When MONSTER MAGNET go on tour this coming November, the band will perform their 1991 debut album “Spine of God” in its entirety.
Mainman Dave Wyndorf comments:
Spine was our first full length album and a big learning experience for us. What I recall most, though was the subject matter. I was a teenager in the early ’70s and my experiences and impressions of that time had stayed strong within me well into my mid-twenties. Like anyone, I would tell stories of my childhood days to new friends and acquaintances, but for some reason I could never really relate the almost mystical effect those days had on my adolescent mind.
To me, the late ’60s/early ’70s were colorful, sexy, scary and WEIRD… but like, cool-weird, y’know? Biker movies, Acid Rock, Jim Steranko comics, the first Black Sabbath albums, The Stooges, Hawkwind, black light posters, full frontal nudity, dope culture, muscle cars, the Manson murder trial, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, the Vietnam war and much, much more.
I had some pretty strange adventures back then… hung out with some pretty strange characters as well. ’60s Flower Power was dying, giving way to a hard-bitten, burned out new age. Yeah, the psychedelic imagery was still there… better than ever in fact. The drugs were there, too…MORE than ever, in fact. But the bottom line had changed…There was no political agenda with the New Jersey dirt bag-freak crowd I hung out with…no ‘peace and love.’ The whole point of the early ’70s (it seemed to us) was to get as stoned as possible and blow our minds by any means necessary. And that’s what we did.
And I’m damned lucky to have kept my brain.
In the late ’80s, I began to write songs about my crazy teen-hood..it seemed to be the only way I could even adequately attempt to describe it… and when I joined Monster Magnet, those songs became the foundation of the album, Spine of God. It’s a distorted memoir of a time I thought would last forever but in reality was over before I could even understand it.
Played in its entirety, Spine is a noisy affair..fuzz boxes set on maximum, echo machines and phaze shifters morphing that distortion and carrying the stories of earth bound, Jersey burn-out culture into another dimension altogether. And, hey..if you listen close enough I swear you’ll feel the paranoid shivers of that bad acid kicking in.
This is going to be FUN, motherfuckers… Bring your earplugs!
