Josh Homme’s finest work, according to Dave Grohl
In these dark days of technological overload and genres like bedroom pop, it’s easy to forget that music is a live and living beast. It isn’t a data file, and its only purpose until very recently was to be performed—to bring people together and shine a spotlight on a hero. Josh Homme and Dave Grohl might now be credited as great songwriters, but their education on this front came from braving a baying crowd.
As the sage-like Grohl said when he was asked what advice he’d give to up-and-coming bands, “Go play live. Just play live.” Time on the stage is irreplaceable. As Grohl continued: “I don’t understand the industry. I don’t understand where music is headed. I don’t really understand technology. I just know when you walk into a club and you see a band that blows you away, you are going to follow that band.”
The bands that have blown him away most are usually fronted by his old pal Josh Homme. “When they hit the stage,” he said about Queens of the Stone Age, “they’re the best rock band in the world, like nobody even gets close.” Considering the plethora of impressive acts Grohl has worked with and the pedestal upon which he places performing, this is perhaps the greatest accolade he could bestow on another group.
“There’s amazing live bands who write powerful songs like Rage Against the Machine,” he continued. “There’s amazing live bands that can make an audience go like this [makes mildly spasmodic hand gestures] like The Prodigy, but for musicality and as a musician, you sit and watch Queens of the Stone Age and you’re like, ‘That’s not fair, what the fuck?’ like everybody in the band is a fucking badass and they know it.”
That searing badassery was born amid testing times in the desert when Homme was just a youngster in his first band, Kyuss. Originally, the genre the band propagated was known as generator rock. This name derived from the fact that they would play parties frequented by biker gangs out in the Palm Desert of California, where the only source of electricity was petrol-powered generators.
At these raucous events, small hardy groups would gather and as guitarist Josh Homme remarks: “That was the shaping factor for the band. There’s no clubs here, so you can only play for free. If people don’t like you, they’ll tell you. You can’t suck.” So, the group played hard and loud. A brand-new sound emerged, one forged by the setting, environment and ferociously cool atmosphere.
In Grohl’s book, this wasn’t just the birth of a genre, but the source of a work that Homme has never topped. “Oh my God! This album changed my life,” Grohl said when championing Blues for the Red Sun as one of his favourite albums of all time. “I was 24, and something about the grooves and the guitar sounds and the drums and the bass made this new noise that kinda sounded familiar like you’d heard it in the early Seventies, but you’d never heard it that good. They reinvented this genre of music, ’70s hard rock.”
The opening drone to ‘Thumb’ almost sounds like the aural equivalent of a desert mirage. You could picture the somnambulant hum being penetrated by a Chevrolet Caprice shrieking through the dustbowl screaming about bat country or the staggering footsteps of Harry Dean Stanton in a dogeared baseball cap, but instead, you get the slow slutty guitar lick of Homme and find yourself embalmed in the miasma of sultry hot desert air all the same.
He might have mutated this in myriad ways over the years, but for Grohl, Homme achieved his masterpiece with this opening howl.
