“1993 was a fucked-up year,” said John Garcia in early 1994. “With the record already being recorded, then the company going under, us canning our manager and losing our drummer – yep, it was a pretty fucked-up year.” The singer was optimistic, however, adding: “Now we got a kick-ass manager, a kick-ass drummer and a new label, so things are starting to roll again. We’re glad that everything happened when it did instead of five years down the line… It was early enough for us to keep our heads together, still respect each other. In fact, we’ve convinced ourselves that Kyuss never existed before this line-up!” The more sanguine Scott Reeder reasoned: “Everything that’s happened has brought us together and made us stronger. Good things come to those who wait – and we waited this long…”
What the good things were was obvious. Kyuss were now that rare thing: a cult musical act whose name was mentioned in the highest circles (witness the endorsement of Nirvana and Metallica, the two biggest rock bands of the era – discounting the contextually very discountable Guns N’Roses) but were not yet subjected to the rigours of personal fame, as most of the public hadn’t yet heard of them. The delayed release of Sky Valley on February 27, 1994 had been repaid with much critical respect: the band were delighted with the album and didn’t hold back from praising its many qualities. It emerged that the departed Bjork (whose drumming on Sky Valley had been his last recorded work with Kyuss) had suggested that the production be transferred from Chris Goss, whose approach had made Blues For The Red Sun so scintillating, to the stoner-rock man of the moment, Monster Magnet frontman Dave Wyndorf. However, as Homme explained: “I like working with Chris Goss a lot. And I don’t wanna break that off just yet.”
Goss himself explained of Sky Valley that, “It’s an open horizon, and nothing sounds closed in,” while John Garcia added: “Black Sabbath was heavy, but it sounded indoors. Kyuss sounds like it’s outdoors.”
“I think stylistically everyone [in the band] has tried to carve his own niche,” Homme said. “I think there’s a definite, audible difference to all three of our albums. On the first one a lot of the stuff was recorded when I was 16 years old, so I was just finding my way on the guitar. The way I’m tilting now is that I’d like to be able to sing a lot of the leads I play. I want to get to the point where I’m looking over at the rest of the band members and my guitar is just singing. I’m not talking about solos. I just want everything to flow and be kind of groovy and heavy; in between chords and bridges when you throw in a little line that just sings.
“I tried to take it to the next level without reinventing the wheel. We tried to stay the same sonically. We went to the same studio, we used the same equipment. It’s the same band playing some new songs. I’m not in a race with anyone. For the most part, the more I try to work out songs, the more I paint myself into a corner. Songs will either finish themselves, or they won’t get played – and that’s OK too. I think you can feel the difference between something that came out real smooth and something that I worked on. When I bring in the song, I can already hear the whole thing in my head. If someone has other parts in the same key or in the same groove, we kind of set up this framework and then we fill it in.”
Josh was later asked what Sky Valley actually was: “It’s a big area, with no one living there,” he said. “It’s like a house, two miles of desert, then another house, a gas station. But the area is huge. That’s where all the Hell’s Angels used to live, where all the meth labs still are. There’s a midget colony out there. There’s spas and retreats, like the Heaven’s Gate bullshit. And we used to throw parties out there because it was such a shitty place, nobody would ever fuck with us up there. It’s the ass end of our town.” As Scott Reeder put it, “Where we live is considered the boonies, but that town is really out in the boonies.”
The album hadn’t suffered from spending a year in the vaults at Elektra since its recording. The bassist explained, “It still sounds fresh after a year. It’s everything we are. The way we’ve been brought up, the way we live, what we listened to when we were kids: Bob Dylan, The Beatles, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull.”
Grand names to drop, indeed. But not without reason: Sky Valley contains elements of all those bands’ work, starting with the progressive approach of Floyd and Crimson. The album is laid out in three suites of songs, which a CD player can’t subdivide – thus forcing the listener to absorb the whole album in three large bites. Part I contains three songs, ‘Gardenia’, ‘Asteroid’ and ‘Supa Scoopa And Mighty Scoop’. The first of these is a dark, atmospheric song built on a deep riff with more top end than previous albums, thanks to Goss’ improved production. It’s Homme’s song and is the sound of Kyuss evolving. ‘Gardenia’ sounds like an adult way of making music, even though those concerned were only in their early twenties. Almost seven minutes in length, the song’s highlight comes when it breaks down to a semi-solo, semi-rhythm approach loaded with plenty of wah pedal. ‘Asteroid’ is quieter and more sinister, full of dark, decaying chords with feedback-heavy tones. There’s a dash of screeching fret-buzz and total unstructured anarchy for some seconds near the beginning, before the musicians drop into virtual silence and a horror-movie motif appears. The fast, snaky riff at the song’s close is as fast as anything Kyuss had done to date, and ends suddenly. ‘Supa Scoopa And Mighty Scoop’ boasts a jerky, one-note riff intro before billowing into the classic Kyuss sound. There’s a tempo change and some counterpointed guitar parts, along with some very Hendrix-like solos. At its finish, there’s an extended stop-start section full of ever-lengthening silences.
Part II begins with ‘100°’, which is a change in pace and direction, with its live-sounding, chicken-scratch, almost funk guitar and extended wah wah-laden solo. At one point Reeder seems to have roused from his deep, deep groove to almost funky levels of activity. “One hundred!” screams Garcia, before another sudden ending. ‘Space Cadet’ leads in with some expert bass chords, which provide an Eastern, sitar-like tone. Seven minutes of trippy, ambient guitars sit on top of that bass riff: the song is an excellent, total departure from the aggression of before. There are some almost folky elements and a slight indication that the song could build to power-ballad size, but of course Kyuss avoid that particular mistake and the song remains a thing of understated beauty. ‘Demon Cleaner’ is again more mellow, making this section the relaxed central core of the album: Garcia’s singing is calm, and Goss lays off the big production techniques, allowing space for the instruments to breathe. However, this feels a bit weird at first: we’re so used to huge, soft guitars that when there’s a space, it feels a little as if there’s a hole in the sound.
The four-song Part III combines the bigness of I with the atmospherics of II. ‘Odyssey’ has a relaxed guitar intro with a bass swamped in studio effects, before a big riff comes firing back in. Later, the drums and bass relax to a Grateful Dead-like improvised middle section, and there are more Eastern sounds. ‘Conan Troutman’ is more punkish and less disciplined, with a thrash-metal drumbeat from Hernandez. So far, it seems that every album had to have a punk song – and this is it, with the drummer giving it all he’s got. The ending is violent, with deep, string-bend riffs. ‘N.O.’ – a cover of an old Yawning Man song – is similarly aggressive, although it has a warm Deep Purple-esque sound that becomes a classic desert drone. Finally, ‘Whitewater’ – nine minutes of solid riffage – fluctuates between angry and mellow sections and winds up with a spinning drone, rather like The Doors’ ‘Riders On The Storm’. There’s also a comedy fragment of a song at the album’s end – simply a joke fairground organ with someone proudly repeating “You can and will lick my doodle” or words to that effect.
Brant Bjork remembered that the sessions had not gone well initially: “I remember the first night recording Sky Valley, the first track we were recording was ‘Odyssey’, which we had been playing for quite a while. We kind of knew what was going on with that song… with Kyuss, we would usually go to tape within the first, maybe second take. [But] with that one it was the third take, and we just weren’t gelling. And I remember Josh was about ready to put his guitar through the wall because the sound wasn’t what he was going for. I just remember it being very frustrating… You see, the thing with Blues, we had everything pretty much down. We knew what we were going to do. Sky Valley, we had no idea. We had like three songs that were solid, and the rest we improvised. The three that were solid were ‘Odyssey’, ‘100°’, and… shit, that might have been it. ‘Demon Cleaner’ was just totally off the cuff, I remember we just went for that. That was a first take. ‘Gardenia’ was pretty solid, although we would jam that live so much. It never really had a beginning or end, so we finally just sorted that out and went to tape with that. ‘Whitewater’ was kind of the same deal.”
So does Sky Valley stand up to Blues For The Red Sun? Well, it’s a more introspective album, on which Homme and Garcia have refined their expression for the sake of subtlety and on which Reeder and Bjork stretch out more than Oliveri did on the two previous records. All this makes for an intriguing listen, but it doesn’t quite have the luxurious, curled-up vibe of Blues For The Red Sun, nor that album’s horizon-straddling jams. But it remains a must-listen.
Either way, the band didn’t care for this kind of analysis. “There really isn’t anything to say about it,” Garcia said in an interview at the time. “Just don’t try to figure it out. You can’t. I can’t. If you try to, you’ll wind up going fuckin’ nuts… It’s 99.9% emotion. There’s not much intellect involved in what we do.” Reeder, asked if Black Sabbath were a major influence – and there’s elements of Iommi and co. all over Kyuss’ vast sound – replied: “The Sabbath comparison doesn’t bother me, really. I’d rather that than many other things.” Garcia added: “I had heard Black Sabbath as a kid growing up. Never into them, as I said. I was listening to Earth, Wind And Fire when Black Sabbath was doing their thing. And it wasn’t till we started playing, and it wasn’t till people started saying we sounded like Sabbath, that Josh finally put on a Black Sabbath record and was like, ‘Yeah, I can see the similarities.’” Homme: “Like, the first seven albums with Ozzy, I know all those songs. I’ve heard ‘em a bunch of times, but I don’t buy ‘em ‘cause I don’t want them to be in my head.”
An aspect of Kyuss’ working methods that lent their music a degree of mystique was the fact that they usually declined to print their lyrics. Garcia later explained that the point was to accept the music wholesale: “Don’t try to sit there and try to decipher my poetry… All of my lyrics, they’re pretty much along the same lines… whatever they mean to you, they mean to you. If you were to listen to ‘Green Machine’ or ‘Odyssey’ or even ‘Thong Song’, some songs you can actually figure out the lyrics and you can write them down. Some of them make sense and some of them don’t – the majority of them don’t make any sense, at least to the average listener – whether it be a 14-year-old kid that listens to a Kyuss tape in mom’s BMW on the way to school, or whether it’s the 45-year-old speed freak who cooks speed out in Sky Valley. In that sense it’s like, ‘Whatever, you have the lyrics.’”
One thing that many reporters focused on, now that Kyuss had been prominent for a couple of years, was the desert origins of the band members. In a vain attempt to convince the city slicker writers that the desert’s influence was too huge to encapsulate in words and too nebulous to fit into a soundbite, Garcia tied himself into knots of protest, saying: “We were really stoned… We went into the studio and did what we fucking wanted to do. It’s everyone doing their own fuckin’ thing all at once. We don’t have a concept of anything here. To me, Kyuss is four guys from the fuckin’ desert playing in a band together, and that’s all it is. Everybody gets their own feeling out of it. That’s the way it should be… If you go out to the middle of the desert and sit there, you can see every colour in the world. And when you sit there for a while, baking under the sun, dust in your face, that’s Kyuss in a fuckin’ nutshell.”
It did no good. Everyone wanted to know what Kyuss were about. Asked about politics and whether, like the newly successful rap-metal band Rage Against The Machine, Kyuss had fixed views, Homme laconically batted the issue aside: “Well, they do that and that’s cool, whatever… but I’m not into that. Not for us. We’re the non-preachers, we speak for the non-preaching.” As for the suddenly cool desert-rock scene, Josh explained: “It’s what the bands in this scene won’t do that will make it the cool scene. Hopefully not a lot of people will come here. Instead, the bands will travel. Desert bands will leave, go on tour, make their records, and come back, and it will remain low-key.” It emerged that MTV had placed a request to send a camera crew to a desert party, no doubt hoping to unearth a cache of sand-dune-riding hippies and punks living it up. Kyuss had declined the offer, with Garcia explaining: “I could sit here and try to explain it all day. But you have to be there, really, even grow up there to truly understand everything that goes on in the desert. Full-on dust in your face! When you take a drink of your beer and there’s fuckin’ mud in your cup, you laugh and go, ‘This is great!’”
Scott Reeder: “It’s the clearest place in the world, too: I played a party that had to be at least four miles from anything or anyone and somebody fucking complained. The police came and broke it up. Guess it must have been the animals.” “These parties played a huge part in our development,” Garcia added. “Because we all come from the same area, we all have that same background, the peace, the desert, the generator parties, the mountains, the canyons. And that’s a huge part of Kyuss, where we’re from.” New recruit Hernandez (of whom John had said, “He’s great, man. He’s an amazing drummer, you know, and he’s also from the desert, born and raised. We’re really lucky to have him”) wasn’t slow to offer an opinion: after all, of all the musicians, he had been a desert musician the longest. “Playing outside anywhere is very inspiring. It’s like playing the best club in the world. It’s unreal. Non-stop partying, hangin’ out all day, foolin’ around, chasing geckos, havin’ frog fights, dust in your face…”
After four March dates with Fishbone and Biohazard, Kyuss made their second trip overseas, playing to a larger-than-expected crowd at London’s Borderline venue. They would return to the UK for a set at the Underworld in September in advance of a 10-date US tour with bands such as Dinosaur Jr. and Ween. The band was beginning to gain a name for itself, with Garcia’s emotional, versatile vocals a major discussion point. At one stage the rock band Karma To Burn, an established act signed to Roadrunner, made overtures to the singer, hinting that he might like to jump ship, as Garcia recalled: “Karma To Burn asked me to come out and sing on one song of theirs. I wound up doing it. Elektra let me do it and Roadrunner let me do it. I went out there and did one song for them. As time went on, they wanted me full-time. They pretty much wanted me to quit Kyuss and come to sing for them full-time. That was something that at the time I couldn’t do. I was singing in Kyuss and that’s my main love and that will always be my one true love: Kyuss, and Josh and Scott and Alfredo and Brant and Nick and Chris Cockrell. Those guys… they devirginised me… I love them, all of them, like my brothers. I couldn’t leave.”
Despite his loyalty, Garcia apparently gave the matter some serious thought, even performing live with KTB at one point: “They called me and said they wanted me. I said there’s no reason I can’t be in two bands, it’s been done before. I went out there and sang on eight of their songs. We never recorded anything. We went on a short tour down south and played Kentucky, West Virginia and all these states down south. They wanted 12 songs and Elektra would only let me do eight. So I told them, let’s do eight. There’s no rule that says there has to be vocals on every song. You know, there could be three instrumental songs. Look at Kyuss, it’s a prime example of having something instrumental. [But] after they found that I couldn’t do the 12 songs that they wanted, we parted and went our separate ways and it just didn’t happen.”
1994 passed in a flurry of tour dates, press interviews and more contact with new bands. Kyuss, now secure in their place in the middle of the alternative rock scene, played a memorable date at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island on July 13 with the Reverend Horton Heat, Babes In Toyland and White Zombie. Lead Babe In Toyland, Kat Bjelland remembers: “Alfredo used to call me the White Mexican! They travelled in a trailer and in style. They had it down. Margaritas made fresh in the blender, good drugs… even a light show with fog inside the trailer once! The people they chose to surround themselves with also made a big difference. They were just a really solid group of ‘dedicated to rock’ people. Not an attitude among them. Good people – smart and funny!”
By the end of the year, plans were even being laid for the recording of another album to follow up Sky Valley. Asked why the band were in such a hurry to do even more recording, Josh laughed and said, “We just stay in our space, doing our own thing, and when the record company tell us that it’s time to start working on a new album, we have enough stuff jammed so we can just go in and make one. They don’t come in here and they don’t say things about what we do!” Spring 1995 was taken up with recording (sessions stretched from March 1– 20, longer than usual for Kyuss) and the new album, titled… And The Circus Leaves Town was released on July 11.
Once again Goss was the man chosen to produce the album, and once again Homme paid him the compliments he was due: “I love working with Chris, he’s the shit,” he said. “Christopher living and being down here has made it so we all feel, when we go in, that it’s all right. That recording’s going to be the one place where everything will be OK, and that makes you wanna be there, it makes you feel that you will be able to pull off anything that you wanna try in the studio.” It seemed that Circus had been no easy ride: “This new recording was the toughest,” Homme continued. “We look at this like a project. We wanted to see if we could consistently, without changing too much, change all the time. It was obvious what we had to do: doing it is not easy all the time, but we learnt an awful lot about ourselves with this record.”
What had they learned? “We stick together more than ever now, we communicate a lot more and the four of us try and put that stuff aside, just take care of what needs to be taken care of and learn that this is just all a part of it. The perspective change is kind of like this: you don’t have to say you love it, but you do have to do it. The quicker you can take care of it and cut other stuff off at the path, you actually see there’s so much you can do.” This had translated into an independent spirit of activity for Kyuss, even in day-to-day business: “Instead of having to do so many stupid photo shoots, we went and took our own pictures. There’s so much you can do in eliminating aggravation from your lives and distancing yourselves from it. So we’re actually more ‘do-it-yourself’ than ever before.” It seemed even record-company issues weren’t dampening Kyuss’ spirits: “One thing I’m happy about is that through our relationship with Chameleon and Elektra we can turn around and say, ‘OK then, what do we need to get done?’ They say, we need a record and so boom! We go in, do one and send it to them with the cover already done. We do our own T-shirts, we’re directing our own videos and all with our own cash. We save money and then buy a good mike here or a good piece of equipment there to the point where we’re an island unto ourselves.”
Asked if the album title had something to do with escaping the big city, Josh explained: “It means many things, and that’s perhaps the least of them. In many ways things have increased for us, but we’ve been able to leave town and shed the shit. It’s more about where we’re headed, what we’re trying to put together ourselves, in terms of what the band is and what we’re meant to be. Europe’s been great because we’ve been able to develop a style of touring for ourselves, where we’ve really started to almost enjoy touring, where you almost make it like a little travelling carnival. We try to bring that same sort of thing to someone’s head, the rock’n’roll version of ‘come in and make everyone forget’ and leave town. I like the connections of mystery with the circus, that whole idea.”
But there was only so far Josh would go with discussion of the new album: “I get reluctant to answer all those questions like, ‘What does this song mean?’, because to me it means one thing but to you, and you, and you, it could mean something totally different. Which would mean it’s achieved its goal, to mean as many things to as many people as possible.”
So how had the new album turned out, recorded so soon after the release (if not the actual studio sessions) of its predecessor? Well, for many Kyuss observers it was a case of the band making the same record as before, but it still being a damn good record…. And The Circus Leaves Town was loaded with the steaming heaviness of both Blues For The Red Sun and Sky Valley, with its first three songs, ‘Hurricane’, ‘One Inch Man’ (released as a single) and ‘Thee Ol’ Boozeroony’, the expected gritty riff-heavy workouts. While these were atmospheric and thoughtful – ‘One Inch Man’ even had Garcia wistfully keening a repeated mantra of “Ever so lonely…” – there wasn’t much in them that even the most devoted Kyuss fan couldn’t find in their earlier albums.
It doesn’t really change radically from this point on, although it’s all good music if the generic Kyuss sound is to your taste. ‘Gloria Lewis’ is a slow, dark, trance-like burn through the vintage desert sound, as is ‘Phototropic’, a laid-back, sensitive doom anthem. ‘El Rodeo’ is a little more anarchic, with its knowingly sideways lead-guitar intro and crashing, descending chords, and ‘Jumbo Blimp Jumbo’ disguises itself in a fractured funk workout, but ‘Tangy Zizzle’ is back to the oceanic riff-mountain that anchors all of Kyuss’ albums, distant vocals and all. ‘Size Queen’ is an overlong, bluesy song based on a strolling bass and Garcia’s oddly processed vocals, and ‘Catamaran’ is another sweet, space-cadet trip of the kind that Homme and his band could knock out in their sleep. Perhaps the closer, ‘Spaceship Landing’, provides the album’s only real new direction, stretching over 11 minutes in a seemingly never-ending jam. After 20 minutes of silence comes a hidden track, the superbly relaxed ‘Day One’, which features excellent, Beatles-like acid vocals and surely deserves better than to be tacked onto the album’s end so carelessly.
Time has not been kind to… And The Circus Leaves Town, with Kyuss’ critics usually referring to it as weak or uninspired. But perhaps the truth is that the band had run out of new ideas after four albums: at the time Homme spoke, unusually, of some difficulties when it came to managing the band’s career. “Sometimes I feel like some of the stuff we’re doing is pretty hard,” he said. “Finding the right tour, because pretty soon you’ll run out of Faith No Mores or other bands where you just think, ‘Wow, we should play with them, it’d be a great show!’ But I’d rather have it that way… We never felt in control of everything. It’s such a circus, man… there’s so much to it. You’re constantly having to learn from your mistakes. Now we’ve become more self-sufficient. If we’re gonna be a band then we want to present what our band is, and we’re able to do that now more than ever before. We finally don’t feel like we’re anyone else’s experiment. We’re doing the experimenting! So it’s been good to wait for things, like waiting to do the desert recording, because it’d just be us and no one else interfering.”
As before, Kyuss’ love affair with the Coachella desert was in full flame. Asked what Palm Desert was like, Homme remarked, “It’s the type of place you move to only when you’re ready. You can’t just move from a big city and immediately expect to like this place. You’ve gotta know what it is, what you’re getting into, to pull it off or you’ll arrive, take one look around and be off very quickly.” But he knew how far he could go before spiralling off into pretentious territory, adding: “It’s not so much ‘We are the desert’ or some corny shit like that, it’s more a case of we were dealt the desert because of where we grew up. We were dealt some beautiful scenery, some of the best places to try and cultivate ideas, it’s so easy to access. We can go into the desert and take pictures of something amazing, alone, and it’s free, it’s just right there… I still go to the same places all the time and I’m continually blown away every time, it never ceases to make you feel small, make you feel in awe of things, things that aren’t something that we’ve all done as a group of people.”
Kyuss hadn’t stopped recording after the Circus sessions: they had also laid down four extra songs to be used as B-sides for the ‘One Inch Man’ single and beyond. For this they located a studio out in Joshua Tree, even further out into the wilderness than their home towns. “We’ve talked about [actually recording in the desert]. That’s definitely the next move,” Homme continued. “We actually know the canyon we’re going to. The heaviest thing we’ve done are those B-sides we just recorded in Joshua Tree. They’re the most cut-loose-here-we-go, rawest form of what we’re doing. We’re not bummed because at first we had this idea that we were wasting all this stuff on B-sides, but then we realised it was positive in as much as ‘Fuck it, carry on, who cares if that well’s dry, we can always find another,’ that line of thinking, y’know? We just had a really big perspective change in the Joshua Tree studios, where we don’t necessarily feel invincible, but we know the only people that can throw us off track is us.” One of these songs was a cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Into The Void’, which had been requested by their friend Frank Kozic, an artist, studio owner and indie record label proprietor. His label, Man’s Ruin, was scheduled to release Kyuss’ cover version at some point in the future.
In preparation for more recording, Kyuss moved their choice of studio away from the big professional facilities to a more down-home location: a venue called Rancho De La Luna, the converted Joshua Tree Park desert home of a Texan musician and producer called Fred Drake. Homme and Garcia had been introduced to Drake by an LA musician, Dave Catching, who worked at Drake’s studio and played in a band called Earthlings? with Wool singer Pete Stahl. The sessions were memorable, as the band explained: “The place was covered from floor to ceiling with this amazing stuff Fred had bought at swap meets,” said Homme, “and filled with old keyboards and organs and little amps. Little lights everywhere. Going to bed there was a 30-minute experience, ‘cause you had to power down the building.” Departed drummer Brant Bjork also recorded at Rancho De La Luna and added: “The kitchen is five feet from the mixing board, so Dave Catching would be in there cooking up an insane meal, you’d smell garlic and herbs and spices, and you’re sitting there in the next room tracking drums and the bass. Fire pit out front, a hot tub up to the left, a huge view where you could see for miles. We did the [session] on mushrooms for three days straight… Were the drugs totally necessary? I have no fuckin’ idea. There’s a long list of things it takes to make music, and drugs is on there, but the list is not made in order of importance.”
The meeting with Drake had been a turning point for Kyuss, as Homme recalled: “Dave Catching was friends with Fred – Fred had lived in LA, that’s how Dave met Fred. Fred had moved out there, to get away. Dave turned us on to that place and Kyuss went out there and did this thing for Man’s Ruin where we just basically took mushrooms for three days straight. That was probably the best Kyuss session ever, with the gnarliest Kyuss songs ever. Once we met Fred, that was it. I just started going there, all the time.
“Fred was one of the most special people I’ve ever run into through music. He was this tall, skinny cowboy with a hat, kinda like the Marlboro Man. He didn’t look like people probably thought. They probably thought he’d be this bearded, longhair, hippie dude in the middle of the desert. But he couldn’t be further from that. You’re sitting up there after a long night of recording, and he’s already up at 6:30 in the morning having coffee, he’s got his cowboy hat, he’s already fed his horse, he’s got his cowboy boots on, he’s already been to the swap-meet and bought four new things. He was always burning a joint, all day. Had a nice even keel. He was sophisticated, he was smart, he had a great sense of humour. Just really mellow. He was definitely the captain of that ship.”
By the end of 1995… And The Circus Leaves Town had sold well in Europe to Kyuss’ ever-growing fanbase, with over 12,000 copies shifting in its first week in Germany alone. Even if the band might never break their home country, a future of overseas shows seemed viable with ‘95 being Kyuss’ most successful touring year; a European trek in the spring took in most of the continent, a US jaunt through July with White Zombie, Babes In Toyland and the Reverend Horton Heat, a German festival slot in August and a further two-week sweep through Europe which finished in Italy on September 9. The band was on the point of a one-month US tour with their heroes Monster Magnet when, in October 1995, they suddenly parted ways for good.
Homme, Garcia, Reeder and Hernandez all had much to say on the subject in ensuing months and slowly a picture emerged of what had happened. Apparently, the band had not argued, nor run out of money, nor been stabbed in the back by the industry: with everything going for them, in true perverse desert style, they had simply got bored. “It was just the right time,” said Homme soberly. “We made four records, and we just wanted to have a good solid ending with a finishing point.” He stressed that mainstream success had never been Kyuss’ goal: “We played for respect, mostly. We deliberately sabotaged any chance at selling records or being famous. People dug the fact that we were playing for music’s sake.” Some of the motivation for the split came from the old punk values that inspired, and hindered, any band which espoused them: “I came from a scene that’s very similar to Seattle,” Homme continued. “I’d come home after touring, and someone would say, ‘What’s up, rock star?’ But instead of saying, ‘If you don’t like it, forget it,’ I’d sit down for, like, two hours trying to explain what we’re doing to some jerk.
“I didn’t want to just play one type of music any more,” mused Homme. “Kyuss was everything, too. When you’re in a band since you’re 15 years old, by the time you’re 22 you’re like, ‘This is all I know, this is not a good idea.’ There weren’t any hard feelings at all. It was like, ‘The band’s breaking up, I’ll see you at the barbecue on Sunday.’
“Kyuss was very deliberate in some ways. With bands we liked, we always listened to their first couple of records before they began to change. So we were very adamant about playing heavy groove music and never letting that change. By the same token, you can paint yourself into a corner. We were extremely concerned with the ‘they’ theory. It was like what would ‘they’ think? Will ‘they’ say we’ve sold out? That’s not a real good cycle to get yourself into because ‘they’ will never be happy and you’ll never know who ‘they’ really are.”
Josh looked back with some exhaustion on the rollercoaster career of Kyuss: “Kyuss’ first record was when I was 17. We did Blues when I was still 18; 19, Sky Valley; 20, Circus. And then we broke up when I was 21. On the last couple of tours, Kyuss was starting to eat itself anyway. I was disillusioned. Punk Rock had blown up in my face. What I thought it was, was a total lie. And then I heard Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life and The Idiot for the first time. If you’re a band on tour, those lyrics hit you – they were so true. And then I heard The Stooges’ records. And those records said everything I wanted to say better than I could say it. It made me want to quit. So I did.”
One of the more revealing and philosophical analyses of the entire Kyuss freak show came not from Homme or Oliveri, both of whom would be quizzed endlessly on the subject for years to come, but from ex-drummer Brant Bjork: “Blues For The Red Sun was the classic Kyuss record… And we just kind of imploded after that. Musically and spiritually, I think Blues For The Red Sun captured what we were all about. That was a tough record to follow up. Some of us thought that we had to change, some of us thought that no, we could just stay and do whatever the fuck we wanted. Some of us wanted to get more psychedelic. Some of us wanted to be more straightforward and just rock and jam.
“People come up to me – and they have for years – [saying] ‘What happened to Kyuss? What happened to Kyuss? Yadda yadda.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, Kyuss was a fuckin’ freak of nature anyway.’ I mean, we were young kids, we were young. When we were doing Blues For The Red Sun, we were 18, 19 years old. We were just punk kids from a small desert town that didn’t know anything else. We grew up and we just worshipped our records, like kids should worship their rock’n’roll records. And when you do, and you have nothing else to do, scary things happen, you know! And that’s what we did. And someone, somehow gathered us up and organised us enough to put us on tape and put us in a fuckin’ van to get out and play live shows. And we just went along for the ride. We had no idea what we were doing. It’s amazing that band lasted as long as it did. So it was just natural that we would just fall apart.”
With the dust settling over Kyuss, the ex-members returned to the desert to get their heads together. It seemed as though the story might be over.