Move That Dope

Here is the story of that album's tumultuous creation, from the man who helped record it, prolific Portland producer Billy Anderson:

I didn't really meet them until the day they showed up to record that first Volume One record. Al [Cisneros, singer-bassist] rolls out of the van and he's fully sleeved at 18 with, like, Jesus tattoos and all this weird tribal shit. Instantly, he's got a briefcase and he gets out a picture of [Black Sabbath guitarist] Tony Iommi and carefully pastes it to the wall with tape. And then Justin [Marler], their old guitar player, came out of the van eating a fucking head of lettuce, just like an apple. That was my introduction to those guys. And I'm like, "These guys are all right in my book."

I think when they got back from touring with Cathedral in Europe they were talking about this new thing they were writing. It was not too long after Holy Mountain.  Al, in his cryptic language, would be all, "Dude, this new thing—flight, weed, 12th." Basically that song is an homage to the 12th fret of the guitar.

They had names for the riffs, like "Blackened," "Reversed Flight," "Hotel Room." We'd get a version of it, we'd cross it off a dry erase board, and then I'd be like, "Maybe we should try an alternate version of that section," with a different feel or whatever. We would go to my house and play with different ways to arrange. We had at least 10 reels of 2-inch tape. Some of those reels had 10 or 15 edits in them. But then, they're only 17 minutes long. So we didn't actually hear it as an entire song until well after it was mixed. It was like going to math class.

And then all of a sudden they were on Earache. They were young and dumb, and they signed a really stupid contract. This contract ended up not allowing them to do anything for anybody else. They owed them like five records. And Digby [Pearson], the owner of Earache, wouldn't let them out of their contract. Either they had to break up, or they had to fulfill their contract, or whoever wanted to buy the contract. In the interim, they had written this Dopesmoker thing. They were determined to have it come out. They wouldn't even play it live because they were afraid bands would steal it. And so the only way they could do that was to sign to a big label. This guy, Ken Friedman, he was their champion. He was super into the music and he started working for London Records. And he's like, "Man, I could get you guys out of that contract, because London will listen to me." Well, what happened is, Ken Friedman got fired and London got bought by Slash. And so Slash just went in and literally slashed everybody that had been working there. Everybody that had been working that Sleep record got canned. So the new people, the Slash/London people didn't know who Sleep even was. We're like, "Here's this awesome record," and the first thing we heard back was, “It’s too heavy and it’s too long.” 

They sent this new guy who was some kind of rave kid. He flew out from New York to go to the mixing sessions in San Francisco. He didn't understand the music. While he was there, Al smoked so much weed in the control room that it set off the fire alarms in the building. And this kid, he was probably like 23 years old. He didn't know anything about heavy music; sitting there with this look on his face, like, "What the fuck am I supposed to tell my boss?"

It got shelved for a couple months, and then London was like, "We want Dave Sardy to remix it." He was the label's go-to boy. I was like, "I'll do what you guys want, but I have to be there." I had to sit behind this guy mixing this thing that I'd worked on for like a year. He was a total dick. I hated the whole thing because I couldn't touch the board or anything. It was hell.

That's what came out as Jerusalem [an edited version of Dopesmoker released in 1999]. Al got all religious. By the end of the recording of the Dopesmoker thing, we would finish recording for the day, and they would sit around a candle and [Al] would read passages from the Bible. It went from this anthem about smoking weed to this anthem about caravans of Jesus people going across the desert. The lyrics changed from like a weed song to this religious thing about "Hashishians." In fact, Al was still writing a lot of the lyrics as he was singing them. He'd be like, three days later, "Dude, I wanna punch in this one word. Instead of something, I want it to say 'Golgotha.'" It was really important to him to have these words convey this certain thing which I still don't even know. Somehow, Jesus was a pothead, I guess.

That whole experience in New York broke them up. They came back and decided not to be a band anymore, which got them out of all their contracts. The first mix that we did together was the definitive version. Jerusalem, to me, is not a version at all. And these new ones, they took the mastered version and just mastered it again. Nobody has those [original] tapes but me. I'm the only one who has the unmastered shit. They're in a box under that table in my studio.

Charting Dopesmoker

[0:00-8:30] Stoner metal's Lawrence of Arabia begins as a tiny riff on the horizon that gradually reveals itself as weed-worshipping ogres trudging across the desert.

[41:00-43:00] Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.

[48:30-63:36] …and you're totally at peace with that.

SEE IT: Sleep plays Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., with Nothing and Black Pussy, as part of the Sabertooth Micro Fest, on Friday, Feb. 6. 8 pm. $30 advance, $35 day of show, $75 for three-day festival pass. All ages. See other Sabertooth shows in music listings.

WWeek 2015