MONSTER MAGNET Frontman Talks About Performing Entire 'Dopes To Infinity' Album

Steve Mascord of Australia's Loud magazine recently conducted an interview with MONSTER MAGNET mainman Dave Wyndorf. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

On his battle with sleeping-pill addiction:

"Benzodiazepine particular. It's not even a sleeping pill, really, it's more like an anti-anxiety drug. Anything that's like Xanax, Ativan, anything with a pan in it, Diazepam. That's stuff than can really fuck you up, beyond heroin, beyond coke and stuff. It's its own particular brand of devil.

"When you hear the term 'pillhead' 'he's a pillhead' that usually means a person whose eyeballs are, like, up in their socket and they never make sense. And not even the hardcore drug guys hang out with them. You know what I mean? You're better off doing heroin. That stuff is so fucked up, it's like, 'God! How did I get involved in that stuff?'

"Be careful everybody! Don't take it on a regular basis! It puts the hooks into you and it will make you have the brain and the nervous system of a squirrel."

On MONSTER MAGNET's upcoming tour during which the band will perform its 1995 album, "Dopes To Infinity", in its entirety:

"I've been watching people do this album routine where they play an album and I've always been interested because if I was a kid, I'd think that was the coolest fucking thing ever, to see a band do an entire album in sequence. You kinda want to do that. I finally talked to some people that I know who have done that I talked to Mark Arm from MUDHONEY, I talked to Josh [Homme] from QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE and they said how much fun they had doing it. I said, 'Alright, we're going in, we're doing it.'

"I picked 'Dopes' because 'Dopes' is not our biggest-selling record but it's not our smallest-selling record either. It leaves me a chance to do the biggest seller again if it's successful. I could go up to 'Powertrip', which is the biggest-selling record, or I could go down to total undergroundsville, which is 'Spine Of God', 'Superjudge' and stuff like that. So this seemed a good place to start."

"I wrote all the stuff and I recorded it so I've already heard it, like, a thousand times in my head. I don't lose any of that. I'm looking forward to seeing how the stuff mutates live because stuff always does.

"It's very in-tune. The vocals are very in-tune. I remember going crazy because I wanted it be the opposite of 'Superjudge' which was wildly razor sharp. This one, I wanted to be smooth and zoomy and it was. It came out a little bit too smooth at the time.

"Everything has to get roughed up. I think the material's going to be better for it."

On the proposed Dave Wyndorf solo album:

"I would do a solo record except that every time I go out on tour for a month, I end up going on tour for two years. Then it's time to make another MONSTER MAGNET record. I'm strapped for time. I use all the heavy ones for the next MONSTER MAGNET record.

"I want to do this solo thing. I've got a lot of stuff in the can now. So between this ... I'll possibly record the next MONSTER MAGNET record and the solo album in pieces at the same time and then release the solo record later.

"I want to work with a piano player and stuff. I want to be sure I lock myself into a different (way of thinking). It's easy for me to pick up a guitar and make it work. But it's going to sound the same. So I think I'm going to hire a piano player. I'm gonna say, 'We're going to write some songs, I'm gonna tell you to play all these pieces I wrote on guitar which I'm going to translate to piano.' That will force me to work in a different sonic sphere."

On the possibility of releasing a MONSTER MAGNET live album:

"We might do that, yeah. I don't know if we're going to record any in Australia, that's a little bit close. But I think in Europe we're going to record the 'Dopes' thing several times and other stuff as well so hopefully in the next couple of years, we'll have a nice collection of live stuff to release."

Read the entire interview from Loud magazine.