Nick Oliveri slams Josh Homme over the block of Kyuss band name
Nick Oliveri and Josh Homme are best known for their collaboration in the first permanent lineup of Queens of the Stone Age, but that’s not actually where the pair first played together. The two were both teenagers in Palm Desert, California, far from the major cities of San Diego and Los Angeles. With their friends John Garcia and Brant Bjork, they started playing in a band called Katzenjammer, which later evolved into Kyuss.
Homme, Garcia, and Bjork were consistent members of Kyuss for most of their existence. Oliveri left the group before the release of their sophomore album Blues for the Red Sun and the band permanently disbanded in 1995. Homme started Queens of the Stone Age the following year after a brief period touring with Screaming Trees, with Oliveri joining in 1998 before being kicked out by Homme in 2004.
Oliveri contributed backing vocals to the Queens of the Stone Age track ‘If I Had a Tail’ from 2013’s …Like Clockwork, but it appears as though the pair aren’t necessarily on great terms these days. That can probably be inferred from Oliveri’s comments stating that Homme is blocking the rest of the members from performing under the name Kyuss, which he stated in a recent interview.
“[The fans] wanted us to play. I wish we were able to play. But I don’t have any ownership or stake in the name,” Oliveri recently revealed. “[Bjork] came up with the name; he didn’t have ownership in it. He left the band at one point. The existing members registered the name. So it’s just as simple as that.”
“I kind of feel a lot of different ways about it. I feel like why do you wanna own the name if you wanna kill the band?” Oliveri wondered. “Let us run with it and have a good time. We’re playing [the songs] with all respect to the music that we can, as close to it as we can. And the fans, we owe it to ’em.”
Oliveri, Bjork, and Garcia reunited under the moniker Kyuss Lives!, but the band were forced to change their name to Vista Chino after Homme and former bassist Scott Reeder filed a lawsuit against the band using the Kyuss name. Vista Chino hasn’t been active since 2014, but if Oliveri had his way, the members would likely be touring as Kyuss right now.
Homme has previously discussed his reluctance to resurrect Kyuss. “The offers come in all the time. They’re getting more and more expensive, and more and more elaborate,” Homme explained in 2007. “The money is crazy, but I’ve never been tempted – I don’t really care about the money, I never have. That’s not what Kyuss was about, so to punctuate the end of our sentence with that would be blasphemy. Kyuss fans are so fuckin’ rad, they’re fuckin’ badass – but to me, reunions are just not necessary.”
“It’s not what it was, it’s what it is, and Kyuss was a really magical thing – and if you weren’t there, well, you weren’t,” Homme added. “That’s just the luck of the draw. I don’t feel the urge to do it for somebody who didn’t have the opportunity to see us, or just didn’t take the opportunity to see us. I’ll let other bands alter their great legacies. Kyuss has such a great history that it would be a total error. I like that nobody saw Kyuss, and that it was largely misunderstood. That sounds like a legend forming to me. I’m too proud of it to rub my dick on it.”
For his part, Bjork claimed that Homme’s need for control broke up the band originally and eventually led to the lawsuit that caused the reunited lineup to stop using the Kyuss Lives! moniker. “Josh and I were the creative force within the band and after the completion of our second record, Blues for the Red Sun, we developed an opposing view on how the band should exist and operate,” Bjork told Rolling Stone in 2012. “In 1992 Josh discovered publishing, which is the financial revenue stream for songwriting. After that, he wanted to write all the songs. As a drummer I couldn’t make him play my songs.”
“I wasn’t going to compromise my heart and soul and play drums for Josh to make money in a band I started,” Bjork added. “So I left the band. I was a confused, angry and sad 19-year-old idealist who sacrificed my love of my band for what I believed in. Two-and-a-half years later, Josh would break up the band after John (Garcia) confronted him about the same thing; his need to control the band for personal gain.”
Check out Oliveri’s comments on Homme blocking the Kyuss name down below.
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