A Recommendation A Week (A-RAW) #3
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture
Frank Zappa
Drop out of life with a bong in hand
Follow the smoke to the riff-filled land
With these iconic opening lines of lyrics, 8 mins in, Sleep embark on a most audacious and ambitious journey. Clocking at just over an hour, 63 mins 29 secs to be exact, Dopesmoker is entirely one song telling a story of a “smoke-covenant” caravan of “weed-priests” on an epic pilgrimage to Nazareth over a sun-scorched “deep sandscape”, carrying “herb bails” of “hemp seed”, and assembling for a “prayer-filled smoke”. If you get a feeling that this is just a highfalutin description of “some stoned guys walking around smoking lots of weed”, it’s only because it is.
As crazy as the lyrics are, the story of recording the album is even crazier. The band had already released two albums that were received very well in the filthy backwash of early ‘90s Seattle grunge, and felt they had earned the right to full creative control from the major labels who would leave the music alone. So, they got a hefty advance from their label, London Records, and proceeded to burn most of it on pot. As their perennially shirtless guitarist Matt Pike said of the time, “I don’t know if you’ve ever smoked out of a coconut chalice with a hose, but dude, it’s the highest you can possibly get. You forget your name, your address, you talk to the dog and the dog talks back.”
In this state of non-return, the band locked themselves in a studio, filled with custom-built amps so loud no human could be inside the room with them, and went forth to record live an hour long magus dopus that they had been till then testing out on live gigs for over 4 years. The result is one the heaviest and demanding pieces of music ever to exist. This album is not for casual listening. Pike’s gargantuan world-sized, lugubrious, lumbering riffs wash over wave after aural wave, following almost every individual syllable uttered by the bassist-vocalist Al Cisneros, bludgeoning the listener to meek submission, that, though might be overwhelming and disconcerting to the uninitiated, resembles a spiritual catharsis that a pious experiences after a punishing ritual. While this sort of sludgy, whole body massage music is not for everyone, even for the most staunch, Dopesmoker’s true rewards only unlock after paying multiple homage to it on repeated exposure. The label that footed the bill never released the album, as it caused a lot of consternation for the suits worried about sales projections and genuine technical troubles due to its sheer length. The band themselves split up soon after to form two more accomplished bands, High on Fire and OM. Dopesmoker finally got its due when it was released in 2012, along with its now iconic artwork.