The Back Room, October 20
After seven years of being grossly underheard, Monster Magnet’s fortune
literally changed in minutes – the time it took songwriter/frontman Dave
Wyndorf to pen “Negasonic Teenage Warhead,” last spring’s alternative-radio
hit. Wyndorf says he wrote the song as a throwaway anthem for the soundtrack to
the theatre disaster SFW. “I wrote this song really quickly off the top
of my head. It’s simply three basic chords and I just went into my brain and
associated everything I’d just been through; a big gypsy carnival and caravan
drug hayride of touring and going nuts.”
The continuing hayride to support their recent Dopes to
Infinity, on which “Negasonic” reappears, has brought Monster Magnet to
Austin twice already this year. So with another Magnet show impending at the
Back Room, it’s only appropriate Wyndorf gets to blow through an interview in
Negasonic-fashion: extended word association.
SXSW ’95: “Too many bands, too little time.”
Touring: “Good and bad, together at the same time.”
Drugs: “So what?”
MTV: “So what?”
Hippies: “Useless.”
“Tales of Brave Ulysses” by Cream (and its similarity to
“Negasonic…”): “Not intentional. It’s a swipe off of one of a million
garage records I listened to. If I’m going to steal from a Sixties band, it
ain’t going to be Cream. I was listening to the Electric Prunes at the time and
thought it sounded like that, until somebody told me it was Cream. But I found
out about it after it was too late. I then thought, `There’s a reason the song
came together so quick: It’s someone else’s song.’ Oops. But I think it makes
the eight-bar rule – if you go longer than eight bars you’re swiping and I went
under. I’m legal.”
“Negasonic’s” influence on Wyndorf’s songwriting: “Ironic. The rest of the
stuff I’m like off in the fifth dimension traveling to Jupiter and that shit
doesn’t sell, but this three-minute exercise of pissed-offness does. It’s made
me think a lot about songwriting, that’s for sure.”
Austin: “A place I love. Like no other place in the United States. Texas has
attitude and Austin, specifically, has attitude.”
“It’s a Satanic Drug Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand” (Caroline-era
Monster Magnet motto): “They still don’t understand, but some people do. And
Satan’s a pussy that let me down like two or three years ago, so fuck him.
God’s Found Dead in Outer Space!”
– Andy Langer
This article appears in October 20 • 1995 and October 20 • 1995 (Cover).