High On Fire mainman Matt Pike is one of metal’s leading weed enthusiasts. But in 2012, as the stoner-doom linchpins prepared to release their sixth album, De Vermis Mysteriis, he revealed that he’d just come through dealing with darker drugs
Perhaps inevitably, it was drugs that nearly ruined everything for Matt Pike. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1972, he was smoking weed by the time he was 11, dropping acid by the time he was 12 and stealing cars by the time he was 13. In fact, he got busted for grand theft auto and sent to a military academy well in time for his 15th birthday. If this was meant to sort him out and put him back on the straight and narrow, the plan backfired because this was where he met Al Cisneros, with whom he would go on to form the monumental doom/stoner metal band Sleep.
If you take one look at the rear sleeve of 1992's Sleep’s Holy Mountain, it becomes clear that the guitar prodigy was still a big fan of the herb at the age of 20. If you peer past the song titles such as Some Grass, the lyrics mentioning 'stoners' and the graphic of marijuana leaves and look at the band photo, you can just about make out – hidden behind the billowing clouds of hashish haze – a callow young Matt with dreadlocks smoking a Colorado carrot that would probably give an elephant the munchies. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what the main source of inspiration was when they delivered the follow-up to their record company in 1998: a one-track, hour-long album called Dopesmoker (eventually released posthumously as Jerusalem a year later).
Likewise when Sleep disbanded later that year and he founded High On Fire, it’s safe to say it was blazing weed and not climbing extra tall, active volcanoes that was the inspiration behind the name.
Some 14 years later, Matt is allowing himself a rare relaxation day and is slouched on a sofa in the backroom of his favourite bar, sipping on a White Russian. (“Yeah, I love The Big Lebowski – who doesn’t?”). He’s speaking to Metal Hammer about his band’s excellent sixth album, De Vermis Mysteriis, and how he poured his negative drug experiences into the writing and recording of it with bandmates Jeff Matz (bass) and Des Kensel (drums). But it wasn’t hash or LSD that were the problem - it was legal painkillers that nearly derailed him and his band.
“I had some pretty dark personal shit going on during the recording of this album,” he says. “I had a really bad painkiller problem while that was going on, and I had to kick that.”
“I had some pretty bad problems with my feet. The insides of them were in excruciating pain and the outsides just numb, so even though I hadn’t been drinking I would knock into things and not even know. Then I’d come off stage and they would be bleeding. And it’s just from being overworked, from being put on aeroplanes all the time and being stressed out. I was actually seeing quite a few doctors about it, but it’s getting better now.
“One of the main things about this condition is how painful it is. I mean, I thought it was gout at first; that is how bad it was. One of the common things about this condition is that a lot of people who have it go on to develop a painkiller habit… which is what happened to me. When I was on tour, I had to go on stage every night and I didn’t want to be in a bunch of pain when I was trying to do an hour and a half concert.
“So yeah, I just kind of got hooked on painkillers and it wasn’t anything heavy. It wasn’t like Oxycontin, I was just eating tons and tons of Norco and Vicodin. It was as hard to kick as heroin, though. It was really, really bad.”
For all those problems, there’s one habit Matt is in no hurry to get rid of. It may only be lunchtime but he’s hellaciously stoned already, even if these days his means of purchase and ingestion is more befitting of a man of his age.
“You know, I don’t smoke as much as I used to and I don’t like to smoke socially, but when me and Jeff practise we burn some weed and get down to business,” he says. “You know, weed has a great influence on riffs, so it’s a good way to step out. I’ve been more into edibles recently, so I’ll eat a piece of marijuana brownie in the morning and then just kind of stay stoned all day. With all the weed dispensaries there are now you can get some pretty good edibles.
“I’ll take a bong hit or smoke a joint here or there but for the most part I’m not as avid a smoker as I was on Holy Mountain or Jerusalem. God, Jerusalem put me over the edge.” He laughs. “We were smoking serious weed. I found out exactly how high you can get. Between the three of us we were just smoking ounces and ounces of weed every day. You smoke so much it becomes hard to get high any more.”
If anything, the supremely relaxed guitarist is keen to tell us about the health-preserving properties of Mary Jane. “With dispensaries in the States you can get a lot of different strains. There are strains for cancer patients, strains for people who can’t sleep at night, there are strains for people who don’t want to be on Prozac who still want to go about their day. I do find that marijuana has benefits in regards to things like that.”
If he’s really pissed off about his prescription drug nightmare he doesn’t show it, however. He just chalks this shit up to one of the few negative things about doing what he wants to do for his whole life – be in a great touring metal band.
“I’m about to turn 40,” he says. “I can’t complain too much; it’s just that you notice weird shit happening to you when you come back off tour. And when you’re as old as me, touring definitely takes years off your life compared to most other people. When you’ve been travelling and partying that much it can kind of kick your ass after a while.”
In fact, he ended up bending the experience to his benefit by channelling it into the writing of the new album. “When you have personal shit going on, the music acts as therapy. I took the shit I went through with painkillers and put it on the album. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. I was in a dark place but I took my anger and despair and used them constructively to form some of what I was going to sing and some of the way I was playing guitar.”
The intensity, despair and anger which inform the playing have been captured ably by producer Kurt Ballou of Converge, and the sound is a perfect match for the narrative of the album, which, in typical Matt Pike style, is a mixture of world religion, vintage occult horror fiction, arcane conspiracy theory and brain-frying fantasy.
The full story, influenced by the writing in the 30s/40s fantasy magazine Weird Tales, is as difficult to follow as a 3am episode of The Killing after five bong hits of hydroponic White Rhino, but the quick version goes a little something like this: Jesus died on the cross so that his twin brother Liao could escape Nazareth (the biblical town in the Middle East, not the large-haired Scottish rock band) by means of travelling forward in time.
Thanks to some priests who rescued occult scrolls from a war between the Vernirs and the Stygians, Liao – an alchemist – made a serum from the black lotus allowing him to travel back in time, but with one catch: he would materialise inside one of his ancestors just before they were about to die and would have to escape or die with them.
“Liao gets his hands on a serum in the future after mankind has destroyed itself through Christianity, and he travels back from the future to understand why and also to deter Jesus from the creation of his religion,” explains Matt.
If that sounds bloody complicated, wait until you hear about the baby-sacrificing witches, the American civil war and the burning of the pot plants. Matt has found a handy way of explaining the story in very simple terms, however. “It’s kind of like Quantum Leap… you know, that TV show from the 80s. So the guy just keeps on waking up in these really fucked-up situations before he gets back to his brother Jesus.”
Blasphemous much? Well, it’s a good job he doesn’t believe in all that stuff because if he did, he couldn’t be blamed for thinking that God had it in for him with some serious biblical wrath shit. When High On Fire were on tour, not only did Matt get hooked on pills but they got caught up in two separate earthquakes (followed by a tsunami), one in New Zealand and the other in Japan.
“Oh man, Christchurch was some scary shit,” he laughs. “I was looking round a church and then five minutes later it just collapsed. We had basically got to the airport and I was checking in my guitars when the thing hit. Ironically, Christchurch had already been destroyed by earthquake before, because earlier in the day we’d been walking round looking at all the damage.
“Then we went to Japan on the bullet train, and the second we disembarked the Tokyo earthquake hit, too. Tokyo was a totally different story. That was a trip. We were fortunate to get out of there when we did. And it was like, ‘Whoa, dude… two big earthquakes on one tour. Is the world going to swallow us up?’ It was pretty hairy and after that there was a lot of psychological trouble. Suddenly you come face to face with your own mortality; you’re aware your body could just go at any time. I think I had post-traumatic stress disorder for a while after that. I kept on thinking there was going to be another earthquake every five minutes. Everywhere I went…”
Collapsing churches, shell shock, painkiller dependence, tsunamis, earthquakes… it’s enough to drive you to drugs, it really is. Luckily for Matt – and for us – they’re the kind that help make High On Fire the awesome band they are.
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 231, May 2012
