‘Feel Good Hit’: Which drugs did Josh Homme actually take?
It’s a story far too good to be true, but we do at least have the word of Josh Homme that it happened, for everything that it might be worth. The story goes that in 2007, Queens of the Stone Age were tapped up by a friend of theirs to play a private concert at the place they were staying for a while.
They get halfway through their first song of the set, the narcotic shopping list known as ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’, before the power is cut to the stage, and they’re rushed out of the building by security. This is because the band were performing at their friend’s rehab facility.
I must stress that Josh Homme comes straight from the “print the legend” school of rock history. This is a man who let the world believe that it was a botched knee surgery that caused him to die on the table for a few minutes in 2009, rather than the true, and much more understandable reason that it was a bout with MRSA caused by drug use. If all we have is Josh Homme’s word for that something happened, then there’s a reason to doubt it.
Especially because, as befitting a man who wrote a song where eight of the nine words in it are “nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol, C-C-C-cocaine”, his recall of certain events may not entirely be trustworthy. It’s true; part of Josh Homme’s fascination with rock ‘n’ roll history and tradition is his reputation for snorting, drinking, and tripping on anything and everything he can get his hands on.
Neither is this anything the band have been particularly keen on keeping a secret, which is, after all, a ‘Lost Art’ if you ask Homme himself. However, the ginger Elvis has been as open about having chemical assistance with his art as Willie Nelson has. This was the guy who joked on BBC Radio 1 during the daytime about producing an entire Arctic Monkeys album while off his nut on Peyote. Not for nothing did he name a track on their seminal 2000 album Rated R.
The trouble is that anyone can have that cavalier, libertine attitude towards having a prodigious drug habit, but it’ll always come back to bite you. For one thing, it’ll make you a total pain to deal with, as Royal Blood singer Mike Kerr said in an interview with Radio X. He recounted an experience he had when touring with Queens, one that was probably deployed as a funny anecdote but just becomes sad in the cold light of day.
Kerr said, “I can’t go anywhere near [Homme] without having an unbelievable amount of tequila in my body. I did hide from him once because I could hear him coming and I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m gonna have to do more tequila,’ so I hid in the toilets of the dressing room.” As Homme’s health issues worsened later in the 2010s, he seemingly began making the steps to get clean. He reportedly left rehab in 2023 and has been sober ever since. Knowing his sense of humour, if he was to play a live set during that stint, I’d imagine he’d still open with ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’.
