This interview begins in medias res because Dave Wyndorf begins in medias res. He’s going, and it’s up to the rest of us to keep up. Good luck.
Somehow this image of the Monster Magnet founder and frontman is iconic in my head: he’s sitting in a dimly-lit kitchen in Red Bank, New Jersey, smoking and smirking at the state of rock and roll. For sure, rock and roll isn’t dead — and anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t paying enough attention — but rock’s place at the head of rebelliousness in popular culture is long since gone. Wyndorf knows this and he’s got the stories behind him to prove it. Over the last 30 years, his band has been up, down and everywhere in between. He’s dug his own holes and he’s powertripped like no one else. Monster Magnet‘s legacy is testament to restlessness as much as relentless creativity.
These have been grim times for restless musicians. Monster Magnet‘s new covers record, A Better Dystopia (review here), might be a manifestation of that restlessness. It comes three years after their last studio offering, Mindfucker (review here), so they were due for something, and they’d already redux’ed two of their older albums. Unless they were gonna go make a new Spine of God (reissue review here) to mark its 30th year — which would be suitably bold and potentially disastrous in kind — or toss out a live album like everyone else, with little point to releasing an album they can’t tour, they were kind of stuck. One should note the Acid Reich demos recently released, that project featuring John McBain, Tim Cronin and Wyndorf, who discusses it here as well. Still, maybe A Better Dystopia is a gimme for the fans. Fine. I’m a fan.
However, even as a fan, I can’t really expect you to watch all 86 minutes of this interview. It’s great if you do — Wyndorf takes modern heavy metal to task for sucking, talks politics a bit, recording that Dust track, the pandemic, the loss of Brighton Bar in Long Branch, and a ton more. It’s an awesome interview, and having spoken to him however many times over the years, I expected no less, but I know you’ve got a life to live. If you skip through, or do it not all at once, however you go, he’s a mad genius and while I don’t necessarily agree with him across the board on everything brought up here, you’ll find he’s singular in both his ability to put the entire world in its place and his drive to do so at a moment’s notice.
I hope you enjoy:
Monster Magnet, A Better Dystopia interview with Dave Wyndorf, June 25, 2021
Monster Magnet‘s A Better Dystopia is out now on Napalm Records. More info at the links.
Monster Magnet, “Learning to Die” (Dust cover) lyric video
Monster Magnet, “Motorcycle (Straight to Hell)” (Table Scraps cover) lyric video
Monster Magnet, “Mr. Destroyer” (Poobah cover) lyric video
Monster Magnet on Thee Facebooks