“There are no rules”: the secret to Josh Homme’s guitar playing
Let’s be real here: the idea of the “guitar hero” is one without a place in modern mainstream music. That’s not to say there are no good guitarists; just look at Emily Roberts of The Last Dinner Party shredding up a storm at the recent Brit Awards. Look at the sheer amount of modern emo bands who can create entire soundscapes with wacky tunings and a summer spent indoors learning how to tap. No, I’m talking about a full-on guitar hero with a cult of personality around their playing who found a specific style and rode it straight to the big time: someone like Josh Homme.
Because of this, it would be easy to call Homme a man out of time. The last of a dying breed of dinosaurs. The truth is that fossilised guitar shop heroes who can swagger their way through Robert Fripp solos before whining about modern pop music are dime a dozen. There’s quite literally nothing special about them. While the way he occasionally treats photographers at his own concerts speaks to a bygone age of rock star douchebaggery, there is something thrillingly unique about not just his playing but his approach to making rock music today.
It’s not quite modern, but if you can find another guitarist, especially one in the world of hard rock, that owes their playing style as much to polka music as Homme does I’d be very impressed. In an interview with Q With Tom Power, Homme elaborated on this, saying, “I took guitar lessons from nine years old till about 11, and I never learned any barre chords… all I’ve ever learned was oompah oompah.”
However, the young Homme wanted to play polka music… well, as much as any 11-year-old taking guitar lessons would, so he soon began taking matters into his own hands. He elaborates on this further in the interview, saying, “I was really frustrated by it, and so it drove me to either give up guitar or start writing music. So, at nine or ten, I was always hearing sounds in my head. You know, you’re walking down the street and that’s at a rhythm, and so I was always singing along to my own soundtrack. That’s why I wanted to play guitar… to get that out.”
It soon became apparent to this still shockingly young Homme that if he was going to be the guitar hero that he wanted to be, it would be not by replicating his heroes but by doing something different from all of them. He says “When left to my own devices, I was like ‘fine’. I’ll have none of that. There are no rules.” He fully admits that when it comes to playing guitar, “There are blind spots that I know nothing about, but I can play you something that is ultimately off-kilter.”
That off-kilterness is at the heart of his guitar playing. Take a riff like ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ off Era Vulgaris. It’s not that if you don’t look deep enough in the bowels of New Heavy Sounds or Kozmik Artifactz, you’ll find nothing that sounds like it. A riff that stark and esoteric powering a song catchy enough to fill arenas around the world, though? That’s something very special indeed.
That’s the heart of his guitar playing, that willingness to, essentially, do things wrong and stand by them. In another interview with Matt Sweeney’s Guitar Moves YouTube channel, he specifically talks about learning a blues scale and then putting a bunch of the notes in each scale back in to make it darker and more discordant. It’s the kind of behaviour that, sure, may get you laughed out of Guitar Centre, but straight into a band with John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl. So, who’s actually winning there?
