Join Consequence for ’99 Rewind, a weekly celebration of the 25th anniversaries of the films, TV, and music from 1999. Today, we’re approaching Sleep’s monstrous, smokey, zooted Dopesmoker (also known as Jerusalem) on its own terms.
Sometimes, an album is excellent in a manner that warrants multi-chapter dissertations. Other times, an album’s greatness merely asks for us to tell its story before getting the fuck out of its way. Sleep’s Dopesmoker firmly falls in the latter.
The band’s magnum opus turns 25 this year (kind of, it’s complicated, we’ll get into it), and its reputation of “essential weed music” has only grown more and more prevalent. So prevalent, in fact, that newer fans (or older fans who might have a hard time remembering the 2000s for… reasons) might not realize that for years the “official, band-sanctioned” version of the album was considered lost to time. It’s a story shrouded in mythology, hard-ass riffs, and, yes, marijuana smoke.
To celebrate the hour-long stoner metal odyssey that is Dopesmoker, we’ve come prepared. We’ll start with old reliable: a sober, analytical look at the album’s history, content, and legacy. Then, armed with certain leafy green nugs and enough GWAR Bud of Gods gummies to kill a horse, we’re going to take our own advice and get out of its way. Let’s enter Jerusalem with Sleep as our guide.
Big Brain Sober Take
Like all great albums, Sleep’s record label famously hated Dopesmoker when the San Jose trio finally turned in the recording. The label, London Records, had won the band over other competing parties (mainly, Elektra) not just by fronting the bill for what would become Dopesmoker, but by promising to give Sleep full creative control over the project. They were apparently so excited about the band’s knack for bluesy, riff-heavy hard rock that they helped free them from their previous contract early. So, when the band wrapped recording in 1995 and plopped one 63-minute long song on whatever nameless executive’s desk was unlucky enough to receive it, they started second guessing their decisions.
Although, to say “their decisions” would be inaccurate. As the legend goes, the A&R reps that had championed the band were long gone by the time the Dopesmoker was ready for post-production. Those who inherited these strong-willed stoners attempted several rounds of mixing and editing to reign in the monstrous Dopesmoker. All the while, they pleaded with the band to consider something, anything, that would be a little more commercially accessible. But Sleep didn’t budge, and, at a standstill, the record was shelved, never to be officially released by London Records.