Queens of the Stone Age Album Art Without Text
This is a feature written for Classic Rock a few years ago when QOTSA released Lullabies To Paralyze. Josh Homme actually lives up to the hype and is ane of the coolest guys on Globe; he'southward in the room with Dennis Hopper, David Carradine and Evel Knevil.
Offstage equally well equally on the guy has charisma. He likewise has that quality of being able to hash out anything from the merits of pickled onion chips (what the yanks call crisps, apparently) to swell underrated albums like The Groundhogs' Thank Christ For the Bomb and ever accept you thinking 'Damn, I wish I had said that'.
Lullabies To Paralyze, the fourth Queens Of The Stone Age album, entered the US charts at number v and the Uk charts at 4 and is already on the way to outstripping its million-selling predecessor Songs For The Deaf.
Reviews in the mainstream printing – the broadsheets in particular – were almost universally positive, even ecstatic, while the stone and metal mags gave information technology a much frostier reception. In that location'south a sense that some fans and critics feel betrayed by the management in which the band has travelled but also a sense that others outside the narrow self-imposed stoner stone ghetto are but discovering them.
If anyone regards the accessibility of recent Queens albums every bit a 'sell out' then Josh Homme isn't concerned.
" I wanted to take people with me and make records that were like a mix record that you would make for a friend. And this anthology is the first time I feel that we've really achieved that. It's an amalgam of things learned on the commencement 3 records," he says.
Information technology'south not merely the music: information technology'due south Homme'south new status as a celebrity that riles them also as his much publicised sacking of Queens co-founder and bass player Nick Oliveri final year.
" We're gonna accept detractors: there's gonna be some people, you know, there's nothing that we could do that will have away from their maniacal readiness to assault with Nick gone," he says resignedly. "Nosotros could have been like a fucking Slayer record and they'd be like 'Pshaw! Pretty lightweight, huh?' But you know, I implore them to eat balls!"
Queens has e'er been a ring with a revolving door policy for its members and to some extent it is that fluidity and uncertainty that has ever lent vitality to the ring.
"I experience like the more nebulous Queens of the Stone Age is – from people who play on the anthology, to the embrace art, to the name of the album, to the proper name of the ring – the more liberty exists for us to change, should we experience the need," says Homme.
Besides equally a core that includes Homme, A Perfect Circle guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, former Danzig drummer Joey Castillo and bassist Alain Johannes (replacing Oliveri), guests on the album included Polly Harvey, Garbage singer Shirley Manson and ZZ Height's Billy Gibbons.
" We've got Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top in the room playing guitar and singing harmonies with Marking Lanegan . I mean God, how often does that happen? I was similar wearing diapers during the recording," Homme enthuses.
Old Screaming Trees frontman Marker Lanegan joined the band just before Songs For The Deaf and while he reportedly left after the recording of the new anthology, he has popped upwards at several shows on the band's European and U.s.a. dates.
Oliveri striking back, claiming that the original intention of the band had been compromised. "The concept was simple," Oliveri said on his website. "A rock band: selfless, mindless, ego-free, unprotected, about danger, sex and no balderdash rock and roll. You know what happens when a pure and original rock band gets polluted, poisoned by hunger for ability and by control issues? Things get really out of control.
"The strongest leaders are chosen by their followers, non self-appointed. The best frontmen are chosen by their fans. And whatever happened to loyalty?"
And then, just a few weeks later on this, Oliveri and Homme were spotted together at a gig. Oliveri then started telling everyone who would listen that he really really wanted back into Queens; he admitted that he had "fucked up" and was prepared to do annihilation to repossess his old job.
"I told him terminal fourth dimension I was hanging out with him, 'If anything falls through and you need somebody, you know where your bass player is, dude — yous know where the bass histrion for that band is. And then pick up the telephone,'" he told Billboard mag. "It own't about a money gig thing for me – I know which band I play bass in."
Rumours abounded that he had been sacked for his penchant for party chemicals(something denied past Homme) with Oliveri himself claiming that he had left because Josh had sacked Mark Lanegan without telling anyone.
" Mark wasn't sacked," insists Homme. "It just then happened that the recording of the new album coincided with the release of Mark'due south solo record ( Bubblegum ) and he wanted to go off and promote that."
Homme further claimed that it was the band themselves who had been backside a campaign of disinformation, spreading rumours about the divergence of Lanegan. And so if Lanegan wasn't sacked, why would Oliveri leave if this wasn't the example? If anyone was in on the 'joke' so surely it was he?
Fifty-fifty now, almost a twelvemonth on, the reasons are unclear and when pressed on the signal, Homme retreats behind vagueness and a professed – and no doubt very genuine – affection for the man. Like Sid Brutal, Oliveri'south part in Queens was more than simply his ability to play a few basslines: he was in many means the soul of the ring. No matter how serious things got – and with the addition of the gravel voiced Lanegan to the ring in that location was definitely a dark counterweight to the lighter songs of Josh Homme – the fact that in that location was a bald guy with a beard playing bass stark naked tended to stop things from getting too A Level. Offstage he was fond of a small-scale sherry later on dinner, as it were. 1 await at him and you knew that he was a by principal at lighting his own farts.
While nobody doubts that he could be a royal pain in the arse to accept effectually 24/seven, Nick remains a pop guy with fans, and with other bands and with all the members of QOTSA.
" Well considering Nick is the realest motherfucker in rock'n'roll," says Josh. "There's Lemmy , and so there's…I dunno, I'g scouting around for somebody in stone right at present, a gimmicky, man, that is as undeniably…(words fail) I love him, human."
But would y'all have him dorsum in the band?
" I never say never. Simply I'm also the kind of guy that will always stand on his own 2 feet and become upwardly when he'due south knocked down. The just time I won't get up is when I'one thousand dead. And then we all need to stand, because that's what I'thousand virtually. And Nick is that fashion to."
All this raises the question as to whether Queens Of The Stone Age is a band or Josh Homme plus some musicians. He thinks hard: "I think this is the virtually collaborative record that I've ever made – nevertheless The Desert Sessions, which is ONLY everybody. Songs For The Deaf I made more or less by myself and that experience was not skillful for me because it was similar being left alone. We worked with an outsider on Songs For The Deaf and the first thing he said was ' I wanna written report your vibe so I tin perfect it'. And I was like…FUCK! So after he was fired information technology was all well-nigh trying to get back to where we were at originally."
Nevertheless, that illustrates that while you're not exactly a control freak, you practise similar to call the shots and say who is in and who is out.
" I think people have a perception that I steer the ship like a Nazi general and that that is the nearly of import role. But it'southward non. It'southward a whole family of artists that includes Chris Goss , Ween , Alain Johannes . And my role includes a lot of the stuff that sucks. Nosotros accept a saying in the ring: You fire yourself, but I tell you lot."
Maybe there would be fewer detractors were it not for Homme'south illustrious stone'n'scroll past.
It's said that although in their twenty-four hour period The Velvet Underground only sold a few thou albums, everyone who bought a copy was inspired to go out and grade a band of their own. The same could be said of Kyuss.
Formed in 1990 by vocalist John Garcia, guitarist Homme, bassist Oliveri, and drummer Brant Bjork, Kyuss (named subsequently a character from Dungeons & Dragons) played a number of legendary 'desert jams' in and around their domicile boondocks of Palm Desert, California.
"Sometimes they were so beautiful that y'all've never seen anything like it," recalls Josh. "Sometimes someone was firing a shotgun on acid or some Mexican gang members were throwing someone onto the blaze."
At ane show, Oliveri was then Taken by the mood that he smashed up his bass at the end of the 2nd vocal and didn't have a spare or some other i that he could infringe. Doh!
Their 1991 debut Wretch was poor, but the follow up Blues For The Red Lord's day – produced by Masters Of Reality frontman Chris Goss – is a classic slab of space rock, blues and classic metal. Lost in the maelstrom of grunge and the death throes of big hair metal, neither Blues nor its equally good major characterization follow up Welcome To Heaven Valley registered much outside of a small simply vociferous clique of fanatical fans.
They were a truly awe inspiring live ring, just the tensions within the band between Oliveri (who left and was replaced by ex-Obsessed bassist Scott Reeder) and then between Garcia and Homme meant that they were not destined for the long haul.
" I felt that in Kyuss we were so fiercely defending something that when we looked upward we said 'Fuck!' and realised that we were painted into a corner of our ain making," says Josh. "I loved Kyuss, I wouldn't change a moment of my time in that band but I left because I loved it and I wanted to preserve it past destroying it."
The dissolution of Kyuss in 1995 resulted in a confused period for Josh: he relocated to Seattle where he joined The Screaming Trees as 2d guitarist. By 1997 he had rekindled his friendship with Nick Oliveri (who had been playing in the legendary sleaze-punk ring the Dwarves under the name Rex Everything) and Alfredo Hernandez, who briefly replaced Brant Bjork as Kyuss drummer in the ring's dying days. They returned to the Palm Desert region and created what became the earliest manifestation of Queens Of The Stone Historic period.
It was an incredible U-plough for Homme: where Kyuss was – even during their short tenure with Elektra records – a defiantly hugger-mugger band, the kickoff self-titled self-financed Queens Of the Stone Age anthology had a ravenous eye on the mainstream. To this day Kyuss has a devoted posthumous cult following and for many of these true believers, the MTV-friendly approach of Queens Of the Stone Age is apostasy. From the get-get, Josh has taken a perverse please in rubbing the purists up the incorrect way: fifty-fifty the choice of proper name with its allusions to 50s Roger Corman b-pictures on one hand and Freddie Mercury et al on the other is only as camp as a pinkish camp for Shirley Bassey impersonators on every level.
"It'll be interesting if they can say the name 'Queens of the Stone Age' to their friends," Homme said at the fourth dimension, significant the "homophobic rednecks" he used to encounter at Kyuss shows, the thickos who started using the discussion "gay" as a full general derogatory term.
Josh admits to a slight unease at his new status as a 'celebrity': people who have never heard a notation of Queens Of The Rock Age's music at present know him as part of that vague aristocracy of people who are famous for being famous. The fact that he is part of a 'rock couple' with Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle helps to keep him in the gossip columns.
" That'due south the part that's so hard," he says. "It's only good for collaborating with other artists and for getting a table in a restaurant. My personality is not geared for information technology. I feel like I requite enough through the music and if you lot want extra, yous're not going to become information technology without a fight. I don't like people knowing about me. Some things are private…y'know, fuck off"
He has yet to smash a camera or attack an reporter from 1 of those Celebrities Behaving Desperately shows. He is enlightened that intrusions into his private life go with the chore: "I'g not lament considering I understand that. Come across, the 'suck' role of being a musician is extremely small. The 'suck' part of being a roofer is extremely big. I've done both things. I went from a hard working job to working hard at this job and I sympathise and remember that. I just beloved to play and I love people and to me things have just got more unproblematic every bit time goes on."
It's e'er ironic, particularly at he moment when the A list of rock is so sorely depleted – only Metallica, U2 and REM are bigger, with Foo Fighters, Velvet Revolver and Audioslave on an even par – that Queens Of The Stone Age should be taking brickbats for being successful. The pitiful truth is that the purists and the truthful believers need a ring like Queens more than than they will always need them.
" I doubt that some of our detractors would take the assurance to practise what nosotros've washed, considering it's not easy. I retrieve you have to humble yourself at the altar of rock'n'roll. You put the music first and realise that you're not entitled to play music. It's a luxury, a souvenir, you've got to exist actually careful. You spit in the face of music and you will be gone. Music is a whole series of steep stairs on the way up just it'due south a fireman's pole on the style down…don't impact the pole."
mitchellpuzed1938.blogspot.com
Source: https://tommyudo.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/queens-of-the-stone-age/
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