Monster Magnet

Tue 16th Aug, 2011 in Features

Dave Wyndorf has reached a stage in his career where he’s acclaimed simply for surviving as long as he has. For over 22 years, with his band Monster Magnet, he’s lived out every single rock n roll cliché there is and, through a series of major line-up changes and setbacks, has continued to release albums and tour the world. At 54 years old he is taking on more now than he ever has and is set to return with his band to Australia in September for the second time this year. This time he will be turning the bands attention back to 1995’s Dopes to Infinity; the psychedelic-space-rock-stoner-metal hybrid, which stands as the definitive album of the bands long career.

The idea of touring Dopes to Infinity in its entirety is something Wyndorf, vocalist and guitarist for Monster Magnet, has been thinking of doing ever since he saw Love perform Da Capo more than ten years ago. On the phone from his home in New Jersey, he explains: “I always thought it was a really good idea and as it became more popular [playing albums live] I actually talked to people who I know who have done it. I talked to Mark Arm from Mudhoney. Mudhoney did Superfuzz Bigmuff. And I talked to Josh from Queens of the Stone Age who told me they were going to do the first album. And it was like, ‘all right, that’s good enough for me. People I know and trust are doing it.’ I decided I’d throw my hat in the ring. It just seemed like it was a good thing to do.”

Wyndorf sees the album tour not only as a chance to give the fans a show they’ve never seen but also as an opportunity to reinspire the band, and play the songs they would otherwise not get to play live, “The concept of bands playing albums in their entirety has gotten more popular over the last, I’d say, 10 years,” he says. “It is fun playing those songs, there are songs on that record [ Dopes to Infinity ] that would never fit into, or I wouldn’t think of shoehorning them into a regular Monster Magnet set. This forces me to play the thing and make it good from start to finish, as a set.”

Wyndorf is the only member of Monster Magnet’s current line-up to have played on Dopes to Infinity and expects the album to change in the hands of the new band, “It will change and that’s for the better. The guys I’m playing with now they can actually do more, musically, than the guys I was playing with at the time,” he says. “I think it’s going to be better. It’s stronger, for sure.”

In 1994 Wyndorf isolated himself from the rest of his band to write the album, intent on realising the sounds he had envisioned. He explains, “I did that whole thing on a demo at home, on an 8-track demo at home. I did every song by myself first and I put a crazy amount of time into it.”

It was an important album not just for fans of Monster Magnet but also for Wyndorf. The process of writing and recording Dopes to Infinity challenged what he thought he knew about making music and tested the limits of his musical abilities, “I was making mistake after mistake in the studio,” he says. “By the time I got to Dopes I kind of knew what I was doing. Not completely, nobody ever really knows what they’re doing, but I knew that I would have to pay extra attention if I wanted to get a result. That was, I think, the first time when I got the results very close to what I had envisioned. So it made me really happy.”

A&M’s confusion over who to market the album towards – either a rock or metal audience – meant it failed to achieve the commercial success that Wyndorf and the label thought it deserved. “I never really thought I had a handle on the commercial success of a record, but you always hope that you have a big hit,” he says. “One big hit can make your music; can bring your music to so many people. You can really feed off a hit.”