I was working at WXJM as the Metal Director. An album comes in from the band “Monster Magnet” called “Spine of God”. The CD sleeve was rather sparse but had one standout line printed within: “It’s a Satanic drug thing, you wouldn’t understand.”  And thus describes Monster Magnet’s music and how they helped to bring the so-called genre of “stoner rock” to the masses.

Monster Magnet takes a nostalgic drug-fueled journey back to the 70’s. Overdriven fuzz-box guitars, psychedelia, and lyrical content that I guess would make a lot more sense if you took drugs by the truckload but yet still had an amazing poeticness even to the sober. Dave Wyndorf is the mainman and visionary force behind Monster Magnet, and over the years of his drug consumption, sexual overindulgence, and music writing, you can see how his life experiences become reflected in the trippy space rock outlet that is Monster Magnet.

Lyrical gems include: “Life is good, a rocket-sled utopia, a self-imposed myopia, you gotta love this pace. Life is fast, a million winners everyday; you tell me is this work or play? I’m never really sure.”.  “Some people go to bed with Lucifer, then cry when they don’t great the day with God.”.  “You’ll never find your pleasure if you worry about your pain.”  and my favorite: “I’m suckin’ up more karma than I need, so have a supernova on me.” That last line comes from the song “Facedown” from the album “Superjudge”, which is my favorite album from Monster Magnet.

When the record company was pushing “Spine of God” they offered me a chance to do a phone interview with Dave. I took up the offer and they gave me his home phone number and said to call him at this time on this date. I grabbed the nearest piece of scrap paper and scribbled down his phone number and the information. When it came time to do the interview, I called Dave and we spoke on the air for about 5 minutes. I spun some tracks off the album, and proceeded to continue to speak with Dave off-air… for about an hour. It was years ago and I don’t recall all that we spoke of, but I just remember at the time he was very cool and down to earth… he was talking with a complete stranger for an hour, so there had to be some level of friendly there. The other weekend when was I was overhauling my closet, I came across some of my mementos from my radio daze… one of which was that scrap of paper with Dave’s number on it. While lots of things got thrown out, I kept that scrap of paper.