‘Songs for the Deaf’: Who is the radio announcer on the Queens of the Stone Age album?
While seizing mainstream attention with Rated R, Queens of the Stone Age‘s follow-up propelled the former Kyuss guitarist Josh Homme’s hard rock ensemble to the alternative zenith. In a drab rock climate of post-Britpop beige and nu-metal buffoonery clogging up Kerrang TV, 2002’s Songs for the Deaf hit the music landscape like a psychedelic lightning bolt, a Palm Desert storm of lysergic punk attack and raucous stoner strut that effortlessly pushed aside any competition orbiting the mainstream at the time.
Its impact is so burned into the psyche of any teen back then that, to this day, many 30-somethings still recall that ‘No One Knows’ video when thinking of the band.
A quasi-concept album, Songs for the Deaf illustrates the evocative drive from Los Angeles to the Mojave Desert in a beat-up Dodge Challenger—the car’s never specified, but what else could it be?—with the novel addition of various station tuning on the radio as our mysterious protagonist hits the West Coast’s dusky roads, passing through Banning and Chino Hills along the way.
“Kind of a concept record that has the radio flipping between songs, like the dial on a radio,” bassist Nick Oliveri told Rolling Stone shortly before the album’s release. “And we have different DJs—I don’t mean scratching DJs, I mean DJs talking—announcing songs and just kind of talking shit about how a lot of stations play the same thing over and over. We’re just taking a chance, having a good time. We don’t get played on the radio, so I figure we should talk shit about them.”
The band’s scant radio play streak wouldn’t last long with Songs for the Deaf shooting to the top 20 of the Billboard 200, and the world’s rock press heralding their third effort as the year’s greatest record. But the backdrop of a static-ridden car radio, waving in and out of clarity, offered a perfect opportunity to rope in old friends and heroes to play DJ, as well as to poke fun at LA radio culture.
So, who is the radio announcer on Songs for the Deaf?
Quite a few. The frontman of Oliveri’s former band, Dwarves Blag Dahlia, kicks off the fictitious radio rollcall as DJ Kip Kasper for LA’s Klon-Klone Radio, followed by Eleven frontman Alain Johannes reeling off an animated Spanish spiel as DJ Héctor Bonifacio Echeverría Cervantes de la Cruz Arroyo Rojas. As our protagonist is heading out of the Greater LA area, old Kyuss producer Chris Goss lends his presence to DJ Elastic Ass for Chino Hills’ KRDL-Kurdle 109.
Friend of the band and Family Values’ ’98 DJ C-Minus hosts the Kool show, and Amen singer Casey Chaos appears in a quickfire commercial promoting “all death metal, all the time”. As LA’s urban sprawl shrinks further and further away in the rearview mirror, Marilyn Manson band’s Twiggy Ramirez scores the desert’s encroaching mystique as Banning College Radio’s DJ Tom Sherman and The Cramps‘ B-movie provocateur Lux Interior fills in as a DJ for AM580’s off-beaten track.
As the Joshua Tree’s ethereal beckon pulls Songs for the Deaf toward a more ruminative plane, Eagles of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes plays a preacher, and another Eleven bandmate and frequent Queens collaborator, Natasha Shneider, plays the eerie DJ for WOMB Radio. Lastly, earthlings? Guitarist Dave Catching, owner of the Desert Sessions’ Rancho De La Luna studio and member of Queens of the Stone Age in the late 1990s, plays host to Wonder Valley’s WANT.
