Revisit Queens of the Stone Age play ‘Songs for the Dead’ at Glastonbury Festival with Dave Grohl
It was a brief and magical time for Queens of the Stone Age. After two albums of rotating members, the main duo of singer/guitarist Josh Homme and bassist/singer Nick Oliveri had found two legendary musicians who were ready to join the band’s ranks. The first was Mark Lanegan, the iconic frontman of grunge gods Screaming Trees, who would contribute to songwriting duties and occasionally perform lead vocals. The other was former Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighters frontman, Dave Grohl.
Grohl had picked up some occasional side gigs as a drummer throughout the first decade of the Foo Fighters’ existence, but his desire to keep playing drums bled over into his day job. This was most infamously shown when Grohl re-recorded nearly all of the drum parts to the Foos’ second studio album, The Colour and the Shape, causing drummer William Goldsmith to quit the band.
Even by 1999’s There Is Nothing Left to Lose, Grohl was still playing drums for roughly half the album. Tensions in the band were coming to a head by the turn of the new millennium. Drummer Taylor Hawkins had just survived a drug overdose, and the lack of progress they had made on their fourth studio LP, One By One, was boiling over. A contributing factor was Grohl’s desire to put the band on hold in favour of joining Queens of the Stone Age.
“The Queens Of The Stone Age gig, when it was Nick [Oliveri], Josh and I, we were badass man,” Grohl told Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson on a 2005 episode of his radio show Masters of Rock. “That’s the best band I’ve ever been in in my life. It was great, but at the same time, Foo Fighters is like a family, the three guys in the band are like my brothers, and that’s a feeling I don’t get with anybody else.”
“I love drumming more than anything else, and when I sit down at a drumkit, I know that it was the thing I was put on this planet to do, and I plan on doing it for the rest of my life,” Grohl added. It was why Grohl was willing to put his more lucrative career as a frontman on hold just to play drums with his friends. The resulting QOTSA album that Grohl participated in, Songs for the Deaf, wound up becoming the group’s mainstream breakthrough.
Grohl’s power on the drums hadn’t dulled since his days in Nirvana. When Queens of the Stone Age arrived at the 2002 Glastonbury Festival, Grohl was out for blood. Songs for the Deaf wasn’t even scheduled to come out for another two months when the band took tracks like ‘Songs for the Deaf’ and ‘Gonna Leave You’ to the people. Keeping things rocksteady is Grohl, pounding away at the drums like a ferocious Tasmanian devil.
Watch Queens of the Stone Age and Dave Grohl play ‘Songs for the Dead’ at Glastonbury 2002 down below.
