I had been looking forward all week to talking to Monster Magnet‘s Dave Wyndorf for the simple reason that, of anyone you might talk to on any given day, chances are he’s the guy who’s going to have the most interesting story to tell and chances are he’s going to get to telling it with the least amount of bullshit possible. We last spoke in 2013 when Monster Magnet released Last Patrol (review here), what was at the time their strongest outing in more than a decade by my estimation, marked by a return to prominence of the band’s psychedelic and space rock influences. In short, they got weird again. And not a moment too soon.

Their prior outing, 2010’s Napalm Records debut, Mastermind (review here), certainly had its moments but ultimately came across as playing to formula both in songwriting and aesthetic. For a band who’d been so brazen earlier in their career on records like their classic 1991 debut, Spine of God, or even 1998’s fourth outing, Powertrip, which set the tone in one way or another for nearly everything Monster Magnet would do until Last Patrol arrived. Prior to that album, it seemed like a changing heavy rock climate had left them behind, and so it was even more encouraging when, instead of pressing ahead after Last Patrol and essentially working under a new formula, Wyndorf and his studio partner, guitarist Phil Caivano, got even weirder, reworking material from Last Patrol, tripping it further out and pushing even deeper into space on last year’s unexpected release, Milking the Stars (review here).

If Milking the Stars proved anything at all, it was that anyone who thought they knew what Monster Magnet were going to do next — fans, critics, whoever — were dead wrong, and the upcoming Cobras and Fire (out Oct. 9 on Napalm; review pending) follows that impulse even deeper. In concept, it does to Mastermind essentially what Milking the Stars did to Last Patrol; it reimagines the songs and gives them a new context. The difference is the songs from Mastermind had a much longer way to go to get to where they are on Cobras and Fire, which between the brand new sleazed-out opener “She Digs that Hole” and the Temptations-gone-Hawkwind cover “Ball of Confusion” makes even the most whacked-out jams on the last album seem tame.

Reworking cuts like “Time Machine” and “The Titan Who Cried Like a Baby” — now just “The Titan” — as instrumentals broadens the context further, but the strength of Cobras and Fire is as much about the quality of what’s there as what’s done with it. “When the Planes Fall from the Sky,” “Gods and Punks,” and “Hallucination Bomb” were strong tracks to start with — had good bones, you might say if they were a house you were interested in buying — but their stretched, twisted, morphed into new identities for themselves and the album as a whole, the headphone-worthiness of which bleeds from every minute of its hour run, right down to the Joe Barresi-assembled mashup, “I Live behind the Paradise Machine,” which rounds out on a boldly atmospheric note, sending Cobras and Fire out not with a bang, or with a whimper, but with the realization that there’s a whole world out there and as much as ever, something about it just doesn’t fit.

Wyndorf has a keen talent for phrasing, as anyone who’s ever read his lyrics can attest. In the interview that follows, he talks as much if not more about the conditions in which artists create today as about these songs or bringing Chris Kosnik in on bass for the live incarnation of the band with lead guitarist Garrett Sweeny, Wyndorf, Caivano, and drummer Bob Pantella, but I consider it all relevant to not just this record, but to where Monster Magnet are headed from here as they continue to move forward to their inevitable next full-length, next tour, etc. Basically, each ramble is a fucking treasure, and as much as you want to dig in, you can. In the end, if you can’t get down, it’s your loss.

Complete Q&A is 9,200-plus words. It follows after the jump. Enjoy.

So you do Milking the Stars.

Yeah.

At what point did you look at Mastermind and go, well you know… maybe?

It’s exactly the same time. I started doing Milking the Stars and I liked it. It was basically — I just said, Mastermind, not exactly enamored with the way that Mastermind came out and I had problems with the person I was working on it with and in kind of a modern kind of way it was mixed in the box — meaning in the computer — and there were a lot of settings and I basically got lazy on it and it was my fault. “You know what? I could do this better, I’m on a roll so I might as well do it,” and also, at the same time I wanted to buy myself time to write. These days in music, if you’re off the grid for a year, you’re dead. Literally, you’re gone. It’s like you died.

So while I was in there doing Milking the Stars, I would go on another tour — because touring is where you make your money now. You don’t get paid for your music anymore, it’s a nightmare. It’s completely backwards and now you make records so you can tour, you know? The expectations of records are lower and lower, people don’t care. Promoters don’t care how good your record is, nobody does, only a handful of people. Unless you have something to release you’re not going to be able to tour, basically that’s what all promoters say to you.

Right.

So you need content, which is the anti-art thing of the modern world. I mean, how much has “content” ruined everything? Long CDs, overlong CDs, bullshit easy access to rock stars, all that content is bullshit. Absolute, desperate bullshit. But I have to have it to — so I was like, you know, if I’m going to have fucking content, man, I’m going to make it cool. What do I want to do? Mastermind. That bothers me. I’m going to fucking redo that, so I did it at the same time.

I did a tour — we did tours — then came back and I started doing Mastermind, and it started getting kind of squirrely because we were touring so much, but finally it’s coming out. At least it gives me another record — another release — out, so I can actually take time off and write and maybe do another tour without looking like I just you know, because I’m not tweeting 24 hours a day, people realize I’m still alive.

Have you been writing?

No, no. I haven’t. I said maybe three or four years of straight up, full on tour, studio, tour — so I’ll give myself four or five months of not writing anything. You get nice and bored and when you get bored is when you write. So, I feel it coming.

Tell me about rewriting “Dig That Hole.” What did you save from the original, because that one seems like it was pretty much across the board redone.

There’s no original tracks on that, there’s no guitars, drums, or anything from the original record, so that’s actually a complete rebuild and I think I rebuilt that first for a Studio 13 release, which is a bunch of years ago — we did direct, vinyl-only, and did a version of it like that. This time I was like, you know what, I like that version, which is kind of just — I don’t know what it is. I don’t even know what kind of music that is.

I listened to it this morning to get ready for this and I was like, what kind of music is this? It kind of reminds me of fuzz punk, the vocals are kind of like those late ‘60s guys — screamers — screamers and pontificators, Sean Bonniwell from Music Machine and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, that was rebuilt because I thought it would serve better, different and better, the attitude of the music and the riffs that were written. Then I rewrote the song, rewrote the words because it sounded like cooler words and there’s a tour story.

Tour story? Hah, okay. What’s the tour story?

Ah, it’s horrible. It’s like to horrible to mention — in this PC world, they’d like hang me up by my ankles and throw rocks at me, you know? I’d be sitting over there with Bill Cosby and Jared.

On the other hand, Bill Cosby drugged women and Jared had sex with kids.

Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, that’s right I wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be that bad. It’s actually pretty typical.

Fair enough.

It’s just road sex with strange eastern European women and bizarre characters like that, that populate the Monster Magnet universe sometimes when we’re on tour and sometimes it’s like some movie, you know? Being out there sometimes is like being in a strange movie and you have to write about it, it’s easy to write about.

Sort of on the opposite end of that, tell me about pulling the lyrics out of “The Titan” and “Time Machine.” What was behind that decision?

It just sounded better to me, you know? I kind of pulled tight and apart as far as instruments go. I slashed a lot of the original tracks and took them away because I thought it was too many, I didn’t want to sound like a John Barry, you know? Like an old — John Barry is like a James Bond soundtrack thing from the late ‘60s, those ones that were recorded kind of fucked up — throw some sitar on it and make it sound like an old soundtrack thing. The vocals got in the way, so I fired the vocalist. That’s one of the good things about being the leader of a band, you can kick the vocalist off and no one is going to give you shit, because the vocalist is me.

“Time Machine” — another one where we tracked most of it — better sound — I thought better sounds because I thought it was a pretty song which I thought sounded a little bit digi in the original one. I was in for a penny, in for a pound for this thing, so I’m not going to not do “Time Machine.” I threw a lot of songs off the record, but that was one of them I did not want to throw off and the original record — we have a lot of songs — and this one only has what, nine?

Yeah.

I worked like hell to make “Time Machine” pretty. I put piano on it, redid guitars with older, warmer sounds and it was really fun. I put the vocals up and I was like well, this is the one thing that doesn’t seem to fit. So, in a rash impulse I was like, forget it, I like it better as an instrumental.

It’s kind of like a calm wash, especially “Time Machine.” “Titan” too, I guess, but “Titan” is still a little bit more cinematic, like you say.

“Titan” is kind of weird. “Titan” has a lot of distortion on it too, it’s just nastier. “Time Machine,” I recorded as clean as possible. I wanted it to be as nice sounding as possible. It’s funny, when the vocals came up, it was like, well, if I don’t sing this like Robert Goulet, it’s not going to work and it just seemed like a tag for the end of the record. Towards the end of the record it’s this nice sounding thing. The fidelity on the record is all over the place, some of it is recorded as trashy as I could and others as nice as I could.

I think it works though, I think you get a good flow. I went back and I listened to Mastermind when I first got this, not only to see what was taken out, but what was changed in the songs and stuff and so it seems like for what you picked and all the sort of crazy shit that you did to it, you managed to still get a good flow across the record.

Well thanks, dude. Thank you very much, that’s kind of like the main thing when you’re making a record — that’s what you have at the end of it. You’ve done everything you can, now the final thing you can do is try to make it all make sense, from a-to-z as a listening experience.

Mastermind was rough, it was rough the first time with all those songs and with this one I was like, fuck, I’m not going to get caught with all these songs again, I’m throwing some out. I tried as much as I could on every song, it didn’t work on every song, so I just kept throwing them out until it was an acceptable sequence.

Are there any you miss more than others?

You mean the ones I threw out?

Yeah.

Nah, its fine. There was a fair amount of fucking garbage on that record — like filler — a lot of stuff that didn’t fit with each other and it wasn’t expanded, it wasn’t nurtured right and there was no reason to nurture all that — we nurtured all that stuff for one record, it was too much stuff for one record anyway — so, that stuff exists, it’s out there and it would probably work together on its own and it has been redone, so maybe it will come out, maybe that little pack of songs will come out on their own someday.

So what was it at the time then, with Mastermind, that it wound up being what it was? Matt Hyde produced, am I wrong?

Yeah, yeah. Matt did and I worked with Matt for a long time. Mastermind was the first record after I got my head back, after I had a drug overdose five or six years ago, maybe even longer, seven? Anyway, I was like kind of off the grid and I came back and I was like, I’m going to make a fucking record and this is the only thing that’s going to grow my brain back and I did.

We did it very fast, I wrote the songs very fast, which is okay, got into the studio, recorded very naturally — here in New Jersey — and Matt was on board. What happened after that was that some of the songs came along really, really well and some of the songs didn’t — a little bit too spare. After that, the record had a mood of its own, which was coherent and made sense to itself, but it the long run, some of the songs worked better than others and some of the songs sounded like what I had in mind than others.

In the end, the time got me and I was just like, alright, a lot of things can get fixed by a well-meaning producer. It can make sense, but it doesn’t always make sense as a whole, I just wasn’t on it. I don’t think I was on it enough to really — I would have to tear it all down. I would have to cancel the record, you know? If I wanted to make it like this, I probably would have had to fire Matt, because he never would have gone along with it. He didn’t understand that kind of music.

To make a long story short, I know that’s a ridiculous answer I just gave. It got away from me to a certain extent, and it’s funny — after that record — that’s when I said to myself, I said nothing is ever going to get away from me again. I don’t care if I have to build this in my basement from now on and that’s what I do. Ever since the end of that record — the end of Mastermind — when that came out, it taught me how to do Last Patrol and so on, and that’s it. Everything is coming out of the basement now and there’s no more collaboration with anyone who is not going to be on it 100 percent.

That’s how you’ve been doing it? Who else was involved in this?

Well, it’s Phil. At the end of Mastermind, I talked to Phil, the guitarist, and engineer — and I was like, Phil, we have to do a record by ourselves, you live around the corner from me, you have a studio — there’s no reason why I have to fly people in, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if I fail at it, I don’t care if it sounds like shit, at least it’s going to sound interesting and we just do it.

So, Phil has been the guy and Phil, on these “reimagine” records, he plays a ton of the stuff. I’m not a very good player. I play a lot on the records, but there’s a lot of stuff I can’t play. I’ll just sit there on a guitar and kind of mimic an idea and show him and go (mimics guitar noises) but it’s got to be played by someone who knows how to play it, that kind of thing. Phil, it’s like, he’s up for it and he understands. He understands the reference points.

I can scream out “Pink Fairies 1972!” “Robert Fripp, Fripp & Eno!” and he’ll understand what I’m talking about. Phil and I are just like crazy people in there. This redo stuff, trying to do this on the cheap — meaning you don’t want to bring everyone back in the studio because it could take a lot of time — using original drum tracks and tracking over that, slowing stuff down, changing stuff, Phil was amazing.

So, that’s the way that I’ve been working which is tight with Phil and also tight with Joe Barresi — the mixer from California. He’s an awesome guy and total pro. When I go out to see him after the whole thing is done — mixing on a real board — not just in the box, not just in the computer, we use a lot of pedals and stuff for effects after the fact, a lot of the stuff gets left for mixing, most of the effects are tracked while we’re recording, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s left after and he’s just amazing.

That’s the little team and it’s not that the other guys aren’t involved with this shit, they were like heavily involved in all Monster Magnet stuff, Garrett, Bob, and Chris — but, just these two things that happened in a row happened to be such intricate little things — it was a two-man job. It wasn’t the kind of job that you want to put everybody out on the floor again. It would probably confuse the issue.

I would think that if you were going to completely redo and rerecord everything and you would bring Bob in.

Yeah we did rerecord some stuff with Bob. We did “Hallucination Bomb,” that’s rerecorded drums.

Yeah, I guess it would be because it has that jam.

Right, it’s all long — there’s a whole tag at the end, a whole groovy tag at the end. Also did, “She Digs that Hole,” that was also all rerecorded. If I were to do it again, seriously, I would’ve brought everybody in. I thought it was going to be cheaper and easier to just pull it apart and fuck with it like I did with Last Patrol, but it wasn’t Last Patrol — it was a whole different record, it probably would’ve been easier for me to pull everyone in and do it.

Well I feel like Mastermind probably had a lot further to go than Last Patrol, right?

Yeah, there was less good stuff. Last Patrol just had better material, I thought. Last Patrol had better material and Mastermind I was like, why did I start this? I don’t have as much good stuff, what am I going to do? So it just had to be treated a little bit different. A lot of the stuff was a little bit more aggro.

It’s an experiment. These things, these reimaginations, are an experiment for me. In styles, moods, vocal levels, the way it’s mixed, vocal level, sounds, organ sounds, sitar, stuff like this that I’ve worked with before, but never in this configuration. I keep trying to get these sounds — a sound to a record that’s not a stock sound.

When you’re dealing with older sounds or sounds that have been around for a while that are attached to certain times in history, there’s the ability to go the easy route and go, oh, that’s exactly what I remembered the Vanilla Fudge sounding like. Or, this is exactly what Iron Butterfly sounded like and as fun as it is, sometimes I don’t want it to sound exactly like that so I have to play around with sounds that could be gotten easily, if I just went with a stock sound, but you want to mess it up a little bit, you know?

If you’re doing stuff like that — at least, I do — I want to mess it up just a little bit to the fact that when you do listen, somebody listens to the record and somebody wants to say, well, that’s just an exact copy of this old music — they won’t be able to say that with me. They’ll go like, it’s kind of like that, but I don’t know what it is. If I say, I’m not sure exactly what the sound is, then I’m doing a good job.

Is that how “She Digs that Hole” winds up leading off the record?

Yeah, yeah. The leadoff for the record is really tough, I was like, what am I going to do? I’ll lead off the record with some short rockers, or shortest rockers and more aggro and more aggro vocals. Another thing, I wanted to sing different on this record. I wanted to sing more — not a baritone — but a lower register and a more like more like a Spooks, late-‘60s kind of vocal style, which is kind of blues-based.

I don’t know if you listen to much late ‘60s music, but those guys really sang and they sang crazy like they were preachers or something. I loved that shit. I tried that and then it worked on a couple songs, so I figured I’d just leadoff on that and slowly go off into Never Never Land, as far as the psych and soundtrack stuff was concerned.

“Ball of Confusion” has that kind of vocal.

“Ball of Confusion” was a weird one because that was just taken from a jam and when we were doing Mastermind, there was one point where I went in and just asked Phil and Bob, Phil who was playing bass on Mastermind, and Bob to sit there with me on rhythm guitar and just do what I called a Hawkwind jam. Just the four on the floor, “bam bam bam,” I was like, I just want to go for as long as we can and get as much cool stuff, free-form jazz — just make it up. Phil, go fucking nuts — Bob, go crazy and I’ll just hold it down. Some changes here or there, but it was all done in one take because I knew it would be cool and I could use it at some time or another, so of course, when we went to redo Mastermind, I was like — what’s this? It’s like a seven-minute, eight-minute Hawkwind jam of just Phil and Bob going nuts, and I just got that out and cut it up, somehow got the idea to make it into “Ball of Confusion.” I cut it into spots, but not too much.

I mean the bass doesn’t follow the guitar — I had to put new guitar on it, a bunch of new guitars over the top, so it sounds mad. It sounds completely mad. The chorus changes, the guitar changes, but the bass is just up there rockin’. That was a trip.

I think it’s a good cover for the record too, honestly. Not only because it’s psychedelic Temptations — all that stuff is fantastic, but it really kind of fit the vibe. That’s a Hawkwind jam.

Yeah why not, you know? I figured a Hawkwind, Pink Fairies-inspired version of “Ball of Confusion.” I was like, I’m happy. It makes me happy.

Do you feel like after you’ve gone back and sort of given these records a thorough once over — multiple times over — that you’re kind of freer in Monster Magnet than you were, let’s say, when you were doing Mastermind or even before that?

Totally. I really feel like that and it’s funny, it’s like there’s not going to be that many people that care, but sometimes you gotta go in and just do something. I said it to myself, I just got to get this out of my system, I’ve just got to get out this Mastermind thing. Mastermind, in my mind, was the one that lead into Last Patrol, which is the record I’ve been the happiest with in a long time, I just kind of changed my whole style, or it went back to an old style, a more comfortable style for making music, myself, I deal with everything, I’m not relying on anyone to finish or put dots on it, to put their exclamation point on it, I’m not in the game of making records the way it used to be a game, so now it can be a more homegrown project.

Mastermind bugged me because it wasn’t that and it was so close to that and it could have been, so I was like, why not? So now yeah, I feel a lot better. I got that out of my system and hopefully — the good thing about today as opposed to the old days — is that stuff stays around now, so you know — in my head — Mastermind, the Cobras and Fire: Mastermind Redux will always be out there if someone down the line wants to say, well what did Monster Magnet sound like in the late 2000s? Oh, they also sounded like this. It represents better and I can move on and do the next new stuff and I’ve learned a lot from messing around in the studio.

Do you see yourself moving forward, working in the same way?

I don’t know. You get a bag of tricks and you figure out how to use them in different ways, so I learned a lot — lo-fi vs. hi-fi — a mixture of lo-fi and hi-fi and how difficult it is to put organ in all the tracks and still work it out with distorted guitar — all this crazy muso shit, but I’m sure it’s going to have a huge effect on the music for the next record, because I just know a little bit more of what can be done. It always helps. Who knows? The next record could be two-minute songs, it could be a 40-minute record of two-minute songs, or it could be long-format.

I’m not sure, but I know that the work I did on these two reimagined things, bringing in all these different instruments that I usually don’t use all the time and rethinking things and committing to new ways is going to definitely help me on the next one.

It seems like you almost have given yourself a new template to work from. You can do that at this point where you get basic tracks down and then you take that and you expand on it and you add the organ, you add weird effects, backwards, whatever. You could do that with new material, and basically work the same way.

Totally. You could do stuff the way stuff was done, you could easily fuck with it the way stuff was done back when I was just doing four-tracks with no studio time. You don’t have to commit. You can change things on the dime if you want to, but now you can do it in a much more professional manner, reasonable manner. Not that I’ve got anything against total four-track stuff and total lo-fi, but to be able to go from lo-fi to hi-fi and to get original sounds with those two and totally be professional about it is really, really cool.

That’s something that in the mid-2000s I had lost the plot on that. I was kind of locked into a major label style of doing things, which was a “quick let’s get the record out,” maybe missed something that another person could bring to it. I spent a lot of time writing the songs, but less and less time actually figuring out the sounds and leaving a lot of those sounds and final commitments up to a collaboration — with well-meaning producers — but, you know, guys that are looking to get on the radio, or whatever that was.

Now that that’s all thrown out, plus that whole idea is thrown out. What radio? It doesn’t matter. It’s like the Wild West out there. That, plus the fact that you can do stuff on the cheap in a very professional manner has just opened everything up to me, I’m just like, “yahoo!” It’s fun.

Would you ever go back and rework 4-Way Diablo?

That’s an interesting idea. I haven’t listened to it in a long time. There’s some good stuff on that and there’s some really terrible stuff on it too, I think. Yeah, that’s not out of the question, I could see going back. That was a weird one because I was really out of it on that.

The last time we talked, you kind of spoke about making it a garage record and not really being there at the time and that was kind of how it went — so was just thinking about that.

I could definitely — it would be no problem — to supplement. I could make it into a garage record by writing some more garage songs and rerecording the ones that are garagey and then leaving some of the weirder stuff, or the stuff that doesn’t fit, some of the more rockish, fist-in-the-air stuff off and turn it into something else. It might be cool. Definitely not out of the question.

Since the last time we spoke, you brought in Chris on bass.

Yeah, Chris is awesome. He was great. We tried out a bunch of people from all over the place and Chris walked in and he really wanted to do it. I know Chris, we’ve known Chris, for a million years. He just laid it down, he’s an excellent bass player, he’s excellent and he really, really took it.

He was a real pro about it, because there were a lot of stipulations, this wasn’t just, hey, come on in and do what you do and it will be cool. I’m a fucking tyrant here. I’m like, nah it’s got to be played just like Phil played it on the record — because I really love the bass on the record. There was a point there where I was asking Phil to go to bass. After I got rid of Jim [Baglino], I was like, Phil, you should just play bass in the band. He’s an excellent bass player and we worked together really well. He kept going back and forth on it and said he’d do it, but he loves playing guitar. So I said, alright, let’s get someone in here and let’s try and see if someone gets it.

Chris came in and he totally got it. He goes, “oh, I see what you guys are doing.” I have a little bit different style that this, but I know what this is. We went back and forth — again — real, total muso shit. You’ve got to play with a pick, you can’t play with your fingers because you can’t hear the distorted bass over all the distorted guitars, all this kind of shit and he was totally great. We go out there and he just slammed it. Just completely, monster bass player, like he always was.

It calls for a little less finesse; he’s got more finesse than what you hear in Monster Magnet. What you hear in Monster Magnet, it’s like a bludgeon, dun-dun-dun, it’s all Lemmy and Alice Cooper, like Dennis Dunaway-style, Mel Schacher, Grand Funk — in the heavy stuff there’s not a lot of finesse involved. It’s a bludgeon. It’s action based and he caught right on to it.

The tours that we did with Chris since then — I forget how many we did, we did a lot — had been the absolute best Monster Magnet ever sounded live and it’s because of Chris‘ relationship with Bob, how he and Bob play together. That’s something that goes on all the time because he plays with Bob in Bitchwax, so it’s like, I look over and it’s like, this sounds really, really good. Then I’m like, of course it does, because everything fits. It’s a strong chassis, as they say. Really cool.

Because your brand new bassist has been working with your drummer for a decade, so yeah.

Yeah, it’s awesome. We get to do so many things. We play a lot in New York, so we get to do things like Last Patrol in its entirety and then we came back and did reworked versions of all older Monster Magnet songs in more psychedelic ways and just long, sludgy, psychedelic almost mellow and then a full on Power Trip-style rock show in America and the band didn’t miss a beat. They were quite different, the whole nature of a four-minute rock song plus four-minute rock song, boom boom boom — it’s a lot different than the lazy psych or seemingly lazy psych, trippy affair. It’s a completely different working of the audience. They work the audience in a completely different way. The only thing those two have in common with each other is that they have to be good enough in what they do to keep the audience engaged.

When we’re talking about the same audiences, that’s where it really got tough because Monster Magnet has been around for a long time and I can see people that are like, “I like the psych stuff better/ I like the rock stuff better” but when we get out there live and play it, especially with this band — Chris, Bob, Garrett, Phil — those guys play everything so well and they have such a command over their effects, the right kind of effects, the right sounds that are coming off, that we seem to be pleasing — you know, knock on wood and cross my fingers — pleasing both sides of the Monster Magnet spectrum of fans and that’s something we had a hard time doing in the older days.

How was the Euro tour?

Really good. Europe’s the place to be for music, man. If you’re in a rock band? It’s like 1974! It wasn’t America — cheap tickets, lots of different venues — all different size venues, they don’t overcharge people, the drinking age is a soft 18, so you can actually get young people in there, which is a huge component in rock music.

You start at 21 and go up, you’re not going to have a great rock show. You’ll have a rock show, but it’s not going to be great. You need people, young people. So, that goes on and there is very, very strong interest in psychedelic music there. I don’t know why, the interest in all kinds of culture. It’s just a better vibe and I’m sure you’ve talked to bands that will agree with me.

What about the US?

US was cool! I loved playing in the US again, it’s been a long time. Still wasn’t as good as Europe — only because of the age thing. A lot of these places in the States, it’s hard to get all these people of all these ages together and that seems like it should be the easiest thing. But, all-ages shows are tough in America. They cost people money, a lot of people don’t want to do them, so we’re going for baseline audience members — 21 and up. It’s an absolutely amazing difference in the crowd and what you can do with the crowd and how you can make new fans and make people happy in different ways.

When you start at 21, you’re going on with a ton of preset expectations, it’s just a whole different thing. The younger you go, the more of a change you get to influence new people. So, the States were great and the people that were cool were really, really cool. No difference in nationality there, it’s just not as many. In the States, clubs or bars also have music — in Europe there are music halls that also happen to serve alcohol. That’s the way it is. It’s music first, it’s all about the music.

They build their venues with sightlines in mind. Every place is built — all these venues that have been built in the last 15 years, they build them like they build the House of Blues. The guys that come in and say, how is it — can you see? How’s the sound system? Is it really good? We want everyone to be happy, we want all these people to be happy, we want to do a good show. The stage is like, I mean you’ve seen some of these places, it’s just a fucking bar.

It’s like, no, this is not the way it’s supposed to be, it’s like, you can’t expect rock and music — live music — to compete with what’s already recorded and what’s in movies and stuff. You’re giving me this arcane, old bullshit, and they work for punk rock, but even punk rock wouldn’t work because the kids can’t get in. It’s like, wow, in the States it’s really prohibitive in a bunch of ways. Not impossible, but also, it’s hard. We’ll do it again, I want to see what’s going on.

I definitely want to do the New York area again, because that’s when you do Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey, Philly, and that kind of thing. I don’t know about a whole tour of the States, but Europe beckons all the time. If you’re a music fan of any type of music, Europe is a better bet for a show. The shows are better there. They’re cheaper, people are more into it, there’s a wider spectrum of age. I can’t say it enough and I urge every band out there that’s just playing in the States, it’s like, take a trip dude. Don’t pigeonhole yourself. States has got some work to do.

I wanted to ask — next year is 25 years since Spine of God.

Wow.

Ok, I’m going to guess from that response, nothing is planned yet.

No, no, but I’ll do Spine, I’ll play Spine of God in America. I would love it.

Yeah?

I mean, we did it in Europe a couple years ago and it was awesome. We did a Spine of God tour and it was amazing. It was so much fun to play, it was like — I’ll put it out in front of the promoters, American promoters, and see if they’ll go for it. We did it once, we put it out in the laps of several different promoters in America and we did it in Europe and this was four, five years ago and they all said we can’t sell this. They said come back when you have Powertrip.

We did the same thing with Dopes and they said the same thing. “Nobody knows that stuff here.” I was like, “I beg to differ.” What are you going to do? There’s different ways you can work the music industry these days, but I’m not going to operate on just bugging people. There has to be an invite and Europe invites all the time. “Hey sure! You do whatever.” Any idea that I came up with, they’re like, “sure, we’ll do it, we trust you.”

How about a Spine of God tour? Sure. How about a Dopes to Infinity? Sure. We’ve got a new album called Last Patrol and no one has heard it yet and we’re going to do that, the tour of the record of an absolutely brand new record — we did the whole brand new record and that’s all — and they went for it. It was one of the most successful tours we’ve had there in years.

Then I come back here and it’s like, “I don’t know, are you going to do ‘Space Lord’ twice? How about ‘Space Lord’ twice? Then we’ll give you half the money you can get in Europe.” I’m like, “you guys suck.” Really lame. The only way to make it in America now is to not make it. People are satisfied for a mention on Pitchfork and Twitter followers. That’s their idea of success. :I have this many Twitter followers and Instagram!” “How many people came to the show?” “Twenty, it was great!” “Twenty? What’re you talking about?”

It’s crazy. It’s like the reduced expectations in America are insane. People are blowing smoke up each other’s ass while their shit goes down. In Europe you can go over there and play easy 2,000, 4,000 people. People are into it, like really not blowing smoke, they’re actually there listening to music, talking about the music, talking about other bands, talking about the scene — a physical scene. People like carloads of kids driving from Berlin to Munich and then Munich to France to see bands and stuff, the kind of stuff that never goes on anymore over here.

Physical, you know? Physical. Here it just seems to be this land where people operate and talk to each other, you know? “Yeah, this really cool new band came in and they had a great tour” It’s like, no they didn’t. They had a good show in New York, they had a good show in Chicago, they had a good show in L.A. and all the rest of the shows were horrible. Ten people, 20 people when it should be 400. That’s the financial problem in America. It’s just expensive for people to go out.

Whatever. Right now, I just stick to where I’m invited, where I don’t have to make up my own good scenario — “Everything is great, we’re doing great” Like, no you’re not. A lot of bands I see are just tweeting away. Bandcamping and Facebooking away as if everything is cool and it’s like, I don’t think you guys realize what cool is. You guys think this is great? You’ve got a problem. Nothing against the music, but I hope music wins.

That’s my dream — live music wins. That means there’s a couple generations of kids that are coming up that really understand that supporting live music is going to make better music on albums. It’s a better thing. It’s a better way, a great way to experience music and it’s a thing — that’s what I see not happening in the States anymore, because of cultural and financial changes. The whole live thing has changed to where festivals do well because it’s more bang for your buck and people pick and choose the bands they want to see and it’s a nice day. Which is cool, but that kind of shows you where people are at.

They want more choices. They want more choices and stuff, as if they’re talking about the same thing — where buying a ringtone. I want more choices, give me more bands. Give me a dozen bands and I’ll choose a couple It’s like, it doesn’t work that way. Quantity is not quality, it never has been, it never will be. Whatever.

So it’s time. Time is the answer.

Time, I think yeah.

Wait for a pendulum to swing.

Something, yeah. It will swing. I guess it’s important for me, as a person who’s lived through a whole different era of music — I’ve been around for a while, so I saw a lot of different scenes happen. I first started going to concerts in like ’73 or ’72 and then I saw the whole thing change in to punk rock and it go from festival seating to Capitol Theater places and all these venues and stuff — that’s the way it is in Europe now. Venues up the ass. All different kinds, theaters, facilities, bars, all over the place. All ages. All the time. That’s the way it used to be in America and that’s why it did so well.

It was all ages, it was like, hey, if you want to sell music — you don’t just make it in some old man bar. “21 and up that’s it!” I’ve seen that happen and go into punk rock, which got into more bars and it started to turn into less of a populist, rock started turning to less of a populist movement and more of a kind of idealist, journalism route, where the journalist had more to do with music and what happened, all into the indie thing of the ’90s where — the first indies, before it got bought up — that was very journalist-driven.

It was an idea, it was an idealized concept. It wasn’t a populist movement, it wasn’t like kids into Grand Funk Railroad and everyone going, “why? Why would you love a band like that?” “Oh, we don’t know, we can’t control it — the kids like it.” A lot of that stuff started to drift away and it shifted into hip-hop. Hip-hop was the populist movement, for whatever reason. There’s probably a million reasons. Hip-hop went right to the core of what kids like. It had the sound, it had the attitude and rock didn’t have that, because they were so busy trying to deny — what indie rock was trying to deny a lot of things — I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about here. Why am I going off on these tangents?

It’s interesting to see how it goes, but through this trail of what’s happened to popular music and how it fits — especially with young people — right now, the kind of stuff I do is a total boutique thing. It’s just like only for a certain amount of people that are going to like it and understand it, or even want to. That’s cool for me, because I’m kind of a boutique person myself.

For the long term, I’d love to see all these new bands — especially psych bands, new psych bands, instrumental — these guys that are busting their ass trying to do shit, I like to see some more people that like that music. I don’t think it’s impossible, but right now maybe it is. The culture is very, very antsy and they just want more stuff and right now people seem to be accepting convenience. Convenience trumps all, and more. Quantity over quality for sure, people don’t even seem to know the difference between the two, nor do they care.

Well in my recent experience, there’s such a glut of stuff that even when you find something that’s really, really special and really good, you’re sort of inundated by so much other information that you almost don’t get to be like, “wait, back there, there was this really awesome thing” and then “oh, here’s 10 more things.”

Absolutely. I totally agree. Whoever thought that the fantastic promise of an internet democracy would just bring down a giant snowstorm? It’s like, “hey I just saw a good chicken feather in that snowstorm, can we go back and pick it up? I can’t see it!” I totally agree and the focus is terrible, there’s no focus. I’m willing to focus, I’m willing to tune stuff out.

I don’t need to be in contact with every god damn thing that’s coming out because, hey, I don’t care what year it is, the same rule applies. Ninety percent of everything is shit. That’s the rule and it always has been in entertainment. Ninety percent of everything is shit. That’s the way I look at things, so I know that the 10 percent that’s good is going to reach me, but how do you teach kids that? They’re sitting there with their mouth open wide for everything.

I would be too. It took me 50 years to really, really not go, “oh, I know I’m going to find something great right around the corner.” It’s like searching the old comic book store and going, I know I’m going to find a good comic back in there if I just keep looking. I’m like, no you’re not. You do when you’re 14 or 15, but after a while you start to realize that it’s just the nature of entertainment, nature of music and art — maybe I’m overestimating that 90 percent of everything is shit — but that’s been my rule forever.

I’m not surprised when years go by and I don’t hear anything good. I’m not surprised at all. But, for the first time in my life I am concerned about missing something that should be right in front of my face, because of that snowstorm, that deluge.

Not missing it totally — but coming onboard like why wasn’t anyone champing this thing when this thing was alive? It’s almost like releases are these fake releases now. You release a record, everyone goes “Yeah yeah yeah,” and, “What is it to my immediate expectation?” If I was a journalist, I would be like, how would my review of this record stack up to my review of the other records that just came out? It’s all tied in because everything is so immediate.

It’s got to change the way people look at records, the way they review them and also the way they listen to them, how they’re received when they first come out, and then how they’re received down the line when they’re almost like “discovered.” In my career, in my Monster Magnet records, they always do better years after they came out.

“Yeah, I wish you guys would have been there on the aircraft carrier when I was putting the champagne bottle over and trying to launch something.” It’s kind of hard. The last time I saw anything go from straight a-to-z, boom, physical scene stuff in America and rock was the ’90s. The whole Sub Pop thing. It was still analog world, information still took a while to get around, and there was a bit of sorting out that had to be done from independent record companies — who they were going to record, who they weren’t going to record, what the budgets were, how long it took the art to make — so there were a lot of considerations put into the releases — more than I think there is now.

A lot of bands get released now, or release it on their own and no matter how good or un-good — whatever, that’s up to anyone’s opinion — but no matter how finished it is or ready to go it is, it’s out there. You’re seeing stuff that’s out there that never would have been allowed out back then. There would’ve been too many cooler heads going, “maybe you guys should wait, maybe you should write a couple good songs, or get your shit together,” or whatever.

The pace was slower, a little bit more refined I think, more potent and it allowed the music listener to actually catch a breath, but now with digital it’s full-on, it’s like, “just go! Whoever wins, wins.” I get the feeling that people are winning — whatever winning is — getting attention for stuff that they didn’t even expect to get attention for or have nothing to do with. I don’t understand why some people get popular and some people don’t. Under the level of pop — giant pop is pretty easy to figure out, because at least giant pop doesn’t lie, you know?

It’s scientifically engineered to be what it is.

Yes, and fueled. Fueled by money and connections — it’s like there’s no mistake, this is going to go. Everybody else is kind of out on their own, but music, especially long-form music — anything that’s going to take a long time or anything that’s going to have more than a bit of nuance, is going to pale next to the latest YouTube thing, you know? It’s like, “hey look, somebody wrote a symphony — but, here’s a picture of a monkey pissing on a kid’s head!”

Oh, monkey wins.

Monkey wins.

Monkey wins.

Monkey wins and because there are so many amateur journalists out there, nobody knows who to trust. There has to be a certain amount of trust between the public and the journalist. I always had it when I was a kid growing up. I disagreed with them, there were certain journalists that I hated, but I know if they hated something I would like it.

Now, with this data generation, they believe the data and that’s it, or it’s easier to grab a hold of a negative review than it is a good one, because good ones usually take some time, unless it’s a big smiley face. The negative ones allow the journalist to say what they’ve got to say — amateur journalists have a really hard time with writing objective pieces, they just love to hear themselves talk. It’s about them, it’s not about the music.

That’s the whole 2000s right there. It’s the “me decade” times a million. Everybody is “me” and that’s great and everything, but when it comes to art, no! You’re not allowed in. I could never understand that. “It’s great! It’s democratic!” It’s like, no, in art you need snobs. You don’t have any say in this, it’s like the people who shut down movies — Spiderman movies — because they don’t like choice of Spiderman. It’s like, this is really the way these movies guys are going to operate? Fan sourced, crowd sourced opinions? They have nothing to say. I mean, to me they don’t.

It’s between the art and the people who like the art. These people are starting to wag their tail like a dog, it shows, you know? You can’t undo it. It’s probably better this way and will eventually be better, a more democratic, freer, world for music — not corporate rock — all that stuff. I’ll tell you right now, it’s like you said — people are missing a lot of the good stuff because, what, they’re not looking for good stuff? Or they choose not to listen to good stuff? They don’t really want it? Or it’s because they missed it?

All that I know is that when this was delivered — the everyone can do it routine was finally done and everyone thought it was going to be great, it turned out to be not so great, because it’s amateur hour and only amateurs like amateur hour, you know what I mean? People who really listen to music very, very hard — and I may be stretching the “professional” thing — but, real music lovers, they’re going to want good stuff, they want a higher standard. There’s no standard now. It’s like hey, you know what the standard is now? Hits. Data.

Content.

Content. All of this stuff, anything that can bring people closer so you can get more hits. It’s like “We’ve got to get the numbers up on this.” We released on song on like Soundcloud and I have all these people calling like “Man, you should have way more hits on Soundcloud” and I’m like, OK, why? “Well there’s a way you can double these numbers, triple them” and that means what, more people like us? “No, it doesn’t mean that at all, it just means it gets added in all these places.”

So, I go back and go, “this is how many people like Monster Magnet?” “Absolutely.” That’s what you lead for, that’s the pinnacle of success, numbers. Whether they mean something or not, un-nuanced, flat, dead in your face, if it says 10,000 — in this little contract that we all wrote and signed with each other — if it says 10,000, that means 10,000 people like it — but it doesn’t. It never did. If 10,000 likes meant anything, there would be kids on Facebook running for President of the United States. It’s all a snowstorm.

It’s like picking fly shit out of pepper. When are we going to extract what’s really important and what’s not when everybody wants to play this game of numbers? At least in the late ‘60s and the early ‘70s, yeah it was still all about numbers — it’s America, it’s commercial art — but there was a heavy lean from journalists and from the leftist/artist segment of the population that grew into — this may be not the overwhelming opinion — but a big strong part of people’s opinion on why things were good.

Some of that involved not being in it for the money. Meaning, “I want to leave the money out of this so we can focus on the art,” that’s almost gone. Almost anybody that I talk to in music can go, “so I noticed you did all those stupid podcasts and you’re on a reality show now, I noticed that you made a complete idiot out of yourself.” Yeah, but it got me 10,000 new listeners! It’s like, what? If you tried that stuff in 1971 they’d kick you out of the world. That would be grounds for execution. Now it’s like there’s a complete acceptance for people to do anything to get more listeners, but it’s not more listeners — it would be one thing if it was a guaranteed listen, it’s just a guaranteed number. Somebody somewhere went click.

It doesn’t seem like it’s worth it to me and I see it devaluing the integrity of almost everyone. It’s just like, wow. This is what it is? When the crowd starts operating as if that’s a win, then art has a problem.

When the crowd starts going, “well, they sold this many.” It’s like people with movie reviews, people who like movies. If a movie sells well these days, there’s a bigger chance that those people will somehow make an excuse for it to be shit, because obviously, they sold a lot, so it must be good.

It’s not like that with every reviewer, but that’s pretty much what’s going on. Unless of course, everyone wants to shoot a movie down. But, that’s pretty much going on with numbers, getting the numbers is a big part of showing off your “quality” and that’s just a shame. That should all come after the fact. Interesting world.

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Tags: Cobras and Fire, Long Branch, Monster Magnet, Monster Magnet Cobras and Fire, Napalm Records, New Jersey

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