Monster Magnet - Look To Your Orb For The Warning

It was 1995. Grunge was wearing woefully thin and nu-metal was lurking just around the corner. Someone needed to blast a hole through this wall of mumbling self-pity and sexless whining, preferably using a giant raygun full of drugs, naked women and mind-bending space rock anthems. So, who you gonna call?

“I’ll never forget it,” he recalls today. “It was like, ‘Alright, I wanna do everything on "Dopes To Infinity" that I didn’t do on "Superjudge". "Superjudge" was a really annoying- sounding record with a lot of mid-range stuff. On "Dopes To Infinity" I wanted to make a kind of smooth, ethereal kind of rock record. I wanted the whole thing to have that really consistent sound. I want to be able to put on this record and be instantly transported to the land of "Dopes To Infinity" and I’ll never wanna leave that land! I didn’t want it to sound like a random collection of songs. I really wanted to make something that was completely different from everything else out there.”

“The record became a total mission for me,” he admits. “It didn’t take that long but it seemed like it took forever because I was always making shit up as it went along. I’d go back to the hotel room and draw diagrams and crazy stuff. It was right at the dawn of digital sampling and all the samples sounded like shit and I wanted real instruments, so I was renting real Mellotrons, and they’re a huge pain in the ass. They’re huge instruments and they have to be tuned constantly. Everything was a tuning nightmare. I was tuning the drums with a guitar tuner! Ha ha ha ha! It was nuts. It was a real weird experience for the guys I was working with too. They’d never done anything like that before. We were working from four o’clock in the afternoon until eight in the morning and the poor engineers had just about had it, like, ‘What do you want now, Dave?’”

“I remember the record company saying, ‘Would you please try and make it sound at least like something people might recognise?’” says Dave. “I think the guy was just trying to tell me in his own way that I could do myself a lot of favours if I could just buckle down and write at least one song for the masses. I kinda did it with "Negasonic Teenage Warhead". I guess that was my answer to him. It’s not hard, you know? NIRVANA songs just sounded like BOSTON to me, like "More Than A Feeling". So I took one of those riffs and wrote the whole thing in half an hour.”

“It was shit! A total disaster! Fucking horrible! Ha ha!” he roars. “But seriously, it was somewhat close to what I wanted, but when it was over I kinda thought I’d gone a bit too far. It’s such a world of its own that it doesn’t have much dynamics inside of it. It’s not emotional enough. That’s where Powertrip came from. It had to be more emotional and I had to separate myself from being a producer and a singer. That’s the one problem I have with "Dopes To Infinity", that I was a producer first and a singer second. Live and learn, man. It’s still a fuckin’ cool record.” This feature was originally published in Classic Rock issue 94, in May 2006.

Today's tune "Look To Your Orb For the Warning" by the New Jersy rock band MONSTER MAGNET, the video is filmed (Live in Düsseldorf, Germany - 16th April 1995) the tune is taken from the third album "Dopes to Infinity". It was released on March 21, 1995. The tune "Look To Your Orb For the Warning" is a real favorite from the album, chugging riffs in midtempo which progresses slowly like a bulldozer thru everything on its way. Enjoy!



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