Sleep returns in a cloud of heavy smoke
Guitarist Matt Pike can laugh about it now. In the ‘90s, his band Sleep made “Dopesmoker,” an album so radical that it got the trio kicked off their record label, led to their break-up, and yet ended up becoming one of the most acclaimed metal releases of the last two decades.
“We made a record that people didn’t get to hear until years later, after we broke up,” says Pike, who has spent the last decade fronting the power trio High on Fire. “We had a bigger following than ever, and no band! It’s like, where was everybody when we were actually touring?”
That situation is being rectified with a reunion of Pike and original Sleep bassist-singer-lyricist Al Cisneros, plus Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder, to perform a handful of shows devoted to the California trio’s influential ‘90s albums, particularly the 1993 “Holy Mountain,” the career-ending “Dopesmoker,” and its shorter but equally daunting companion piece, “Jerusalem.”
“We made a record that people didn’t get to hear until years later, after we broke up,” says Pike, who has spent the last decade fronting the power trio High on Fire. “We had a bigger following than ever, and no band! It’s like, where was everybody when we were actually touring?”
That situation is being rectified with a reunion of Pike and original Sleep bassist-singer-lyricist Al Cisneros, plus Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder, to perform a handful of shows devoted to the California trio’s influential ‘90s albums, particularly the 1993 “Holy Mountain,” the career-ending “Dopesmoker,” and its shorter but equally daunting companion piece, “Jerusalem.”
Pike and his Sleep bandmates spent the better part of three years trying to create their masterpiece on “Dopesmoker”; the idea was to write and record a 72-minute song for guitar, bass, drums and voice about a colony of zealous, pot-smoking prophets. It’s comically over the top and deadly serious all at once.
The band journeyed to that smoke-filled destination throughout most of the ‘90s, establishing a sound that owed more to the bluesier, spacier brand of metal that came out in the early ‘70s than it did to the trendier brands of hard rock and metal of the time.
“We met in high school and we hung out together, mainly because no one else liked the same kinds of music we did,” Pike says. “I grew up on ‘70s metal from my dad’s collection, then really got into punk: Bad Brains, Black Flag, Circle Jerks. We also appreciated the whole ‘(expletive) you!’ attitude of bands like the Melvins, who didn’t care about fitting in. The style we were doing, we were very aware of what was happening around us and how our worshiping of (Black Sabbath’s) Tony Iommi was completely at odds with people doing grunge, rap-rock and whatever else was popular at the time.”
Eventually, the sound forged by Sleep and a handful of other bands (Kyuss, Monster Magnet) was dubbed “stoner rock” and the major labels came sniffing around, sensing a trend that could be exploited.
“We signed to London (Records), but were very upfront about what we wanted to do (for Sleep’s third full-length album),” Pike says. “We said, ‘We’re going to write a one-hour song.’ I think they thought we were going to do 10 songs connected by little jams in between. But we were thinking more in terms of Beethoven’s Ninth.”
The epic arrangement was written out on four whiteboards hanging on the studio wall until the band could play it straight through from memory. “We refined and refined, at one point had the album done and decided it wasn’t good enough and went back and started over,” Pike says. The music and lyrics were heavily influenced by the band’s daily activities, which the guitarist says were more akin to a “ritual” or “religious ceremony.”
“It was like our church, to write and record that album,” Pike says. “We’d get up at 10 in the morning, drink coffee and smoke copious amounts of pot all day. This was not a casual thing. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but it gave us a different angle on things, on how to approach our music, our arrangements, the lyrics. We were coming out of punk rock and Sabbath, but we got more into fantasy and metaphors and religion in the lyrics. Al was writing lyrics full of biblical references. There is nothing more ‘doom metal’ than the Old Testament and (The Book of) Revelation, the lyrical and spiritual connection to a higher power. I would write riffs that I thought would fit in, more along the lines of (Pink Floyd’s) David Gilmour where I would bend notes and make them linger, rather than the faster style with more arpeggios that I would use in High on Fire.”
Baked or not, “Dopesmoker” is a metal landmark. But London Records didn’t hear it that way. The label asked the band to try again, and Sleep went back and supplied a shorter version, the 52-minute “Jerusalem.” This time, London simply let the band go, claiming there was no way to edit the album into a track suitable for radio airplay.
“Trying to make a radio record out of ‘Jerusalem’ is nuts,” Pike says. “One of the riffs is as long as an entire song on the radio. It was the most physically and mentally taxing thing we’d ever done, and I think we all just broke down when it was over.”
The band dissolved, with each of the original members going on to make more music: Pike in High on Fire, Cisneros in Om and Shrinebuilder, and drummer Chris Hakius in Om and the Sabians. Both “Dopesmoker” and “Jerusalem” were posthumously released to acclaim, and the trio reunited in 2009 to play a concert. The Sleep tour this year with Pike, Cisneros and Roeder (replacing Hakius, who has dropped out of live performing) brings the band to Chicago on Thursday and a handful of other cities.
“We never got a chance to perform ‘Dopesmoker,’ so it’s a bit of unfinished business to play these concerts,” Pike says. “It’s hard to say if this will be the last time we do tour (as Sleep), but there are no plans to do anything else. I’m not sure we could top that album anyway.”
greg@gregkot.com
Sleep: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 9 at Logan Square Auditorium, 2539 N. Kedzie, $25 (advance) and $30 (door); ticketweb.com.
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