Dylan’s Carlson is doing a run of performances to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his album Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Edition– among the greatest achievements in droning doom metal and maybe even doom metal more broadly. In my own opinion it’s honestly a straight-up landmark in the history recorded sound. But it’s also a record that I think gets misunderstood and improperly contextualized because people don’t want to fixate on Earth’s extremely bad vibes
I was fortunate enough to see Carlson debut this anniversary performance in Austin over the summer. When he announced it on Instagram one fan responded “the last time i saw you play in Austin, it was in 1992 and you dozed off during one of the tracks from Earth 2. standing up.” Carlson had a pretty major opioid problem in the 90s and it’s a miracle he’s alive, let alone still playing music.
At this point his career is wildly impressive in its longevity and consistently high quality but there was a time when he could have been more well known as Kurt Cobain’s heroin buddy, an enabler, and ultimately the guy who gave Kurt the shotgun he used to kill himself. Charles Cross’s Cobain biography “Heavier than Heaven” paints a pretty depressing picture.
Nowadays doom metal is pretty tightly associated with cannabis, and cannabis in turn has been pretty thoroughly sanitized as part of a healthy lifestyle. But Earth isn’t really weed music. It’s heroin music.
This became clear to me sitting in the Central Presbyterian Church of Austin watching Carlson and his collaborators nod their way through a loose and seemingly improvisatory rendition of Earth 2. Rather than watching or listening to a metronome or any other kind of time keeping device, everyone on stage watched Carlson swaying and tried to roughly match the point in his downward nodding at which he would actually change chords. The overall effect to me was reminiscent of watching an opioid user nod off, wake up, and nod off again, all while attempting to stand more or less upright. But don’t get me wrong, it sounded really good.
The set went on for over an hour, and it ended up running a good 15 or 20 minutes longer than the recorded version of Earth 2. This looseness and deviation from the recorded edition echoed one of Carlson’s decidedly un-metal influences— the Grateful Dead (see Carlson’s RBMA interview and his appearance on the Dead Tour Tales podcast). The Dead were a band with heroin problems of their own, and other bad vibes hiding behind the facade of psychedelic enlightenment. A band that might even have had connections to some kind of sinister deep politics of the sort outlined by Peter Dale Scott or Dave McGowan. Earth might have these kinds of connections too— via Cobain’s father-in-law, who did management work for the Dead — but I won’t even begin to get into all the theories about that.
Sinister vibes aside, the Dead understood that rock music compositions don’t need to be ossified in the exact form that was committed to their tape in the studio. That attitude was a holdover from the dominance of the LP format in the 1960s when plenty of great artists did wonderful things with the format— but it doesn’t need to be the default.
The Dead understood that and they used this understanding to create one of the largest and most lucrative discographies in recording history, creating very few great LPs while making their name instead on endless variations on the same material. And why not? This is something that Dylan Carlson understands, and it’s why he’s re-recorded some of his old drone metal compositions in western guitar style, why he’s now playing Earth 2 in a longer, looser format than it was recorded. So if you get a chance to see him play Earth 2, go check it out. Just be prepared for a slightly bad vibe.
