Brutal Legend: A History of High on Fire

[Editor's Note: Being a respectable, upstanding music service, Rhapsody's editorial policy prohibits the use of colloquialisms having to do with drugs, drug use, drug experiences, etc. We have therefore lightly censored the following, attempting to keep the general thrust of opinions and events intact. We trust you understand.]

While he's known today as the frontman for critical and popular metal heroes High on Fire, guitar god Matt Pike first gained recognition in the mid-'90s as a member of seminal stoner metal trio Sleep. The definitive Sabbath-obsessed [marijuana enthusiasts] not only perfected the trudging, psychedelic super metal of the stoner-rock "movement" they predated (Kyuss, Fu Manchu, etc), they coined the term "stoner rock" itself in an interview. And Sleep's Holy Mountain certainly defines the aesthetic, from the previously unheard-of levels of Iommi-ness in the album's beginning seconds (stoner-metal classic hit "Dragonaut") to the [confusing to parents] graffiti-art starburst cover art and accompanying photo of the band members obscured by a giant cloud of [some variety of] smoke on the back.

The legends surrounding Sleep are many. There are three really good ones: first, the band started out as a quartet comprised of Pike, bassist/songwriter Al Cisneros, drummer Chris Haikus, and one Justin Marler handling second guitar duties. After recording their first album, Volume I, Marler quit the band to go become a monk. Metal guitar player turns monk? This is weird.

Secondly, people still refer to these custom-made enormous green tube amps Sleep played through back in the day. To explain, there's this company that makes amps called Orange, 'cause the amps are orange, but Sleep's amps were "green" — get it? Classic! No word on whether they played 420 guitars.

Now the last great legend involves the band getting signed to a major label and then promptly getting kicked off said label when they submitted a 68-minute, nearly instrumental track of unspeakable heaviness as their first single and refused to budge when the label was like, "Uh, you can't do this." As the story goes, during the early '90s, when Fu Manchu's logo rock was selling lots of units to hipsters, the people at London Records decided to sign Sleep, in the hopes of cashing in on the stoner-rock wave. When asked for a single, Cisneros, Pike and Haikus delivered "Dopesmoker," an hour-plus epic that featured such endlessly brilliant lyrics as "Bong in hand/ Drop out of life/ Follow the smoke/ To the riff-filled land" and related the tale of a people called "The Weedian" and their journey to Nazareth in a space caravan to find the "Smoke Covenant," or maybe just to score. Anyway, this is so far beyond even the peyote visions of Kyuss, one can only marvel at Sleep's utter coolness, whether you smoke pot or not. [OK, that was tough. We weren't sure what to do with that. Please just don't do anything stupid and then tell your parents we put you onto it. Seriously.] Unfortunately, the legal imbroglio that ensued eventually torpedoed the band, and Cisneros, Pike and Haikus all fell silent for a few years.

In 1998, however, Pike formed High on Fire in Oakland, Calif., and in 2000 delivered a debut album, The Art of Self Defense, that — thanks largely to the one-two punch of opening songs "Baghdad" and "10,000 Years" — more than lived up to the almost-incalculable expectations that arose the minute people heard "the guitarist from Sleep has a new band!" From there, High on Fire has steadily remained the de facto leaders of the new era of stoner metal, playing a version of the genre that is stripped down, faster paced and flat-out meaner in all respects than nearly anyone else's in these salad days of extreme metal.