cool like there was earlier on it the 20th century. There was young versus old, right versus wrong and right now all that stuff is kinda blurred so it's a pretty homogenous time and it's no mistake that there's a next big thing every six months."

MÖRAT : So how do you rebel in 21st century?

DAVE : "Well rock n roll is 50 years old and that's probably 50 years more than anyone ever expected. When it began it was about sex, like, "guess what white kids can have sex!" Then turned into rebellion, until the 70's when it became massive mainstream entertainment and it's been so ever since with a couple of exceptions like punk rock. So it's hard for me to realise that there have been more fruitful times and more interesting times as far as rock n' roll's concerned. But I knew that when I started and my whole thing is "this is the regular world here and this is my world over here. In the original days of rock n roll the corporations controlled everything, but they didn't control the actual goings on of the rock n roll community, they just tried to exploit it. Now more than ever bands are bought and sold by entertainment lawyers and it's a fix. But when it comes to kids having no example but those corporate bands, that's when you get Starbuck bands or whatever. I hate to complain, but that's why I like to keep my world as separate as possible from the rest. Y'know, I go out and make records and sometimes they go in the charts and sometimes they don't. I do my best to make record that could be played on the radio, but not at the expense of the music. It's amazing that we've lasted as long as we have."

MÖRAT : Nonetheless are you disappointed it didn't sell more than 500,000 in a world that talks in millions?

DAVE : "It sold shitloads as far as we're concerned, but it didn't sell like a Zombie record or a Korn record. But how much do you really need? As long as I'm not getting kicked off the record company I'm fine. All I wanna do is make a bunch of records and taking over the world with your rock band isn't the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago. We don't live in the same world. People think in terms of "I wanna sell to everybody" and the music is gonna suffer, but do you really want every single person on earth to appreciate you? In order to do that you have to feel that you have something in common with all those people and I don't. I'm one person and I have my own way of doing things. I was always shocked that more than 30 people liked Monster Magnet, like "you understand what I'm doing?" So, no I'm not disappointed it didn't sell more."

MÖRAT : Finally, do you think you'll ever take the rock superstar that crown that seems to fit you so well?

DAVE : "I don't know. I think if I was really after that I would have moved to LA a long time ago and shaken the right hands cos that's what you do. What I do is make my music, do what I do and then go home and hide. I kinda like the double identity, it's cool. It's cool like being spiderman or something. I can go home and be Peter Parker for a while. I know for sure that if you go to LA and work yourself as a rock star, you will be a rock star. So in that respect I guess I didn't wanna be a rock star or I'd have had a couple of fashion emergency's. I quite enjoy the fact that we've been going for ten plus years and it's done nothing but gradually get bigger. And I may have made some mistakes in making music and trying things out, but I haven't made any serious compromises in Monster Magnet at all, it's all worked out just fucking fine. I wanted this to be my life and goddamnit it is!"

MÖRAT