Monster Magnet

Can you describe what its like, then?

ha, I remember when betty was born

viceroy, have you ever heard the original version of tab?

bought another copy of fragile, seeds were busting up the spine

you can never have too many copies of fragile

I'm liking this album so far. Their last one was alright, but the new one feels a lot more spirited..."Gods and Punks" is a great little tune.

Christ I'm a good looking man

cool video too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ofFFrx8QI

I interviewed Wyndorf the other day - nice guy. We talked about Hawkwind.

if satan lived in heaven he'd be me

always excited by tales of new magnet, though i've kinda jumped ship since powertrip. that early glitterhouse EP is still one of my favorite things of ever.

New album is fantastic, particularly "Gods & Punks" and "Ghost Story."

"You can fuck recovery / 'cause you're already gone . . . "

i jumped ship after 'Superjudge' .. it just wasn't , i dunno, it just wasn't the same maaaaaaan

^ can totally understand this, but dopes and powerslave are awesome albums, so long as yr willing to meet the cheeze halfway

lol @ powerslave duh

anyway, "god & punks" is excellent, right in line with "negasonic", "space lord", "crop circle", etc. love the video too. "homeless, hungry, EVIL." ending bums me out though cuz i can relate to evil hobo dude. fuck the kids.

this was a band I had been meaning to check out for years but got turned off in the late 90's by "Space Lord" (which I realize isn't representative of their sound, but hey I was 18, and I hadn't discovered mp3s yet).

finally picked up Spine of God and holy crap is this thing awesome. not just the sludgey goodness I love in stoner-psych music but really nice trippy melodies, and Wyndorf's voice is incredible for the style. not just droney, it really has character and adds a lot to the music.

yeah, spine of god/tab and the stuff that led up to 'em = the peak, when john mcbain was still playing guitar. groovier, sludgier and WAY more psychedelic than the stuff that came after, though superjudge retains a bit of that flavor. i like both dopes to infinity and powertrip, though, and i'd say that "space lord" represents that phase of the band pretty well. it's dumb, cartoonish cock rock polished up for 90s radio, but catchy, funny & surprisingly clever within the parameters. a guilty pleasure.

the best version of monster magnet was the 5 piece w/ tim cronin on vocals, but that alignment recorded almost nothing that conveyed their live power

anybody tripping off spine of god should do themselves a favor and track down their first cassette, forget about life I'm high on dope, which contains a massive version of tab (funny story: I actually have the 2 track mixdown master tape of this)

would love to hear that, edward. have a boot with an early demo of tab, maybe the same version you mention, maybe not. it's damn good.

almost certainly one and the same, it's pretty widely available. the original track listing was:

side A
lizard johnny
black wahwah
8-ball
brainstorm

side B
tab

when it got bootlegged in the 90s, somebody tacked on "freakshop USA" from the circuit 7" after "brainstorm", and that's the version that most frequently circulates.

those guys were from my hometown, we were all in the same incestuous scene, forming one absurdly-named concept band after another and releasing cassettes left and right. but there was something special about that first monster magnet tape. they rode it up and out of the local scene, it was kind of wild to witness.

love this story, Edward. anything else i might have heard of come out of that scene? anything i should have heard but haven't? sounds like a blast. and yeah, i remember watching nirvana come up out of the oly punk rock house party scene in a similar way. strange, but more power to em.

"Gods and Punks" totally reminds me of The Four Horsemen.

Ehh.. you mean the song? Or the horsemen?

The band. The great early-90s band with Dimwit on drums.

Release day! Reserved my copy

love this story, Edward. anything else i might have heard of come out of that scene? anything i should have heard but haven't? sounds like a blast. and yeah, i remember watching nirvana come up out of the oly punk rock house party scene in a similar way. strange, but more power to em.

― naked human hands and a foam rubber head (contenderizer), Thursday, October 21, 2010 12:37 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark

just stumbled across a lengthy interview with mcbain where he talks a lot about the red bank weirdo tape scene. I have a copy of the chigger tape he mentions, it is amazingly hilarious, intentionally bad music. my favorite magnet offshoot was evil acidhead. blackjack was gonna put out their single at one point but they dropped the ball. it is some of the most heavily oppressive psychedelic music I've ever heard.

http://www.nowinvisibly.com/wwc/content/article_fsusa.html

YSI?

I can leonardo my rips of the tapes. I know mcbain remastered the EA stuff a couple years ago with an eye towards getting somebody to release them but that never happened. if you guys know any psych labels with some loose change in their pockets please send 'em his way.

leo

acid reich did a great version of "set the controls for the heart of the sun" with made-up lyrics like "bathe in the light of the unholy one / fry like a pig in the heart of the sun"

We then recorded the second demo and decided, along the way, that Ozium didn't quite fit.

Did you shop that tape around to the labels (including Primo Scree/Caroline)?

No. It was made strictly for the band. I don't recall how The Ugly American got involved. As I see it, it's far superior to anything we ever did. I love how raw and grating it is.

mcbain otm

I still kick myself for losing my copy of this, and for not bidding on one that showed up on ebay a few years ago

i lived at the shore at the time and always assumed the red bank weirdo tape scene, of which i'm pretty sure i still have some cassette mementos in a box somewhere, was basically three or four guys in a basement somewhere making it up as they went. which i guess, skimming through that mcbain interview, isn't that far off the mark. i can't imagine the audience for most of that stuff exceeded a dozen people. the brighton bar was a fantastic shithole of a club. i loved that place. big nurse, who mcbain mentions as having headlined the brighton bill that was monster mag's first gig, were fantastic for awhile. they released a single on heat blast records, which was THE local label, which was pretty good in a husker du-ish way, not sure if they ever released anything else. they weren't a red bank band; they were from somewhere else on the shore, i forget exactly where. nudeswirl, from new brunswick, was another good one, them and their silly-yet-quite-catchy drum-machine-and-guitar offshoot they might be vaginas. nudeswirl signed to polygram records, back when the grunge dollars were starting to flow, and promptly vanished. monster magnet were really something else when they started playing at the brighton bar. they just kinda walked in as rock stars from the start. and, yeah, i loved them with tim cronin on vocals too. tim was also an all-time-great record store clerk.

ha, I was one of those guys in the basement

there were more than three or four of us, but me + 3 other guys probably generated 50% of it so

it depended on the release but those cool beans tapes did decent business through jack's and blowyourselfup. I'm sure some of the bands with local followings like laughing soup dish did pretty well.

otm re: tim as all-time-great record store clerk. "if you don't like this, I'll buy it back from you." the guy was hugely influential on my musical education. he's actually in chasing amy, stocking the shelves in the record store scene.

Monster Magnet is one of my Top 10 All-Time Bands so huge bong-tokin' grin at Mastermind. I still wear my Dopes To Infinity tour shirt weekly but almost didn't care anymore after the last few. currently Diggin' That Hole \m/

there was another clerk who worked with tim when i first started going to jack's, whose tastes were a lot more poppy, and they used to fight over how i should spent my money. "you need this sex clark five album." "no, no, what you really need is this scratch acid record." i needed that balance in my life. i learned a lot from the two of them.

that would be gary

he and tim started cool beans

yes, gary, that's it. thank you!

Interview w/Dave Wyndorf (part 1 of 2; the rest, including Wyndorf talking about Hawkwind, will be posted on Thursday)

I'm sure some of the bands with local followings like laughing soup dish did pretty well.

Ha, I got a request for these dudes on my show once. Couldn't find their records though.

dave's wrong, he's a great drummer

xp

Tim's still at Jack's and also currently in an excellent band called The Ribeye Bros along with some Magnet alums. Excellent, straight up garage rock with really good and funny lyrics.

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs444.ash2/71727_1615896193108_1107423051_31715939_2434131_n.jpg

Having finally heard that early demo cassette Edward rightly praises above, it's pretty great to hear that legendary Freddie Hubbard rant used as a sample.

I've had 'Space Lord' (& all of Powertrip, really, but especially that) on constant rotation lately & I'd been thinking "how in the hell, at a time when White Zombie could fill stadiums, was this not a gigantic single?" And so I looked it up & it turns out it actually kinda was, in its own modest way:

The song peaked at number three on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs chart..The music video is notable for being the first video ever aired on MTV's Total Request Live on September 14, 1998.

I guess I just wasn't paying any sort of attention at the time! At any rate, it is a JAM

this band totally rules btw

Scharpling interviews Dave for ninety minutes. Absolutely a must listen... http://www.lowtimespodcast.com/lt_episodes/009/

Aw man, his story about playing Norman Mailer's place is hilarious!

I heard "Teenage Negasonic Warhead" for the first time in ages and was struck that it was a major cop of "Tales of Brave Ulysses" by Cream. Or am I insane?

I'M SO FUCKING STOOOOONED

if satan lived in heaven he'd be me