The recent, tragic passing of Tim Cronin, a founding member of Monster Magnet, was a big blow to the underground music community. We all mourned him first for knowing what an amazing human being he was. Secondly, we reflected back to the very roots of this seminal band.
Thinking about the early ’90s and any other music that was also drenched in ’70s culture, led me to really one other band, The Black Crowes.
Everyone who loves rock ‘n’ roll knows that The Black Crowes released not only their best album in 1992, The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion, but simply one of the greatest albums of all time. It just came soaked with ’70s giants like The Faces, Leon Russell, The Rolling Stones, and The Allman Brothers. The band is still around and is generally regarded as one of the greatest live acts of this generation.
As someone who saw them on tour in 1992 and more than 30 years later, I can faithfully attest to the unique live magic of the band, spearheaded by the brotherly chemistry of the Robinsons.
A year prior, the album Spine Of God by Monster Magnet was lauded with similar fervour, albeit by a much smaller audience. Burned-out visions and delusions of grandeur stoked by obsessions with comic books and psychedelic culture were hardly mainstream back in the early ’90s, even with the “grunge” scene laying some favourable ground. After all, Soundgarden was the band that helped them sign to a major label.
In spite of all that, the reality was that the masses would never fully get the spaced-out, you-must-be-on-drugs-to-write-such-lyrics world of Dave Wyndorf and Monster Magnet. The band even promoted it as such.
“It’s A Satanic Drug Thing…You Wouldn’t Understand”
So while both The Black Crowes and Monster Magnet mined ’70s rock music and culture, Dave Wyndorf’s crew took more of the grittier gems like Hawkwind, MC5, Sir Lord Baltimore, and The Stooges. And, you would be hard pressed to find someone more knowledgeable and passionate about that period of music than Wyndorf, as he often folds in seeing David Bowie and Roxy Music in his teenage years.
And so in 2025, it is not even close which band became the most influential.
That would be Monster Magnet. Yes, Monster Magnet. By a landslide.
As S. Patrick Brooks, creator of The Heavy Underground Farm Report, told me in one of our many discussions, “The Black Crowes were a product and Monster Magnet became the manufacturing plant.”
Bingo!
And, that “plant” is churning out even more bands who are in unapologetic reverence for all the associated styles of the ’70s rock culture.
This is a global production. And, while I doubt we will ever get back to the size and magnitude of the rock culture of that decade, stoner rock has secured almost all the rights to that culture. Thankfully, it has not sacrificed the integrity, intensity, and zero fucks attitude that Monster Magnet ushered in 35 years ago.
It is hard for any band to be truly unique and innovative. So much of even the greatest rock music is an interpretive iteration of past styles, riffs, and attitude.
The reason why the stoner/doom scene is the biggest underground scene in the world is because of the bands that have been most influenced by the 1965 to 1975 era, where elements of blues and psychedelia roamed with feral abandon. They have such a deep reservoir of greatness to dive into.
Sleep was unique for reawakening the Sabbath doom.
Kyuss was unique for helping create the “desert” sound, being as big, thick, and trippy as possible.
Fu Manchu was unique in bringing elements of cruising and ’70s van culture to their fuzz.
But no band better ascribed themselves to the vibe and attitude of the ’70s better than Monster Magnet. For one, and this is going to be a hot take if there ever was one, Dave Wyndorf is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist ever.
Even song titles give away sci-fi, acid trip adventures that await in more psychedelic colour.
Zodiac Lung, Spine of God, Dinosaur Vacuum, Cyclops Revolution, Cage Around The Sun, Dopes To Infinity, and King of Mars gave early indication of such delicious distortion of the mind.
Who the hell writes sex lyrics like this?
“I was born underwater, I dried out in the sun, I started humping volcano’s baby when I was too young” – Crop Circle(1998)
And layer those lyrics over some Stoogesque aggression, and you have 1970 colliding with 1992’s Ralph Bakshi-directed Cool World.
My favourite song by Monster Magnet is Dopes To Infinity, and, believe it or not, it has one of the most spiritually romantic lyrics in my opinion.
“I can tell by the moon in your eyes that you’re loved by the tribe, you’re the right one, baby”
And, while most people would not associate “love songs” with the band, even those who are diehard fans, Wyndorf not only can pen them but sing them with candour, pain, and perspective that flows through the same imaginative resources as all the songs he writes.
In this performance of Zodiac Lung, you would think he is performing to maybe a dozen people at night in a dingy New Jersey bar. The intimacy of performance transcends time of day and size of crowd. Wyndorf has the aura to command, control, and consume his audience. The lyrics and the framing of them are wholly unique in rock ‘n’ roll.
I have watched that video more than a dozen times. It still guts me the same way. I guess I am attracted to Wyndorf’s personality, where he came from, and the constant reflection of all the wisdom Bowie imparted on him and the world for that matter.
But, as Wyndorf lamented years ago, we are no longer in the Age of Bowie. And, with Bowie now having been gone for almost 10 years, it is even more important now to honour bands like Monster Magnet, who not only flew the Bowie flag, but brought us the unsanitised era from which he rose to prominence.
In the song Stay Tuned the death of cool could easily refer to foreshadowing Bowie’s death and losing so much of what he symbolised in rock music.
“Well there’s a crazy moon, been up all week
And it’s messing with the things that I think and do
And I find myself staring at a screen
Wondering how far we’ve come since the death of cool
There ain’t no targets to aim for
No more mountains to climb
At least they’re not where they used to be
Why even keep it hard in a flat-lined world
Where every piece of dung is the next big thing
What’s gonna happen now?
Will the good guys pull through somehow?” – Stay Tuned(2013)
Their eleventh studio album, A Better Dystopia, is a cover album of mostly ’60s and ’70s garage/psychedelia. While most bands would probably not release a cover album this late in the game, to me, it feels poetic, a kind of full circle for Monster Magnet.
Their cover of Hawkwind’s Born to Go is not simple nostalgia. It’s powering up the psychedelic classic for a new generation of slackers, gearheads, and societal misfits.
Except this group of outcasts, I am proudly one of them, has ended up being involved in and supporting the coolest and most globally relevant underground music scene in history. And, without hesitation, the band that deserves top billing for writing and performing with the most exemplars of ’70s rock culture is Monster Magnet.
It’s The Stooges and Hawkwind having a love child decades later. And that child grew up to influence a global music scene that the same globe has no idea who Monster Magnet is. For me, that seems like the perfect story.
Impact without idolatry. Connection with compromise. Grit and grease without glamour and gold.
They made it. And, they didn’t.
And as such, they need to be hailed as the most important band in communicating the culture, subcultures, and marginalised stories of ’70s rock and roll.
Long live Monster Magnet!
