The band Josh Homme needed to steal from: “I wanna copy his ass”
At the beginning of the Queens of the Stone Age album Villains, Josh Homme gives the listener insight into his upbringing with the line, “I was born in the desert, May 17, ‘73”, signalling that from the day he was born, he found himself on the outskirts of the world.
When it came to music and art, he continued to resonate with those people who also lived on the edge of life, which meant going to parties with the local weirdos, discovering his music tastes through these people, and developing an identity as a result of his fellow outsiders.
He once credited a man called Mario Lalli with helping him properly understand his music preferences. Given he didn’t grow up around a specific scene, Homme instead went to parties that Lalli hosted and discovered music, art, and general ideas from those people who would attend. The sound that we now know as Queens of the Stone Age may have come out incredibly different were it not for him going to these parties.
“I was into punk rock music, and he’d have these parties at his house,” said Homme, discussing his rearing, “Look back on it now, there’d be 13-year-old people, me, and 40-year-old people. Which is kinda gross, ultimately, perhaps, but in that time frame, it was totally fine. Because it’s a gang of individuals and outsiders.”
Things ended up working out pretty well for him, as there is no denying the fact that he’s had a pretty incredible career, and that the rock music he’s made now lives in the hearts of millions. However, as is the case with a lot of successful musicians, in rising to the top, Homme steadily forgot his roots, and it took the influence of another artist to bring him back down to Earth.
This other artist was ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, who is what you would call an old-school guitarist, which isn’t necessarily a reference to his sound, but rather, his attitude when it comes to music. The first way that this manifests is his adoration for that old school blues sound. He didn’t want to overcomplicate songs and knew that so long as you could play with emotion and passion, the music would come out OK on the other end, even if only three or four chords were involved.
“Well, the blues may only be three chords, but the complexity is fascinating,” he said when discussing his favourite genre, “I’ve listened to those old blues records forever. And I can still learn something from these guys. These giants.”
The other means by which his old-school mindset manifests is in who he likes to play music to: it’s all well and good playing to those sold-out crowds in New York and London, but that’s not where the original ideas come from. Most of the time, your real innovative thinkers are those who exist outside of a scene, who don’t have their minds inhabited by trends and therefore can truly conjure up something new. These are the kinds of crowds Gibbons plays to, and it was an idea that resonated with Homme so much he decided to steal it, leaving behind those big city gigs and instead going to places off the beaten track, the kind of places he grew up and where true innovation can occur.
“Yeah, we’re just playing, like, cities we don’t normally play,” explained Homme, “We did a tour of little places and all the little rooms in all the cities we would play, and now we’re just going out to where we normally wouldn’t go. Ever since I met [Billy] Gibbons…one of the things I love about ZZ Top is they’re a people’s band, y’know? And they don’t ever really play LA, they play Bakersfield instead, which is a farming town out of the way, so I kinda wanna do that, too. I wanna copy his ass.”
