It seems fitting that when I meet Matt Pike, singer, guitarist and leader of lauded Bay Area doom metallers High On Fire and uncrowned king of stoner rock, he is wreathed in smoke. "I'll be with you in a minute," he bellows from a fire escape, waving a Marlboro. "Some security dude was just hassling me for being out here ... Little fuckin' fat-ass soccer hooligan. I'll whup his ass and stomp it into the ground."
Pike is not a man to mess with. At 15, he was shipped off to military school, following a spell in juvenile hall. "I used to steal cars," he grins over a beer and a shot a little later, an hour or so before High On Fire headline a sold-out show at London's ULU. "I knew that, as a young kid, they couldn't punish me too bad. So I took the rap for a bunch of dudes who would've gone to prison for years, kept my mouth shut and went off to the detention centre."
He had discovered heavy metal a few years earlier, thanks to the corrupting influence of a couple of babysitters: "These dirty little rock girls who would take great pleasure in depantsing me ... They turned me on to AC/DC, Zeppelin and Sabbath when I was nine years old. They turned me on to sex, too. I soon got myself a guitar." Pike says he didn't get good at guitar until he discovered drugs, a couple of years later. "Smoking endless amounts of weed and taking LSD really helped my guitar-playing," he testifies. "And speed ... I'd be so freaked out, I'd need to put my tweaking fingers to good use. I played guitar, or else I'd be endlessly cleaning my apartment."
After military school, he moved with his mother to San Jose where he hooked up with Asbestos Death, a metal group whose fearsome dedication matched his own. Developing a gloriously doomy sound from the template of their beloved Black Sabbath, they soon renamed themselves Sleep. Following some acclaimed early indie albums, they signed to London Records in 1994; however, their sole recording for the label would remain unreleased for years. An unbroken 64-minute epic of slow, marijuana-sodden riffage, Dopesmoker was a masterpiece that stumped a label looking for a radio hit.
"We were stubborn, man," he reflects. "Our contemporaries, like Soundgarden, were recording their 'radio hits', but we refused to. Out of integrity. It was a ballsy move, but it destroyed the band. It also made us legends."
The frustrations surrounding the album's rejection led to a rift between Pike and vocalist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, which would only be healed with Dopesmoker's belated release in 2003. Cisneros and Hakius later formed their own acclaimed experimental metal group, OM, but Pike focused his energies on his new venture, High On Fire. "For a long time, I was resentful," he admits. "I thought, you guys can lay down and die, there's no way I'm doing that. Sleep was about spirituality; High On Fire is more aggressive. It's about getting demons out."
Over four albums, High On Fire's ferocious exorcisms have won Pike more critical kudos and loyal cult fandom, even if mainstream acceptance eludes him. He seems sanguine, however, even when his friends and contemporaries Mastodon win major-label contracts and a worldwide audience for a sound he helped pioneer, while he remains playing the clubs. "I love those guys like brothers," he says. "Things happen the way they're supposed to happen."
Now 35, possessed of the same ageless grizzle as Motörhead's Lemmy, Pike harbours a retirement dream of opening his own bar in Costa Rica. "You can fuck as many women as you like and take as many drugs as you like, but one day you have to hang it up, because there's young kids out there ready to outplay you tenfold," he smiles, knowing deep down he'll never stop. "I can totally see myself still playing at 70, like Roky Erickson, who we played with recently. I guess he's still crazy - he loves High On Fire."
· Death Is This Communion by High On Fire is out now on Relapse