The riff Josh Homme called the stupidest of his career: “The dumbest stuff ever”
Arguably one of the masters of stoner rock riffs, you’d think that Josh Homme would consider a number of his guitar parts to have been stupid on account of the marijuana-induced haze in which they were written. However, like many musicians who have toyed with mind-altering substances, flashes of brilliance are always bound to emerge due to the way in which the drugs are supposedly capable of unlocking different parts of the mind.
With that said, some of his riffs are frankly the works of a genius, and there’s no denying that there’s bundles of imagination in his works with Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss and even on the single epynomous album he created alongside Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones as Them Crooked Vultures.
In fact, you’d think that playing alongside Led Zeppelin’s bassist and the Nirvana drummer, undisputedly two legends of rock music, would push his abilities to the next level, and there are a handful of tracks with solid riffs that demonstrate Homme being on top form on this underrated and overlooked album from 2009. The opening track, ‘No One Loves Me & Neither Do I’, is packed with as much badass swagger as one might expect from a trio of this calibre, while ‘Elephants’ has taut instrumental interplay and ‘Warsaw’ is the band letting loose and going all out into prog territory.
In an interview with NME in the lead up to their self-titled album’s release, Grohl revealed that it was sometimes mind-blowing to hear what Homme would come up with in the studio, but at the same time, there were some strange elements that he couldn’t wrap his head around. “I have no problem calling one of my best friends a total fucking genius,” he told the publication, “But he’ll come to the studio with something that you think is the most ridiculous piece of shit you’ve ever heard in your life.”
Despite this, Homme stated that it was the contrary, and played down his supposed genius by saying that he was having to challenge himself in some of the most unexpected ways to get the best out of both of his bandmates during writing and recording sessions.
In response to Grohl’s remarks, Homme explained to the magazine what drove him to write a particular riff on the album that he retrospectively looks at and laughs. “I was trying to think how I can take him to a new level, and then I finally realised I have to play the dumbest stuff ever,” he recalled. “My granpappy always used to say, ‘If you can’t outsmart ’em, out dumb ’em.’ That’s where ‘Caligulove’ came from. The riff in that song is amongst the stupidest I’ve ever done.”
By the album’s standards, ‘Caligulove’ may have one of the more inane riffs that Homme presented, but it’s far better than most are able to muster up throughout an entire career, and with that being one of the record’s weakest moments, it goes to show that all three musicians were performing at their peak for Them Crooked Vultures. While a follow-up is yet to arrive after 16 years, it remains a fascinating side-project from all three, and one that they can be proud of having combined to make.
