The “best” band Josh Homme thought would never be famous
Comfort has practically been the enemy of Josh Homme since day one.
He never liked the idea of making the same album over again, and even when he was in Kyuss, he felt that he needed to end the project to make sure that nothing got too complacent. He only wanted the chance to make music that had a little bit more adventure to it, and that only came from listening to other bands throw caution to the wind whenever they made some of their greatest records.
But for as heavy as Queens of the Stone Age became during their time together, Homme didn’t want to have only one kind of sound throughout his career. He had cornered the market on his brand of ‘robot rock’ when the band first got started, but when you look at every one of their albums, each of them felt like a new creative endeavour to see what the hell they could get away with every single time they started a new song.
And despite how heavy they sounded, they never considered themselves overtly metal or anything. They were more interested in following in the footsteps of the hardcore punk bands that they loved as kids, and if Greg Ginn had been able to approve of what they had done, they would have been able to sleep easy at night. But the rest of the world had a different idea for where music was going to go.
For the longest time, Homme was making songs that were practically designed not to be listened to by the mainstream, but the alternative scene was already bubbling under as far back as the 1980s. There would be the odd band that would become one of the biggest acts in the world overnight, but while R.E.M. and Pixies still were on the fringes of society, Homme was taken aback the first time that he heard Nirvana breakthrough.
Because, really, he didn’t see how a band like them could. That’s not to say that they were bad; far from it. Kurt Cobain was making some of the greatest songs that the underground world had ever heard, and even though Homme loved every second of what they were doing while they were still signed to Sub Pop, he couldn’t have imagined that the rest of the world would get on board once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took over the world.
No one had seen a rise like Nirvana had, and Homme couldn’t help but be proud that a band that eclectic was able to get on the charts, saying, “A couple of years later, I got an advance copy of Nevermind. I was raised on Black Flag and the Cramps; I had always thought, ‘This is the best shit ever, and no one’s going to listen to it.’ Nevermind proved that I was completely wrong about that. I was so stoked.”
Getting over that line was one thing, but the real key to Nirvana’s success was that it levelled out the playing field. No one at the majors knew what worked and what didn’t anymore, so now it was easier for some members of the underground to end up breaking through. Butthole Surfers wouldn’t have had a prayer at the time, but since Cobain said that he liked them, we now live in a world where a song like ‘Pepper’ managed to become a chart-topping hit from a band called BUTTHOLE SURFERS.
That kind of move simply didn’t happen before Nevermind came out, and if Cobain could lead a revolution like that, Homme figured that anything was possible as long as he had the right idea. No one would have fathomed that Queens of the Stone Age was going to become the biggest band in the world, but the whole reason why they worked was that Homme followed his muse just like Cobain did.
