photo found via zodiaclung.com
Originally recorded on 2010Oct07, I had a LONG talk with Dave Wyndorf. A founder of what would become known as “stoner rock”, he has led Monster Magnet through twenty tumultuous years. Naturally, we talk about the new album Mastermind and their latest videos, but also touch on his history of drug use and how it afflicts America on a larger scale, plus we discuss his favorite gods and go in-depth on his famous facial hair.
Matt: Hello Dave, how is the day treating you so far?
Dave: Good, actually really good. Just finishing up on some music that’s gonna come out on my own label.
Matt: Oh yeah?
Dave: Yeah, it’s called Studio 13. It’s like a tiny little place, where us and some of the Magnet guys can do some weird stuff and put it out cheaply produced, in a garage style, and it’s actually a pretty cool thing.
Matt: That is pretty cool, so which of the guys from Monster Magnet?
Dave: On this one, it’s Bill and I and Bob. And on the next one, who knows, we’ll have some guest stars.
Matt: And the beautiful thing is that it will be your own label so you’ll be able to do whatever you please.
Dave: Exactly.
Matt: It seems like a lot of that’s happening these days , a lot of guys that have been around for a few years are going around and making their own labels. You said Studio 13 is the name of your label?
Dave: Yes.
Matt: The first thing I thought of was 13th Planet from Al Jourgensen.
Dave: Oh, I forgot about that. I probably wouldn’t have named it Studio 13. It is actually number 13 of the street. It’s Phil’s place and it’s got a little studio—13 Broad Street.
Matt: Right on. That works. So you guys aren’t triskaidekaphobic, nothing wrong with the number 13?
Dave: No, no… I’ll say that and a bus will hit me today.
Matt: Speaking of weird luck, I was just reading your interview in Decibel recently where you’re talking about the rough time you had in Van Nuys and you were arrested and all that crap. It was a pretty funny story and I don’t want to get into it too much because it’s a whole sidetrack, but you do talk about the writing process. I’m a guy whose written ninety percent of my interviews, including this one, about an hour before conducting them, and it’s reassuring to see similar patterns with you and yet Mastermind turned out great.
Dave: The 11th hour seems to be the thing. If you’re gonna write that way you just hope that you learn from the last couple of times you had a panic attack and wrote, and hopefully the good stuff, the stuff that you learn, shows up. The more you do these projects, the better your instincts are when you do put yourself in panic mode. I don’t know what it is about this last minute thing but it really makes it real. The whole rock’n roll thing to me…ever since I was a kid, it always seemed like the stuff was written about like a minute before it came out. Little did I know, a lot of stuff had been sitting around for a long time, but it’s just that way in my head, and I can’t get over it, and I can’t seem to get up off my ass until it’s absolutely deadline time.
Matt: Do you do anything special when the music is either really flowing fast, or not moving at all?
Dave: I guess you run away, like I did in Van Nuys.. which basically was hide from the fact that I had to do it. But it doesn’t work for that long. There is no trick. You can’t learn a trick to do it. The world isn’t big enough for me to hide. Once I know that I’ve said to certain people that I’m going to get it done then it hangs heavy. As long as I don’t promise anybody anything I probably won’t do it. As soon as I make promises to actual human beings who are either counting on their food from me or something then I’m like “Oh shit, I gotta do it!”
Matt: Now let’s get into Mastermind a little bit; I wanna talk about some of the lyrics. I was curious if any of it is personally autobiographical, or if you externalize a lot. Where does the music come from for you?
Dave: The whole thing, it always starts from me, from my personal experience. How much of it gets out there in the literal fashion? Not a lot of it. I tend to use metaphors a lot. I like to codename people. I like to codename my relationships, for a couple different reasons. It got me out of a lot trouble over the years. Before I would actually say all the stuff I’ve done and there’d be certain people coming to my door wanting to kill me. So, what I’ll do is use the vernacular of my favorite stuff which would be comic book stuff—sensational, biblical, outer space stuff—that always gets a handle on. It’s a way to describe your emotions in a larger-than-life way. When it comes down to it there is no real fiction in the songs at all, they’re all based on just the normal stuff. Girl meets boy, girl dumps boy, boy gets some sort of revenge, except in my songs the revenge will be like getting a fighter jet and bombing a city; instead of getting noticed by the football team, it’ll be like utter destruction, cosmic proportions. The whole time I was growing up, the stuff that really really grew on me, that had its roots deep, was either fantastically real and depressing like an old Sidney Lumet movie, or something over the top like Planet of the Apes.
Matt: In retrospect, do you find parallels between those things?
Dave: Just for inspiration, sure. Music was a huge inspiration for me as a teenager in bands and stuff. As I grew into being my own band guy, the inspiration for me to write it and continue on were more from cartoonists and people like that. Not that it affected the music—it just got me excited to know that a guy was sitting in a basement somewhere with only a pencil in hand, who could create so much from so little. It was the something from nothing concept that really always inspired me, and to see just how far their imaginations would go. A guy like Jack Kirby, who’s like a little Jewish guy from Long Island in his basement—this little guy was in WWII, he was in his fifties in the 1960s and he was doing more psychedelic stuff than the kids were doing. He was just a little guy from Delancey Street in Manhattan who moved to the burbs. And that kind of stuff really really trips me out. That that kind of unbridled imagination could come from a seemingly normal person….
Matt: Yeah, it doesn’t come from an incredibly drug-addled state.
Dave: No, not at all. Exactly he was born on the earth like everyone else, what’s going on in his head? I don’t know. I don’t know, there’s not clichéd answer for it. It’s not easy to figure out. He just did it and he never stopped doing it. And it’s really, really cool.
photo found via zodiaclung.com
Matt: Well speaking of drugs, I’ve got to ask you this, too. As a band that’s often tagged as stoner metal—and like I heard you a little earlier on, drug rock—how has the label affected Monster Magnet over the years. Do you think the title is apt? Has it attracted some sort of a stigma?
Dave: I’m sure it’s attracted some sort of a stigma, sure. But not as much as “metal” has though. And so, I don’t think stoner rock has affected us as much as being categorized as Metal by record companies.
Matt: That’s interesting. So you think that, by virtue of the tag, Metal people just get a bunch of ideas in their head and write you off immediately.
Dave: I’m sure that there’s a lot of people who have never heard of us because of that. They just see the word “monster” in it and see it in the Metal section. But you know this is Rock. There is really no other way to describe it. I guess you could call it psychedelic rock or rock with psychedelic whatever, but really it’s just R-O-C-K, rock. The stoner thing didn’t really bother me because basically, you know, I asked for it. I had no idea it was going to go as far as it did.
Matt: That’s the strange thing, there are whole websites (stonermetal.com for example) that show a real subgenre has cropped up, largely because of you guys and bands like Kyuss. These formative bands— especially looking back now, where there so much nostalgia attached to modern society and people are going back and re-discovering this stuff from the 80s and 90s and rekindling a love affair with this kind of music—they’re starting to get a resurgence again.
Dave: I’d love to see it go back even further. Now everything old is new again. When I was a kid the world was smaller, you could only really go back as far as say the 1920s to look for music. Guitar players would look into the Yardbird guys, and they would look back and they’d see—not within their lifetime, but within a few generations—the beginning of this stuff. Now we’ve got a time when rock’n roll is way older than anyone thought it would be. It’s easy for people to skip over the origins, it’s easy to not be a historian, if you just follow your past and don’t take an active interest in history. As most kids don’t, they don’t really know what started what, and it’s not because they don’t care, it’s just too much information.
Matt: And even if you just studied Rock, it’s a very young genre in the annals of music history. It’s like 60 years old.
Dave: And it’s not covered that well all the time also, because a lot of hipsters are at the helm trying to rewrite history constantly in their own vision. And whatever critic is on it the hardest and the most tends to get the most attention paid to them, whether right or wrong—he’s just the biggest blabber mouth in the world. With the internet starting to kick in the way it should rather than just being a novelty, as it has been forever, you are starting to see people unearthing genres of music and making connections of how that music developed with the early 1970s and then a jump back to the early 70s in the 90s with bands like Kyuss. So it’s cool to see it happen and actually see younger people at the shows. In Europe, I see way younger people coming to see what it’s all about and it’s alright. So the internet isn’t all like Facebook, people are actually doing their homework.
Matt: I’m sure there’s a lot of cats out there just leeching and not giving back. But really if it’s an awareness thing if you’re going out to the shows, if you are buying the music at some point, and getting money back to you guys, then it’s all good.
Suzy Creamcheese, what's got into you?
Dave: My main thing is to play it to the people who are going to enjoy it the most and try and get them to talk about it. You like this music, talk about it. Come to the website, talk about it to your friends. It’s a lot of fun to investigate music; it’s more fun to investigate music and find out what you really like, then sit back and let people pummel you with stuff and just take it all. Spend more time investigating and less time downloading. Go for quality.
Matt: Sound advice, Dave. You mentioned this stigma attached to your band possibly because of the word “monster”. I’m a huge Frank Zappa fan, and I always thought Monster Magnet was named after the last song on Freak Out!. Dude, I told people that.
Dave: “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet”…I should have thought of that when I named the band.
Matt: It’s a toy right?
Dave: It’s a toy, yeah. It’s a couple of things. It was a Wham-o toy. That’s what it’s named after. It’s also a title of an episode of a Japanese cartoon called Tobor the 8th Man, which is where Frank Zappa got it. So it goes all around.
Matt: What was the most dangerous toy you recall playing with back in the day?
Dave: Do fireworks count? No, I guess not. My most dangerous toy that was a store bought toy?
Matt: And something that you probably wouldn’t see nowadays, because of its level of danger.
Dave: Oh man, toys were so great when I was a kid. I mean they were really, really on it. Made out of really sharp metal that could easily bend and you could slice people open. Just your basic car, your basic little kid car. I could turn that thing into a ninja star in about 3 seconds and could literally kill millions of people with it. I had a great fire breathing cap gun machine gun. It was a machine gun that would eat up about 3 rolls of caps in about 3 seconds. And if you kept it on full… that thing would…
Matt: Explode?
Dave: It would start burning, it would catch the plastic on fire and burn. And I loved the war toys back then, they had no bones about promoting it.
Matt: Yeah, it was stuff made to look realistic, none of this “we’ll throw extra material on it to make it look like a toy”.
Dave: No pink-ing.
Matt: No pink.
Dave: This stuff was made almost to scale—an M-16 Marauder—really awesome stuff, the kind of stuff that really gets kids excited. You can’t really drive that out of kids no matter how you try to P.C. the thing. Kids are always going for the gun.
Matt: Now speaking of Frank Zappa… his facial hair. I think the Zappa Family Trust has had his design copyrighted.
Dave: They should.
Matt: I’m pretty sure they have. Now you’ve looked remarkably distinct over the years, you’ve got the sleeked black hair, and your mustache goatee..
Dave: I didn’t think I was that distinct. I always thought I was a Neil Adams bad guy from a late 60’s DC comic.
Matt: I mean, maybe, but I’ll tell you what, I did an image search on your face and throughout the years you are practically ageless. I am not just saying that to dick around, it’s fucking remarkable. It’s gone from fairly basic face framing to this one from Decibel, for example, where you have almost this John Waters level of thin intricateness going around.
Dave: That’s so funny, because you know what happened? I shaved wrong. I was trying to clean up my act for Powertrip. My whole thing with Powertrip was, “Screw this, if people aren’t going to buy the records I’m just gonna throw giant breasts on the record, I’m gonna throw around money, and I’m gonna clean up my act and be slick and wear leather pants and stuff.” So I shaved my mustache too thin, but I didn’t wanna shave it all off so this little skinny thing came out. And it’s weird because I remember going to party in New York City and I ran into Dick Manitoba from the Dictators, who is a New York City rock legend, and he was like “What is up with the mustache man? I mean that thing is dapper, like Bud Abbott!” So I stuck with that. It was a weird little thing like John Waters.
Matt: Only it was longer.
Dave: A mustache is a weird thing, If you don’t take care of it and you shave, you have to remain faithful to whatever you shave off.
Matt: What are you sporting these days? Is it just your standard mustache goatee?
Dave: Yeah, it’s just standard… maybe for our tour I’ll go in. One time I did a video where they plucked my eyebrows and stuff and things got really strange. I looked like Ming the Merciless.
Matt: Have you ever thought of going all clean? Would that ever work out for you?
Dave: You know I went all clean, a bunch of years ago for about 6 months. My daughter who was little at the time, she was tiny, I shaved it off for her and she was like “ahhh I hate it!” and that was it. Everyone else said I looked like my little brother.
Matt: Now you were jut mentioning that you plucked you eyebrows for a video. I want to talk about the video that you just did for “Gods and Punks”. I was looking into these lines, maybe a bit too much, one is “you can fuck recovery because you are already gone”. I was wondering is there any residue or anything from your overdose back in 2006 that is still lingering today?
Dave: Oh yeah, sure. It comes up all the time just because the world is full of it. It doesn’t come up with me because I’m over it. Would I love to have a drug that would make me lose all my anxiety and sleep like a baby? Because that was the drug that was kicking me, sure. But every time… I’ve tried it since then, you know it’s been 4 years.. and I remember going on a plane and taking a couple Xanax and instantly the feeling that I got from it…was not the good feeling. I started telegraphing to the end of that last time. It’s not going to work anymore. It can’t go back. It was like drinking. I quit drinking once and I never drank again because I had it with it. I’m lucky that way. Once I’m done with something, I’m just done. But the world around me and the people I see, I’m hyper sensitive to it. More than half the states just seem to be shoving down pills faster than they can get them. There’s a pharmacy on every corner. I’ve never in my life seen so many pharmacies. This has grown my whole life and it’s growing even more. The fix is in. Dose, dude, legally dose. Go to your doctor, get the script and start dosing. No matter what it is, be on something. I can tell you from someone that’s been there, you have to be really careful.
Matt: Yeah, I mean especially these last 10-15 years when they got full license to advertise willy-nilly and shit. That’s when it got really crazy. And I’m pretty sure that certain doctors for certain drugs get commissions if they blast out enough of them.
Dave: Yes they do.
Matt: That’s fucked up.
Dave: It’s fucked up because life is hard enough, everyone knows that, everything’s crazy. But when the guys in the white coats just start willy-nilly prescribing stuff, there’s a whole new breed of people that can become fucked up on drugs. They’re not smart; it’s not like people who grew up on the street. These are people like moms and stuff, “mother’s little helper” stories. It’s really uncool. And there’s not a lot of people writing about the horrors of this because the doctors have it somewhat under control. People go for years on these drugs only to full off into a horrible state at one point or another. Whether it be pain pills or whatever. It’s a new level. With a whole new group of people.
Matt: What you’re saying about how no one’s writing about it and it doesn’t come up all that often. I’ll just do a little side tangent and ask directly, do you know the band Porcupine Tree?
Dave: Yes, I know them.
Matt: They put an album out about a three years ago titled Fear of a Blank Planet. It talks all about that.
Dave: Oh awesome, I’ll get it today.
Matt: I’m pretty sure it’s the latest album. Just look it up. It’s really really good, probably one of the best albums I heard that year. [Note: I knew this was wrong as soon as I said it, having fucking reviewed The Incident a year ago, but didn't wanna veer further]
Dave: It’s funny the press came out against anti-depressants, that was the big bad guy.That stuff is like nothing compared to the anti-anxiety stuff. That’s the stuff that’s changing people more than anything.
Matt: And even more than the drugs itself, it’s also the culture of making that okay, of making that the solution.
Dave: Exactly, and it also caters to whole new crowd of people: people who aren’t really looking to get high, but are looking for some quick relief from your normal anxiety. And it’s not the kind of behavior that builds backbone.
Matt: Yeah, you need anxiety, it’s something that you have. You have to foster that, not be ruled by it.
Dave: Yeah, you’re actually supposed to deal with it. What anti-anxiety medicine does is puts the anxiety to another part of your brain and locks it up like in a computer folder. Like a little file. And it keeps it there. It doesn’t go away. And one of these days you’re going to open these files and every bit of woe you had in the last ten years is gonna leap out all at once and make you crash. It’s better to deal with this shit as it comes. The only anxiety medicine that should be prescribed is to people who are bad criminals and people who cannot function otherwise.
Matt: I wanna come back to the video and ask you one more thing. As far as the ending of the video goes, it was cool to see the villain explode and shit, but honestly, I was expecting the kid to fall under his tutelage, with almost a bittersweet ending.
Dave: That’s not my ending. Nathan Cox ended that video. That was the way he wanted to end it. I was like “Okay I gotcha. At least we’ve gotta leave something up for the sequel. Like somebody’s gotta come and be this guys buddy and scrape up the blood and get the DNA and partner with him.” I know what you mean. Maybe he was thinking in the comic book way “well he’s not dead”. Because we all know in comic books maybe he isn’t really dead. I’d have liked the kid to fall under his tutelage also. I agree.
Matt: That’s good to hear that your vision is shared with mine. That seemed to be the story arc. The guy was sympathetic, even though he’s a super villain.
Dave: Yeah, I remember when Nathan would send me out the character guides for him, for different people to play him. I said to get the guy with the saddest looking eyes, because you’re gonna wanna like him even though he dies. And he did, he was really cool. He kind of looks like Perry Farrell from…
Matt: With a longer nose, yeah, Perry from Porno for Pyros or Jane’s Addiction, whichever one you want. That is funny… speaking of a super power kind of thing, I was wondering about “The Titan Who Cried Like A Baby”, you also say a pretty eerie line for a mellow song: “if you’re talking the God’s honest truth, she don’t think about you no more.” I was glad you put a crushing line in a mellow song, and kept the flow, the balance.
Dave: Yeah, it’s a bummer song.
Matt: I was wondering who was your favorite gods or titans, or extraordinary beings from mythology or whatever.
Dave: I always like.. tend to like… the guys that make them better. My favorite gods were like gods in comic books. Like Thanos the guy that Jim Starlin created for Captain Marvel. He’s in love with death, has a love affair with death. He’s called the Mad Titan. And he’s super powerful, mad genius type guy, can draw on sorcery, everything. Super scientific also. His one soft spot is he’s actually in love with death, who appears as this strange woman figure. He’s trying to court her. Of course whenever she shows her real face it’s like this horrible skull. Yeah, I like the gods with those types of fallibility… I love the Norse gods, they’re always great, too. The Greek gods are great because there was so much slumming. I liked the gods that slummed.
Matt: Oh, that hung out with the mortals and stuff?
"I'll bill you later"
Dave: Yeah, because they knew the mortals were having fun!
Matt: Do you feel spiritually connected to any greater powers, personally?
Dave: I wish I did, it definitely would’ve helped me in rehab when I got into those fights. Greater powers… nature. There is some sort of…system of nature.. the stuff I see, the color I see, the looks of the faces of the animals. The shape of a woman’s behind. There’s gotta be some greater power behind that.
Matt: Some grand design to that?
Dave: Yeah, I mean it’s amazing. And maybe I’m just a stupid mortal that can’t understand anything but that would be the greater power. That this is a system that will go on with or without me.
Matt: When was your moment of deepest awe? Have you ever had a real “awe” moment? Well, you said you were impressed by nature…
Dave: Oh plenty of them, yeah: driving for the first time in the southwest coming over a mountain peak, seeing these huge valleys is pretty awe inspiring; the Swiss Alps is like that, too; seeing Aurora Borealis from an airplane in Alaska. And there’s the kind of intellectual awe when you’re like 13 years old and you watch Dr. Strangelove for the first time, and you actually get it. You understand where the comedy’s coming from. Or you watch the Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis and you realize show business really is that mean and there are tricks behind tricks.
Matt: It sounds like elucidation… when things become clear to you.
Dave: Right, exactly. Elucidation.
Matt: Nice, well that’s a good point to end on I think Dave. I’m gonna let you go. It’s been really good talking with you!
Dave: You too! Okay, bye.
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