Friday Full-Length: Monster Magnet, Test Patterns Vol. 1 (R.I.P. Tim Cronin)
Posted in Bootleg Theater on July 11th, 2025 by JJ KoczanTim Cronin was one of the kindest people you could hope to meet, in a heavy-underground context or any other. I don’t remember when we first got in touch, but I’m pretty sure it was when I was in college, through his band The Ribeye Bros. His passing earlier this week after being diagnosed with ALS in March leaves a couple unfillable holes behind, in music as well as in the lives of those who knew and loved him. He was somebody who was nice to me and had no need or reason to be. Among humans, that makes him tops in my book. He took the Obelisk Questionnaire in 2022 and it was always a pleasure to hear from him whether he had new music happening or not. New Jersey and rock and roll will miss him, let alone family, friends and bandmates, and those who knew him even casually.
Cronin was an original member of pre-Monster Magnet, when the band was himself, Dave Wyndorf, John McBain and a whole lot of weirdo restlessness. They played under different names, different shows, different ideas. Following heavy space rock whims in the late ’80s when most kids were getting down with a slice of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie.” Test Patterns Vol. 1 was released in 2022 on God Unknown Records with two early versions of the acid-slacker epic “Tab” plastered across its sides, each an entrancing, underproduced abyss waiting to swallow the listener. Hawkwind through the looking glass. The stuff of mirror universes. All go.
It wasn’t the first archival Monster-Magnet-before-they-were-Monster-Magnet-type release. One shudders to imagine how many tapes like this are sitting, what, in Dave Wyndorf’s garage?, when they should probably be in the Library of Congress for preservation and future research. In 2001, Wrong Way Records put out Love Monster as a collection of material from around the same time, with songs like “Atom Age Vampire,” “War Hippie” and “Five Years Ahead” and a sound that was about as raw as one could expect for having been tracked in a rehearsal space during the Reagan years. I don’t think it was actually recorded on a phone answering machine, but you get the idea.
The journey of “Tab” — gorgeous and muddy in kind, a headphone-ready, close-your-eyes piece of transportive potential drawing a distorted line in the sand between the 
squares and those who can dig it, existentially speaking — of course has its most known representation on the 1991 25…Tab EP (reissue review here, discussed here), but is different every time. This owes to the open and unsolidified nature of what Monster Magnet were at the time — it’s not every song that can feature twice on a 48-minute LP that holds nothing else, either literally or figuratively — and the experimentalism driving them. They were all fuck-around and the music was the find-out.
“Tab” on Test Patterns Vol. 1 has been remixed and remastered and whatnot, but it’s still one of the greatest pieces of freakery ever put to tape. I know there’s a lot of weird stuff out there, and that’s a good thing, but Monster Magnet were too ragamuffin for the arthouse set — and thus at the vanguard — and because they went on to more commercial sounds and successes, there’s an entire subset of their fanbase that never knew from whence the “Spacelord” came. “Tab” amplifies their loss. The voidbound echoes in the midsection, where you can’t quite tell anymore what’s backwards or forwards and it kind of all sounds like noise but there’s still that strum of guitar, embody this. Once they got the lineup solidified, signed to Caroline and moved on to making albums like 1991’s Spine of God (reissue review here, discussed here) and 1993’s Superjudge (discussed here), they brought more structured craft. But I’ll argue that as straightforward as they’ve ever gotten — and there have been ebbs and flows throughout Monster Magnet’s career of weirdoism; sometimes it’s personnel, sometimes it’s Wyndorf directing, sometimes it’s just life, I think — their foundation in noisy, mess-around-with-sound psychedelia and space rock has always been a distinguishing factor. Cronin was an essential part of that.
Side B’s “Tab (1988 Demo)” is — you guessed it — even rawer. It begins with chimes and mellow swirl in a call to prayer and soon oozes its way through a lysergic morass of drift and noise. The sound has obviously been cleared up, but Wyndorf’s croon is largely indecipherable and that’s fine. It’s about the atmosphere, the density of the wash they create, more than any single element peaking through the mix. That lifeline strum is there, even more buried, but the persona of the demo “Tab” is more meditative, even less ‘song’ in the traditional sense than a piece for worship set forth by those chimes. To be sure, it’s not any gods you’ve ever heard of being called down, but the mad-howling drag of the later reaches are definitely in communion with something.
I picked Test Patterns — and I don’t know that there will ever be a Vol. 2 or not, especially now — to close the week to honor Cronin, and to underscore the idea that sometimes we don’t know at the time the impact that our actions will have. No way John McBain, Cronin or Wyndorf knew that the band they were shaping would still exist more than 35 years later, let alone have the influence or reach Monster Magnet have enjoyed. But that’s just it. People do things all the time, put stuff out into the world, and sometimes it’s pretty special. I used to read Cronin’s blog about Jack’s Music customers. I dug his collages of cut-and-pasted LP art a lot. Between the Ribeyes and doing lights and whathaveyou for Monster Magnet, with whom he stayed close for decades even after not being in the band anymore, he was always working on something, plugging a show, etc. Putting art into the world, making it better.
On behalf of myself and this site, condolences to Cronin’s friends, family, bandmates, and really the entirety of my beloved Garden State, which is certainly poorer for his passing. I don’t know how you start a campaign to rename streets or anything like that, but if there isn’t a Tim Cronin Blvd. in Red Bank sometime soon, we’ll know for certain there’s no justice in the universe. Rest in peace, Tim, and thanks for everything.
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In light of the above and out of respect to Cronin’s memory, I’m going to leave it there for this week. I know this interrupts the Parliament-Funkadelic series of Friday Full-Lengths. I’ll get back to that next week. Until then, thank you for reading and I wish you a great and safe weekend. Hydrate. Tell someone you love them. Fuck ICE. Fuck fascism.
FRM.
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