Jerusalem

After the reception of Sleep's Holy Mountain the band signed to London Records, and what they handed the label was a single song an hour long. It was written and worked out at soundchecks, in motel rooms and in friends' houses; Matt Pike has said they spent something like four years on it. Al Cisneros has described cannabis as central to how it was made, and called the line "drop out of life" a kind of creed at the time. The performance was taped live in the second half of 1994, straight after an American tour. London Records were unhappy with the result and refused to release it. They had David Sardy remix it and still could not decide what to do; the band refused to let it out in any edited form, and the two sides deadlocked. Sleep broke up, and the recording circulated on bootlegs and unauthorised pressings. Rise Above Records issued it in Britain in 1998 as Jerusalem, and The Music Cartel in the United States in 1999 — a version the band disliked. The record as they intended it appeared only in 2003, as Dopesmoker, through Tee Pee Records. Every version has been received as a high-water mark in both stoner and doom metal. The running order here follows the six-part Rise Above edition.