Matt Pike is a true original whose legendary status in heavy music has been forged through with pain and success in equal measure. But last year seemed to be a particularly big breakthrough year for Pike, as his long-running band High on Fire won a Grammy for “Best Metal Performance” for their punishingly great song, “Electric Messiah.” On top of that, his mythic San Jose doom metal band Sleep finally released their long-awaited fourth album “The Sciences,” which was released 15 years after their hour-long one track opus, “Dopesmoker.” Critics and fans were blown away by the release, and it was safe to say that, after the success of both of these records, 2018 was the best year in Pike’s long and storied career. That was until it all went wrong.
Just as High on Fire was about to head out on a killer co-headlining tour with Municipal Waste, the band announced that they would need to cancel due to Pike’s health issues surrounding his struggles with diabetes. In a release, he explained that he had to undergo surgery on his foot that resulted in a partial amputation of one of his toes and for fear of losing another, he had to stay off the road to pay close attention to his health. Since the cancellation of the tour, Pike has been doing much better and is hitting the road with High on Fire alongside the young thrash greats Power Trip for one of the best heavy tours you will likely see this winter.
“We have a new breath of life in our band. We’re feeling really good about it. It’s been so long. We’ve been held back from being able to tour due to my medical bullsh-t,” says Pike as I catch him on the phone before the tour’s stop in Tampa, Florida. “I’ve been doing great. I don’t even take anything for diabetes. I just changed it with diet. I don’t drink anymore or anything like that. I’m just hanging in there with keeping carbs low and keeping sugar out of my diet… There are worse diets (laughs).”
But as Pike is seeing the well-earned recognition after years of working his fingers to the bone, he can only laugh to himself when unfortunate things like this present themselves to rain on his parade.
“For every accomplishment like that, I’ve had a lot of really good luck or really bad luck. There wasn’t anything in between. I’ve been like that my whole life. I have a very bipolar personality. I’m not a mental health type, all the time. ‘Bipolar, what?,’ that’s what I mean by it. It’s either one end of the spectrum or the other, there is no inbetween. I never have a f-cking normal day. I have days where it’s like, ‘what the f-ck?’ It’s either so good or so bad. I’ve come to get used to it. It’s cool.”
Some days, these frustrations can be too much to bear and Pike looks for ways to blow off steam to even himself out. On the day I spoke with him, firing off some automatic weapons at a gun-range had done the trick.
“I find gun ranges on tour, at home I do them way more,” says Pike, regarding one of his favorite hobbies. “I go up in the mountains. I have my little bug-out spots where your phone doesn’t work anyway so I just shut my phone off and go up there with some bros. I have a lot of friends who are vets, sh-t like that. It helps them with their PTSD and it helps me with my anger management problems. We go up there and blow some cans away. We get to hang out in the forest. We do this sh-t in like a quarry or places where we clean up after ourselves where we can get in and get out and be really respectful.”
On the title track to “Electric Messiah,” Pike paid his respects to one of his biggest musical heroes and influences on High on Fire, Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead. “All give praise as the ace hits the stage,” Pike shouts in his impenetrable blizzard of a voice, adding, “He’s playing bass & he’s melting your face.”
“They were just so f-cking cool and almost acceptable but totally f-cking punk rock, still,” Pike says of his admiration of the band. “It’s not like they blew up huge, they had to work their way up. Motörhead fans will always be Motörhead fans for the rest of their lives. They don’t forget about Motörhead, you know? That’s a thing that has earned its timelessness instead of it being the flavor of the week. Motörhead is not a flavor of the week. They’re legends. It’s timeless. That doesn’t go away.”
In many ways, Pike’s artistic trajectory is mimicking Lemmy’s in that he has never compromised in producing the music that he has wanted to make. If people don’t get it at first, they’ll come around. He has time to wait.
“First and foremost,” says Pike, “I make it for myself. But I also make it picturing it from standing in a crowd, what I’d want to hear. How the notes are conveyed off of a stage while you’re staring at it. So there’s a lot of emphasis on writing and [picturing] what it’s going to be like live.”
When I ask him if seeing other musicians compromise with their art upsets him in any way, he explains that it only helps him to understand that he is on the right track.
“It doesn’t [bother me] because it makes me and the people I work with a little more special,” Pike explains. “It makes us much more careful and caring about our art. If other people do it the other way, that’s good that they do it that way because it makes what we do all the harder and more cherishable.”
Even though it was recently announced that Sleep will be going on an “indefinite hiatus” from recording and touring, Pike is happier than ever to be out on the road with High on Fire.
“High on Fire is so fun right now,” says Pike with a sense of relief in his voice. “It’s like we hit the reset button and things are going really well and we all feel really great. We’re all really hungry again and are having a great time playing. I haven’t felt like this in a long time. Sometimes when you do something long enough, it begins to feel like a career. It’s not as fun and we’re having a lot of fun and that’s a major part of it. You bring a certain amount of energy and people notice, who are sitting there staring at you. They’re like, ‘Holy sh-t, what happened to that band? They’re happy!’”
Make sure to catch High on Fire with Power Trip, Devil Master and Creeping Death at Elsewhere on Nov. 21 and 22. 599 Johnson Ave., Brooklyn.
