WHEN Nirvana released Nevermind in the summer of 1991, the sudden wave of success that engulfed them was so all-encompassing and so unprecedented for their genre of music (alternative rock, for want of a better term) and locale (Seattle, Washington) that they were faced with all kinds of incongruous situations, such as Kurt Cobain collapsing in tears by the side of the stage after yet another stadium show before a baying crowd of football jocks and middle-aged accountants.
In microcosm, Queens Of The Stone Age endured a similar trajectory in the years 2000 and 2001. 2000 was the year that nu-metal really took hold, with Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, Deftones and others taking the formula of two guitarists (preferably playing downtuned seven-string guitars), a shouty singer (often in baseball cap and generous shorts), rhythm section and DJ (always an avowed hip-hop fan, and usually a short-haired, punkish type) to its logical conclusion. The kids loved it, making all these acts (who would, to a man, desert the style and the sound when it became terminally unfashionable a couple of years later) and their record company shareholders millionaires. The whole nu-metal wave,* which started life with Korn’s debut album in 1994, may now seem passé but at the time the festivals showcasing the best and the worst of the movement grossed enormous profits and became a bona fide modern phenomenon – acceptable Woodstocks for a world that wouldn’t tolerate a real Woodstock without burning it to the ground.
Of the nu-metal that surrounded them, Oliveri pontificated: “I think that a lot of acts jumped on the bandwagon from some of the earlier bands that had already set up and were doing this rap-rock thing. There is a lot of new stuff that I’m just, like, I don’t get it. It’s not all bad, but there’s a lot of it that is – it’s like any other music. It’s tough for me to listen to it, so I don’t. Some of it I can go see live and go, like, ‘Fuck, this is powerful shit! You look at the crowd and they’re going fucking mental, so it’s cool… I got no beefs with the stuff. It’s not my cup of tea for what I want to play, so I don’t. I’m more along the lines of playing rock’n’roll, man. That’s what’s fun to me. It’s supposed to be a good time, you’re supposed to laugh and play grab-ass with some girl in the crowd if you’re hot in it… however you want to do it, that’s cool. I just prefer to play rock’n’roll, I’m not that pissed any more, you know? When I was younger I was pretty pissed off, so I can see where these kids are coming from, in the crowd, you know? They wanna hear something that’s intense and like, ‘Aaagh!’ all the time, so I can dig that, because I was just as pissed. I was mad too.”
After spending the first few months of the year recording the follow-up to their self-titled debut, QOTSA anticipated that the album would sell reasonably well and lead to more successful touring. In fact, the enormous success of Rated R rocketed the band up to the next level. Having survived a last-minute title change – so last-minute, in fact, that some promos went out under the original name II – Rated R was a startling leap forward to newer territories that few fans could have expected. Laden with pure pop choruses but retaining the deep rock textures that made Homme’s work recognisable, Rated R was a fully developed canvas, taking in all areas of the popular music spectrum.
Its casual knack with a riff was encapsulated by the lead-off single, a crooned, sinister – but annoyingly catchy – song called ‘The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret’. A tense, scratchy verse, in which Josh sneeringly begins “I’ve got a secret / I cannot say…”, leads into a dark tunnel of a chorus led off with the long falsetto of “Whatever you do… / Don’t tell anyone”, a melody which carves itself into the listener’s head. That warm, fuzzy guitar tone that makes the Queens’ sound so distinctive – and, let it not be forgotten, so suited to radio – is a slightly threatening thing of beauty.
The addictive single, released in August 2000 but released to radio a couple of months earlier in time to accompany the album, stayed on the airwaves all summer and was so ubiquitous that later pressings of Rated R came with a bonus ‘The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret’ CD single. A video was shot, consisting mainly of the band playing to camera, deadpan of expression, interspersed with a series of images (a man’s mouth; a woman’s face; an ant being lowered into someone’s ear) which really wasn’t that exciting but which did serve to show Josh and Nick’s faces – the former resembling an accountant, the latter some kind of deranged monk. The video was directed by Jon Parazzi, who – as Oliveri remarked – had “done a couple of things with the Earthlings? and we liked his stuff. It was cool because we could go in and give him our parts and he did the rest. We knew what we wanted, so we left it in his hands. He knew how to get it. He was somebody we trusted, and it turned out pretty well.”
When asked if he had been surprised that it became a hit, Homme responded, “It’s not a hit-type song, because it’s not for kids. Our record company was like, ‘This is going to be a hit,’ and I’m like, ‘A hit with whom?’ It’s about fucking. Twenty-one-year-olds and over, maybe. They were trying to shove it down the throats of 13-year-olds.” Amazingly, ‘The Lost Art…’, (the second track on the album) is surpassed by the droned, rocked-out-and-having-fun mantra ‘Feelgood Hit Of The Summer’, which opens the record and provides a neat, spiteful, belly-laughing Queens manifesto for those new to the band to digest, and has since become infamous. “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodan, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol!” is repeated four or more times per verse – before the ‘chorus’, a single stuttered yelp of “C-c-c-c-c-cocaine!” And that’s the song, which builds this formula up with added venom throughout the verses, before dropping into a quiet, almost whispered recital and then accelerating up loud again for the final fling. It’s a remarkable piece of songwriting that introduced more than a few non-Americans to Vicodan (also Vicodin), a powerful tranquilliser.
An unexpected guest lending some presence to the vocals on ‘Feelgood Hit’ was none other than Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, whose malevolent whisper and final shriek gives the song a recognisably metallic aura. As Josh recounted, “We were in Studio B at Soundcity and he was in Studio A. The hallway outside the studios is very small. It doesn’t matter if you’re in A or B, you’re going to end up hanging out with the other band. So he was hanging out and Chris Goss, our producer, asked if he’d sing on it and he said, ‘Sure!’ He read the lyrics and laughed, and sang backup on it.”
Nick Oliveri: “Josh wrote down what the lyrics were and [Rob] was like, ‘Oh, a rock’n’roll cocktail, I think I’ve had this!’ It was so funny and he came in and did his stuff, a really nice guy, he is a very cool dude. Being a fan as a kid, I saw Priest as a kid in like ‘83 and I never would have thought that in my whole life that Rob Halford would be singing on my music, never. It was actually a nice treat, we were all in the control room watching him sing in the vocal booth with headphones on and we were all just going mental, ‘Oh shit! Rob Halford!’ It was so cool.” Oliveri even had the pleasure of giving the Metal God some vocal direction: “He was doing some of the more sinister Rob stuff, and then when it got to the ‘Cocaine!’ part in the choruses I said, ‘Hey man, can you do your Rob Halford thing?’ And on the original version every one is, ‘Cocaine!’ But we didn’t want to overkill on that, so we only ended up putting the very last [chorus] of the whole song on it… in the rest of the song he’s just doing the sinister Rob thing, but there are, like, eight different people’s voices on it, so it was really tough to mix.
“You know, when I was a kid I had no idea [about Halford’s homosexuality] and once I found out it was like, wow, it all makes sense now! He was like one of those leather-daddy type dudes and, if you think about some of the stuff that he’s singing, there are all of these references to it, like ‘Hell Bent For Leather’ and ‘Point Of Entry’, and just all these things that make sense now. But you know, I don’t really care what he does when he’s off the stage, you know what I mean? When he’s on stage and if he’s throwing down, cool, I don’t give a shit! His sexual preference, I couldn’t give a shit because it doesn’t affect me in any way. I’m not with it so how is it going to affect me? That kind of shit never bothered me.”
The impact of ‘Feelgood Hit Of The Summer’ was subtle and insidious. Firstly, the single immediately made QOTSA seem like a pro-drugs band, a far from accurate scenario. “My stance on drugs is that I’m more like a libertarian,” said Josh. “I think they should all be legalised because people take them, and they hide, and they get chastised, and if you’ve ever known any real junkie or anything like that, you say, ‘You really should quit.’ Then they go, ‘Yeah, I know I should.’ And as soon as you’re gone, they’re like, ‘Thank God that guy’s gone.’ People do what they do, and as far as their necessity for music, drugs are on a really long list of what it takes to make music, and they’re no more or less important than any of them… I don’t wave the flag for drug rock, and you know, if someone asked me drug questions, they’d go, ‘What drugs do you take?’ I’m like, ‘What are you on, because you’re out of your mind. That’s none of your business.’ Secondarily, I think they have their place, but not such an overwhelming importance, they’re just something interesting to find out about, you know what I mean?”
Homme’s stance towards stimulants was both liberal and ambiguous, as he explained, “[‘Feel Good Hit…’] lists drugs, but it doesn’t say yes or no. It’s almost like, what will people do if you don’t swear? You say things that make them react. Some people were like, ‘That song, I gotta tell you, is bad, and you guys really need help.’ And other people realised that it’s almost like a social experiment. It got banned in some places and went to the top of the charts in other places… That’s what’s so funny, is that the record industry and the radio refused to play the song in America and get behind it because they were afraid. But then the police took it, used it to play to schools, junior high and high schools, so you can imagine how for us, we [said], the social experiment has worked itself out!”
As for himself: “I’m an equal opportunity person. I hate junk. I like to use drugs as a means of manipulating other people. I can tell you this though, none of them are a licence to be a dumbass.”
The one-two punch of ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’ – ironically named, as it was released in the autumn – and ‘Lost Art’ remain unmatched for a rock album in recent years. But the rest of Rated R cocks a snook at the listener, sounding more obscure and nowhere near as catchy as those two unlikely radio hits. ‘Leg Of Lamb’ comes from the opposite end of the line, eschewing the deliberate soft-rock tones of the first two songs for a horror-movie vibe surrounding a jerky, stop-start riff. Oliveri’s melodic – but not friendly – spiralling bass-line matches Homme’s creepy vocal melody, with the result being one of the weirdest, most threatening songs in the QOTSA canon. ‘Auto Pilot’ is a shambolic affair, with a tin-pan guitar, multi-layered vocals and a certain Beatles-like querulousness that is not the album’s only nod towards the vintage atmospherics of the Fab Four. ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ carries on where ‘Leg Of Lamb’ left off, exploring skin-crawling organ tones and trance-like atmospheres but laying on massively echoed textures and disturbing, burbling guitars. A few months down the line, the song would be used on the soundtrack of an educational film used by the San Diego County Office of Education and the San Diego Sheriff’s Department to highlight the dangers of driving while drunk or drugged. Homme: “I feel like doing doughnuts [spinning car tyres hard enough to scorch the road] in San Diego County and dropping my name when the cops come… it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. I just want to be in league with the cops. I sort of feel like the roads should have those inflatable arm-floats [a.k.a. water-wings] along either shoulder… And that all cars should have ‘em too so you could just bounce off everyone.”
‘Monsters In The Parasol’ – originally a Desert Sessions tune – briefly returns to the fold of melodiousness with the ‘robotic’ rhythm that Homme and Oliveri had mentioned so many times before: its deadpan vocals and the twisty guitar fill that presages each line of the chorus make it a masterpiece of economy. Asked why the song had been upgraded from the third and fourth Desert release, Homme explained: “We really liked the song, and Desert Sessions is cool, but it’s really limited in print. We thought the song should be more available because we really dig it.”
A slice of undiluted Oliveri comes pouring out of the speakers with ‘Quick And To The Pointless’, a dose of punk fury with screamed vocals, aggressive riffs straight from the tradition of West Coast hardcore and plenty of nastiness – a complete change from the rest of the album. ‘In The Fade’, conversely, sits atop an almost reggae-fied beat which is so relaxed it’s almost optimistic. Guest singer Mark Lanegan of Josh’s sometime day-job band The Screaming Trees provides his standard hoarse, dark tones and in doing so keeps the song from complete incongruity. There’s another gear-change with the aptly titled ‘Tension Head’, a fast, maddened volley of riffs, complete with layered screams and a bass part that flies all over the place in a textbook example of controlled chaos – and a further switch of pace with ‘Lightning Song’. This tune places the Queens’ devotion to classic, Beatles-style, quasi-psychedelic pop in context, with its deftly plucked acoustic guitar, shuffle beat and a melody unnervingly reminiscent of ‘Norwegian Wood’. But the album ends with a true Queens/Kyuss-style desert riff-a-thon, ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’, a layer cake of fat, overdriven bass and lush atmospheres.
Rated R is quite a ride, and the most amply spread record that the band have ever produced – at least in terms of sheer diversity. Once more Chris Goss had produced the album, and once again he had made it a smooth experience, as Nick recounted: “Working with Chris is really easy. He’s very laid-back, and he’s a good friend of ours, and he knows the band’s vision already and he runs with that. He was like the third member to me and Josh on this record. Me and Josh did all the pre-production ourselves, because Chris was doing another record, so we just had him come in when it was time to go to the studio. We pretty much knew what we wanted to do from the start anyway, and Goss, being a friend and somebody who we trust musically, threw us some ideas and we tried a lot of them. A lot of them we didn’t like and a lot of them we didn’t use, and the ones we liked, we used. And Josh and I had a lot of ideas and we just tried them all.”
Homme: “The sound with Kyuss was identical from beginning to end, it never changed. In fact I used the same cabinet and head on every record – all Ampeg cabinets, because the goal always seemed to be bass. My perception was that to the normal guitar player they were like, ‘This doesn’t sound right.’ But for me it was perfect. It seems using the gear incorrectly is the best way to get on. You’re forced to create… I don’t like guitars that are too light, it has to hurt after a while to hold it. I don’t have many 24-fret guitars or anything like that, but it really depends. Now that I get the opportunity to play more types of music, I think things are really situational.
And the inspiration for the music? “I just think that I absorb the ideas. The reason I love being in today’s music is that it comes down to your delivery. Björk plays with a 52-piece orchestra, and some guy playing champagne glasses… someone with fuckin’ nut bells, and it works because it’s in the delivery, and the delivery is correct. There is no genre for me. I don’t play heavy, I don’t play punk, I don’t play metal, I don’t play classic rock, I just play rock’n’roll and I like it vague like that, because then we can play whatever we like and not have to be like, ‘No, we’ve got to go, chugga, chugga, chugga.’ I mean, what kind of music is Björk? It’s out there. And I think that’s where I’d like to be. If we want to play heavy I hope the audience is like, ‘Fuck yeah.’ And then when it gets broken down after a while and it’s quiet, I hope they’re like, ‘Fuck yeah.’ The inspiration is to keep searching.”
Of the new album: “It’s still heavy-rock music – a little more melodic, robotic, and psychotic. We’re trying to set it up so we can play a new style of music that we like so the spectrum is a little wider. That’s the main focus – we’re still heavy rock, but also whatever else that’s good… Someone the other day said they heard the humour in it and for some reason we thought that was going to get missed. There’s a lot of humour in the records – not silly shit, but us having a good time. There are a couple of jams in stoner rock that are funny to us.”
Informed by an interviewer that Rated R was too diverse to become boring, Homme responded with evident pleasure: “That’s the idea. Theoretically, how could something be really heavy all the time? Where’s the reference point to prove that it’s heavy? This is something we started realising toward the end of Kyuss. You can only be heavy if there’s something soft to gauge it against. It doesn’t have to be, ‘I love you, I gave my love a chicken.’ It comes back to us playing what we’d like to play. We don’t want to be painted in a corner.”
The refreshing aspect of the QOTSA/Goss partnership seemed to be that there was little preciousness involved: “There are no weird egos, I’m not going to try your idea, it has to be my idea. It’s easy to work with each other because we try each other’s ideas, and it doesn’t matter whose idea it is, if it’s not going to work, we’ll say so or ‘Dude, let’s do that!’ So it’s comfortable working with him. You know, it’s hard to bring somebody in there who doesn’t know what the band’s about and trying to throw ideas on top of something he knows nothing about.
“Obviously we didn’t want to make the same record twice,” explained Homme. “We wanted to have a lot of elements from the first one, but we wanted each song to move and be as diverse as we could get them. Whatever flavour Queens Of The Stone Age we want to play works. If we think it doesn’t suck, then we’ll turn it into a song. We wanted to have something that moved to us. We wanted it up and down, side to side, song to song.”
Asked yet again about the stoner-rock term, Homme explained: “I was at the meeting where they made that up, so, for me, it sounds like some fake marketing tool for people who are stoned enough to wish they were in Sabbath. It’s more a terminology for [critics] than me. I don’t use it, and I don’t need it. It doesn’t come up until I talk to journalists. The more difficult it is to define, the better it is for me.”
Was Homme worried about the critics’ probable reaction to the album? “Not everyone is going to like it, and we know that,” he said, smiling. “We’re really happy with it all. Hopefully this tour will open some more ears. It’s just a really different sound for right now, and I think people are looking for that.”
Barely had the ink dried on the Rated R CD sleeve than a second QOTSA-related album appeared – this time the debut album from Nick Oliveri’s Mondo Generator. Cocaine Rodeo was released by the small Southern Lord label in July. With a sleeve depicting Oliveri, cackling malevolently, arm-deep in a pile of bottles and a cocaine tube superimposed on him, the album seemed to promise many illicit thrills. A far more frenzied, less controlled record than Rated R, Cocaine Rodeo also featured Homme, Brant Bjork and ‘John G’ (a deliberately vaguely identified John Garcia) and thus became the closest artefact to a Kyuss reunion to date.
Nick Oliveri: “Kyuss broke up in 1995, and I had already left the band and I was playing in The Dwarves and Josh was playing in The Screaming Trees. You know, you leave and then you come back and you play together a few years later, your inspiration is different. Kyuss was a cool band, you know? Kyuss was a band that wasn’t supposed to get big. It was supposed to stay at a small level, and if there was any threat that it was going to get too big, you know, that’s pretty much why the band broke up! Kyuss was always the band that was afraid of, ‘Well, we can’t do that because, that’s not Kyuss. Kyuss wouldn’t do that.’ Different shit like that. Well, fuck, the song sounds good, let’s play it! ‘No, we can’t do that. People will think we’re sell-outs!’ What the fuck’s a sell-out? We’re not making any money! I’ve always wondered what that means – sell-out. Does that mean, if you make some money, you sold out? Fuck, I’m ready to, all right?”
The history of Cocaine Rodeo was a convoluted one, as drummer Bjork recalled: “About four years ago, Nick came out to the desert right before Josh started Queens Of The Stone Age, and he wanted to make a record. So he got Josh and I back together and we got into the studio. That would have been the first time Josh and I played and recorded since I left Kyuss, and it was definitely the first time Nick, Josh and I played together since Nick had left Kyuss – even before I had. It was kind of an emotional, trippy, weird experience, and we recorded some of these songs that Nick had. I think there were only about two or three songs we played.”
Oliveri’s album begins with ‘13th Floor’, a frantic punk workout with distorted vocals – not too dissimilar to ‘Tension Head’ or ‘Quick And To The Pointless’ – and ‘Shawnette’, a yelled, chaotic song that stops and starts on a dime with calculated violence. ‘Uncle Tommy’ is harsher still, with layers of guitars and vocals over a classic hardcore/thrash metal drum pattern, and while ‘Miss Mary Gets A Boob Job’ was more controlled – and at times even reminiscent of Oliveri’s day-job band – it’s still a punk song to the core.
‘Unless I Can Kill’ is a standard punk grind made grimly unforgettable by Oliveri’s incredibly aggressive vocals, a throat-shredding barrage of shrieks that would fit equally well in a black metal band. ‘Pigman’ takes the aggro down a notch despite the sheet-metal layers of guitar that surround the chorus, but ‘Simple Exploding Man (Extended Version)’ is back to the grind, with the guitar squeals lifted straight from ‘The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret’. The madness continues with ‘I Want You To Die’, a Minor Threat/Discharge-style thrash-punk anthem that seems to have surfaced from 1981, and ‘Dead Insects’, an atonal, almost freeform workout that flails insanely around before collapsing. Strangely enough, the title track is a pastiche of redneck rock without much to say, and ‘Another Tension Head’ (presumably a snide nod at the QOTSA tune) brings it all to a close in a hail of gibbered riffage. A weird album but one that complements the much more polished, melodic work of Queens perfectly.
Oliveri didn’t push the press bandwagon out too far for his solo release, but he did have time for some choice words on Mondo Generator. “I’ve been really busy,” he said, smirking. “It’s tough to get time off from Queens Of The Stone Age to do some side stuff. There will be time to do it – it’s just a matter of when! I had Cocaine Rodeo on the shelf in my room and I was looking at it one day, took it down and listened to it, and found that I really liked it! I said to myself, this deserves to be heard. It was all timing after that. I called my friend Greg who has Southern Lord Records and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll put it out!’ Next thing you know, here it is. It’s pretty much as simple as that… It was a good band to have together. We were really just psyched to have a chance to play – we just never put our session out or ever really did anything with it. I’d say it’s in-your-face, really heavy raw music. I’m not pulling any punches with Mondo Generator – I’m not trying to hide behind anything. If you’re in the mood for it, it’s a really great record to listen to.”
To clear up the confusion with songs of the same title on both the Queens and Mondo Generator albums, Oliveri said: “The first song on the Mondo disc, ‘13th Floor’, is ‘Tension Head’ on the QOTSA disc, but it’s a different version. I recorded that song three different times with three different drummers: the first version is the one on Mondo, the second version is with Alfredo who was the last drummer in Kyuss – and we never put that out – and the last version with Gene [Trautmann] on it is on Rated R.”
Nick appeared on the record under his own name as producer, but used his old Dwarves nickname Rex Everything for musicianly chores. The other pseudonymous musicians were Rob Oswald of Karma To Burn (‘Up N. Syder’) and Brent Malkus (‘Burnt Mattress’). “We change members a lot, add new life, we like to get our heads right,” Nick said, laughing. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that, anything to keep it new. A lot of times, live at shows, we change the songs up. With Queens we’ll play some Mondo songs. We change things and make them different – whatever keeps it new for us. It’s important to me to keep things new and fresh… Queens is going to keep me from doing a tour just as Mondo Generator in the short run. But like I said, with Queens we’re playing some of the Mondo songs in concert, so I get to do that side of the gig. It’ll be a while before I can even consider doing Mondo Generator live and then I’d have to actually consider getting a touring band together. If I ever do get four weeks off I might go out and do it, but then again, I might just say I’d really like the time off! It will happen, I just don’t know when.”
With Mondo in mind, the mix-and-match QOTSA live sets – presumably a hangover from the old Kyuss days, when any song from the band’s catalogue was ready to be performed at a moment’s notice – was a lifesaver for someone with a low-attention-span like Oliveri. As he said: “We do Desert Sessions songs live, we do a bunch of Queens songs, we do some Mondo songs, we really try and mix it up live and it is always a different set. We don’t do the same set twice, so whatever we need to add to the set to keep it new, we do that.”
In July 2000 Britain signalled its welcome to QOTSA when the band left the Kerrang! Awards with a Best International Newcomer award. After accepting the trophy surrounded by midget security guards, Oliveri told the press: “Step one for us was to make music that we would want to hear ourselves. If we’re not really into it, how is anyone else going to get it? That was kind of our outlook on the whole project as we went into it. Let’s make something for us, because if you don’t like it yourself, how is anyone else going to get where you’re coming from?”
Homme pondered the band’s new-found popularity: “Kyuss got noticed because it didn’t give a shit if anyone noticed it. It’s like huddling around something and pretty soon everyone crowds around because they wanna look at it. And it could be a piece of dog shit, but you’ve got a crowd of 500 people trying to look at it. Bands miss that, they scratch and they claw. We don’t do anything unless we’re asked to. I don’t wanna show up and go, ‘Can I please get into this club?’ I want someone to ask me. That attitude is the reason why it’s still fun. It’s like being a deliberate outsider. You invited the outsider in and now the outsider’s gonna fuck things up.”
Asked if he expected a wave of Queens imitators, Josh said, grinning: “Catch me if you can, motherfuckers. I can go anywhere now. Where are you gonna go? How are you gonna copy? It’s almost like a challenge to stay ahead now. But between Nick and what he brings to the table and what I bring to the table, you couldn’t get ahead of us. Some people may say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but I say, ‘Fuck you, copycat’… When I used to do demolition, I loved to break down walls, but I hated throwing the bricks in the dumpster. There’s always something that sucks mixed in with something you love. I don’t really want to talk to a bunch of people about our music. I guess my thing is I don’t want people to know; if I have a family, I don’t want people to know; if I take drugs, I don’t want people to know.
“Even though modern music is more lawless than ever, with people like Björk, Tom Waits, and Outkast, I think most bands play by this false set of rules that doesn’t exist – while we know that there aren’t rules. We don’t have to write everything. It doesn’t have to be always all us. It just has to be good.”
With fans equally attracted and repulsed by the two albums coming from the QOTSA camp, the band’s stint on the 2000 Ozzfest would have been strange enough – but with the musicians deliberately distancing themselves from the proceedings (“We’re not angry and we don’t rap,” stated Josh with enormous sarcasm at the start of many sets), the whole event became elevated to the level of the surreal. The experience was kept fresh by the revolving set that the band played and the fact that the Queens personnel had been augmented once more: “We just got a new lap steel electric piano player named Brendon [McNichol], from Masters Of Reality,” said Nick. “We’re constantly moving with new members to keep it fresh. If we’re playing a song and it feels right, then we’ll do what comes naturally instead of following the set-list.”
On the ritual moshing that typified the festival, Homme sighed and remarked: “Inevitably a pit takes place where the best seats in the house would be. So it’s like this big hole in the middle, right up front. What’s the point of that? It’s more like, if you guys are going to do a bunch of activity, can’t you just move around without having a bunch of hard-tails bounce off each other with their shirts off acting all angry? I guess we’re just not pissed off any more.”
Oliveri was more upbeat about the tour: “It’s going great, man. We’re almost halfway done, but we’re filling the off days with our own shows. It’s kind of like a day on and a day off thing. We don’t really like to take days off when we’re out, so it’s been cool… Some places are better than others. We go on at one-thirty in the afternoon, so everybody’s still waking up. If it’s a Monday or a Wednesday, people are still at work, but there’s some early birds that are out, drunk when we came on, still drunk when Ozzy plays!” Oliveri and his cohorts weren’t averse to a spot of hedonistic partying after their set, as he told the Canadian writer Martin Popoff: “Every night, really, there’s kind of an explosion. There’s really nothing I can [talk about] that wouldn’t get anybody in trouble. We always have a really good time. I think that gets us through touring and surviving out here. I’d hate touring if I didn’t get a little wild and a little out of myself, you know?”
However all this on-the-road fun could have its rougher side. Just prior to the Ozzfest in July, an incident at the Big Day Out Festival in London led to Oliveri’s arrest after a disagreement with the British band Terrorvision. The NME originally reported that a fight between the two bands began after Terrorvision objected to Homme’s band taking too much time to vacate the shared dressing room both bands were obliged to use on the day of the show. The music paper quotedTerrorvision’s press spokesperson as calling QOTSA “pissed-up American arseholes who couldn’t hold their lager”. After a scuffle, Oliveri was detained for two hours but then released without charge. Homme later told MTV News that although his band had been drinking, they were far from intoxicated and that the report should have read ‘pissed off’, not ‘pissed up’. “Being the band they are,” Homme said, “they hit us up for money. We didn’t want to pay them. We were sure we would have won in court, it was self-defence, but we had a gig the next night and figured it would be cheaper just to pay.” He also revealed that the two bands played together a few days later in Greece, sniggerering, “‘Terrifiedvision’ tried to get us booked into a different hotel.”
Rolling Stone reported an amusing incident occurring at one Ozzfest show where a drunken audience member approached the stage shrieking obscenities at Homme. The frontman looked down from the stage and taunted the heckler with, “What you don’t realise, you dumb fuck, is that I have a PA, but nobody can hear what you’re saying except me. This next song’s about fucking my new buddy’s girlfriend in the ass… Wait! Come back! Don’t get scared. I love you! We’re supposed to be having a good time.” Later, Homme remarked: “I don’t want that guy to buy the record. Some of the Ozzfest tech people went up to our tour manager during the set and said, ‘Do you wanna scare people, or you want them to like you?’ But they don’t understand. For every one boy that doesn’t like us, there’s two girls sitting behind them digging it. You don’t want every boy. You want their girlfriends, though.” The same disgruntled crowd member was later apologetic, as Josh added, “Our keyboardist ran into the guy from the audience who was yelling at me… The guy was like, ‘Tell your guitar player no hard feelings.’ Playing places like this, I wanna be nice, but then I wait for people to challenge me. I feel out of place, I guess. You want somebody to push the shiny red button. Maybe that’s foolish. I can never tell until it’s too late.”
Oliveri: “The biggest kind of thing that I like is about the size of a theatre, a small theatre. I really believe that anything over like 3,000 starts to get a bit like, I can’t see the band, and I’m a music lover who likes to go and see bands play live and if I can’t see a band playing on the stage, if I’m that far back, I won’t go. I’ll put the disc on my CD player and rock out at home. I can’t see doing that to your fans. I mean, we did Ozzfest but that wasn’t our thing, it was Ozzy’s – I’m more into smaller places. The more intimate the better, really. I do prefer the 1,500-sized clubs – they’re awesome, with some really good sound systems, and they’re just comfortable to see a band at.”
As the Ozzfest rolled to a close, Oliveri revealed that the band had been busy recording some new material for the benefit of their ravenous British fanbase. “We went into the studio and recorded three songs for England. We’ve got a bunch of new songs of our own, but we didn’t want to waste them as potential songs for the next record, so we did some covers we always wanted to do. We did The Kinks’ ‘Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy’ and ‘Who’ll Be The Next In Line?’*And then we did Romeo Void’s ‘Never Say Never’. That kind of throws the stoner-rock tag right out the door!”
Once more, studio experimentation had been the rule rather than the exception. Oliveri: “I played the kazoo, believe it or not – through a guitar amp. I miked the amp – all distorted – for the Romeo Void song, for the ‘Might like you better if we slept together’ line when it goes into the horn part. Well, I did it with kazoo, and if I didn’t tell you that, you probably wouldn’t even notice. It might come out in the States, but it will definitely be on import. We’re doing ‘Feelgood Hit Of The Summer’ as a single in England, because that’s what they want, and we wanted to do these kind of off-the-wall, punky B-sides for it. And there’ll be one new original called ‘You’re So Vague’, which was an out-take from the album. It didn’t necessarily not make it to the record – we just didn’t want to put it out yet.”
Having had some time to reflect, Josh was pensive on the subject of the metal-loving jocks who’d plagued him on the summer tour: “Ozzfest was gruelling in every way, shape, and form. But I had some good times too. It was definitely the hardest tour that I have ever been on, as far as, like, just a general state of well-being – mind and body. The crowd also… If there are these big guys that look at you like, ‘Who the fuck are these guys?’ my first reaction is to attack them. And if I ever have a heckler, I don’t mind. I enjoy adversarial situations like that. And this one guy in particular, we came out and haven’t even hit a note yet and he starts yelling, ‘Faggots,’ repeatedly at us. So I was like, I’m dealing with an idiot here. So I just thought to myself, ‘OK he’scalling me a faggot, so let’s just go with that.’ So by the fifth song, I had him so angry, because no one can hear what he’s saying but everyone can hear what I’m saying. So then he gets up to leave and I started to yell, ‘Don’t leave, my girl’s scared, please don’t leave me!’
“So after that day, our main goal was to offend as many people as possible. Which probably isn’t a good idea, but at the same time we felt that the people who did like us would understand… If someone is going to attack us or look like they’ll insult us while we’re on stage we’ll go after them. Once there was these two heavy-set girls that were making comments and directly giving off their opinion of how much they thought we sucked. We would go after them and say, ‘This next song goes out to all the ugly girls and I see a lot of you.’ The power of it all, they’d send this vibe to me and I’d send it back at 140,000 decibels. So when they would get up to leave, everyone would focus on them, because if you’re a heckler in a situation like that you’re making a big mistake. But that was our main concern with Ozzfest was that we didn’t want to be negative at all, because we’re just a bunch of happy guys.
“We’re almost trying to eliminate the pissed-off angry dudes who want to hurt everyone at the show. We want it to be guys and girls partying and being mellow. It’s supposed to be fun – not, ‘Why do I have a bloody fuckin’ nose?’”
Homme’s wider viewpoint was made plain when talking about his attitude to crowds: “Whatever scene or clique we’re looking at, it makes me go, ‘Ugh,’ to see 20,000 identical people; goth people, metal people, whatever. They start to look like a herd; I want to see cowboys on the outside of them. I knew that we were kind of ginger on the palate for Ozzfest, and that was our one and only time doing something like that. I don’t think we ever want to play ball like that again, because that almost destroyed our band. For the first time, we were just bitter and pissed off. But in a lot of ways, it helped shape some of the ideas of this record. Like, don’t spend any time on things you don’t like. Spend time on things you love. Let them get your energy. On that tour, the only fire that got fed was the negative one.”
So much for the Ozzfest. In the wake of the release of Rated R, which brought Queens their first real taste of success on a commercial and critical level, Homme was often asked what he thought of his sometime Kyuss colleagues’ subsequent careers, just as they were asked what they thought of the remarkable progress of QOTSA. Referring to John Garcia’s new band Unida, Homme mused: “It’s almost like the family has grown and we’re all still friends too. Like fingers sprouting from the meat of the hand, if you know what I mean. But that seems pretty natural to me. But maybe not to others… it’s like new chapters to our saga. I’m looking forward to hearing some new stuff from Unida.”
Brant Bjork, who had achieved cult status by this point with Fu Manchu, was nothing but positive about his old bandmates’ success: “I respect any radical direction change in any band. And coming from the guys, it wasn’t a complete surprise. I’ve known these guys half my life and I’m very familiar with what they’re into… I love the first record, that one is amazing. I’m excited for the guys. They deserve it. They’re a good band.”
The subject of a Kyuss reunion became a recurring theme. A persistent rumour had been doing the rounds for some time that an unknown promoter had offered them a significant sum of money – some said up to a million dollars – to re-form. Homme confirmed that the rumour was true: “Yes, it was a lot of money. It was six weeks in Europe to headline all the major festivals, and I mean all of them. They pay you about a hundred thousand plus to headline those things. But it was never about money, and there’s no reason to make it about money now… it was enough to set up everyone and change everyone’s life for the next bunch of years. So when that came about, it was a proud moment for us. I wish all the naysayers were there to hear that phone call. And we just went like, ‘Nope.’ Everyone declined. And everyone stopped and said, ‘Should we?’ Everyone went home, slept on it, woke up and in the morning everyone was like, ‘I can’t…’ I felt proud that this was a testament to who we are. Anyone can say that I sold out or something like that. But I don’t care about that any more. I just see something like that as a poison. It killed Kyuss… I play music, I make records that are real. If you can tell, then you can tell. If you think I’m full of shit, then there is nothing I can do.”
Had Homme thought of the thousands of Kyuss fans who would give their eye teeth to see such a reunion? “I do realise that,” he answered, “but it would also take… we were talking about what it would take for us to do something like that. We would want to rehearse for three months till we were set in fighting form, because we would want to be like a well-oiled machine. In Kyuss, especially in the last two years, we were on the road and road ready. We could jam any of our songs at a moment’s notice. And secondly, we wondered about how it would look if we were to get back together. And when the subject of money came up, it’s Kyuss, so we’d have to fully disclose what we were about. And in the end we didn’t like the way we looked, it would’ve been better if we did it for free. It would’ve just been a shame to put the cherry on top of a sundae. It would’ve been a cherry on a sundae made of shit. So that’s why I think Kyuss will never get back together because there’s no situation around that would make it correct.
“Someone handed me a picture of John Garcia and I from 1993 yesterday. I just sat and looked at it for 20 minutes without saying a word, you know. And I never thought all of this would come of it… We never even planned on leaving the desert, to tell you the truth. So it has been nothing but a give and something that I have been very thankful for. I play music for a living. I wouldn’t trade it or sell it out for the world. And I just feel lucky, and it is something that I’m not going to fuck over now… because this is supposed to be about pleasure and digging it. And sometimes people get so attached and get so hostile about the music people listen to. And they miss the fact that it’s something out there for people to enjoy. And it’s also about listening to people out there who are passionate about what they do, which is something that we are.”
Times were changing, it seemed: Josh also revealed that his choice of guitar had changed at last, although his original love would always be for the old Ovation he had found in a record store in Northern Idaho: “This shop had just a banjo, an acoustic guitar and this black Ovation hanging on the wall. I hadn’t seen another one like it, and didn’t for another 17 years, until about six months ago when I saw my second one. Apparently there were less than 1,000 made, and it was at the end of the run of Ovations when they stopped making electric guitars, it’s not even in their catalogue. I think guitars are the same as the sound for me, in that I always want to have a thing that someone else doesn’t have… The first new guitars I’ve ever played are made by this company called Maton, a little Australian company who have been around since 1946. They’re this small company who make everything from Australian wood, by hand, so their custom shop is also their assembly line, y’know? They don’t ship away for parts and they only make one shape of electric. Things like that attract me, y’know? I think that’s the fantasy of guitar players, to find that guitar in a little dusty guitar shop and then be like, ‘I’ve found it, don’t tell anyone!’”
Had Homme ever damaged his precious Ovation in all those years of touring with Kyuss and the Queens? “Well, let me just say it’s been broken three times and I’ve thrown three punches – I’ve never broken it, but others have. And a lot of my favourite guitar players, like Willie Nelson, play the same guitar all the time. I was a huge Black Flag fan, and Greg Ginn always played the same Dan Armstrong. My black Ovation doesn’t leave my sight when it’s on tour and if someone picks it up I go fuckin’ crazy, y’know? I think the bottom line is that you need to do something pretty bad to me to get me annoyed, and messin’ with my guitar would be it.”
The news came in autumn 2000 that when the Queens’ own tour had finished, they would set off again in October and November in support of the Foo Fighters, the band fronted by their old friend and ally Dave Grohl. “I think some of the young, radio-friendly Foo Fighters fans will be scared, but overall I think it’ll be a much warmer embrace from an audience for us,” said Homme. “I think we have more in common with Dave and his past than any of the bands at Ozzfest, thank God. Ozzfest was nothing but mullets, Budweiser, and free sunburns for everyone. I’ve never seen so many devil horns in my life.” Asked how the support slot had come about, Homme dead-panned, “I threatened [Grohl] with a Smith & Wesson nickel-plated 9 mm… He’s always been a big supporter, and he’s afraid of heavy firearms.”
“We’ve been friends of Dave for years,” Oliveri added, “and he has always been pretty supportive. One of the good things about Foo Fighters is that they always take bands that they like out on tour, and it has been good for us playing to their audience. Quite a lot of them seem to be aware of us and know a few of the songs, which is encouraging… We like to keep busy, so this year has been good. We toured for 15 months on the first album, and we don’t like to be sitting about at home, there are at least another eight months of touring to do with Rated R.”
The tour would tie in neatly with the release of the second Rated Rsingle, ‘Feelgood Hit Of The Summer’ – although the song was already causing some controversy in corporate boardrooms due to its lyrics. “We’re getting this feedback that lots of people won’t even play it,” said Homme. “There’s no cuss words, and there’s no endorsement – in fact the only other word is a ‘no’,” says Homme. “They don’t look at it in a very positive light.” It emerged that the giant Wal-Mart retail chain had refused to stock the album unless the band removed the offending song – but relented after Homme pointed out that the CD was already titled after a censorship warning. A similar row had collapsed after the release of the first Queens album, with its bikini-bottom cover: “There’s no nudity, but we got banned all over the place,” recalled Josh. “Of course, then the album started to sell, and then they were like, forget it… It’s fun to push buttons. If you’re not making someone pick sides, it’s not art. It’s only really good if they don’t know until it’s too late.”
Asked if the band were surprised at the success of ‘Feelgood Hit’, Oliveri enthused that it was Britain which had understood the song best: “You guys are so cool, you got it instantly. With every album we’re shit at choosing singles. We just say, every track could be a single, do what the fuck you want. In the States it was banned immediately: it was weird realising that this song people over in Europe were requesting and hearing all the time was forbidden material in the US. You can say the word ‘cocaine’ in America as long as you follow it up with a stern moral statement. Just the word ‘cocaine’ without a government approved health warning next to it is practically illegal in the States. We just said it out flat, and everyone in the US just thought we were being evil, that just because we were being honest we were somehow Satanists intent on enslaving children to our dark underlord. Over here people were singing that song and saying, ‘That sounds like my average weekend’!”
A compilation of Kyuss songs entitled Muchas Gracias appeared in November 2000 and has been the last Kyuss fanfare to date. Fans enjoyed its inclusion of live tracks and B-sides, but the players themselves had gone on to such different arenas, it almost seemed irrelevant. As Homme pointed out, “We were always a musician’s band anyway. That’s why nobody has ever heard of my favourite band, The Frogs, because only musicians trade their tapes. We didn’t want to be in a successful band, we were just a bunch of kids and somebody asked us if we wanted to make an album and we thought it was cool. Somebody asked us if we wanted to go to England and we thought that was cool too. Kyuss split because the band was starting to go some place we didn’t want it to go – we were becoming successful.”
* There’s a valid argument pointing out how the nu-metal scene was usurped by bands like Queens Of The Stone Age, and the rapid rise of garage-rock bands such as The White Stripes, The Hives, The Datsuns and so on, that lies beyond this book’s scope and because insufficient time has elapsed for a true perspective to form (E-mail me in 2010 and I’ll have an answer for you!)
* Both songs were the respective A-and B-side of a Kinks single in 1965.