“I wanted to preserve it”: The band Josh Homme needed to destroy
The concept of the music business isn’t supposed to be one big happy family all of the time. It’s a dog-eat-dog world when it comes to those at the top, and it’s a case of kill or be killed whenever the new flavour of the day comes to town and leaves every other artist flat on their face. Although Josh Homme had a tender side that he showed off in Queens of the Stone Age, he thought part of their success had to include wiping out one specific act from existence.
Looking through Homme’s history, though, he always seemed to have a firm handle on what he was doing. He knew that no part of his music had that much in common with what was popular at the time, but it hardly mattered as long as he could put together the heaviest riff he could think of and have crowds jumping to it.
Even when Homme was barely out of his teens, he knew this was his calling. Most kids’ upbringings may have had them learning the basics of ‘Smoke on the Water’ and dreaming of stardom with Led Zeppelin posters hanging from their walls, but for him, there was no point in doing that when he could create whatever the hell he wanted with a generator, a guitar, and a couple of friends hanging out in the middle of the California desert.
And from that cesspool of rock and roll, Kyuss was born. Despite Queens of the Stone Age having some of the highest accolades in stoner rock history, Homme’s first outfit really deserved the title a little more. If you go back and listen to songs like ‘Demon Cleaner’, they have a lot more in common with the likes of Sleep than anything to have come off of Songs for the Deaf.
But part of Homme’s punk rock ethos has always been about reconstruction, and by the time the 1990s came to an end, he knew he couldn’t compete with the other members of Kyuss anymore. If they had kept going on, chances are they would have had to sell out or make a complete pivot into new territory, so the only way for him to keep everything pure was to tear the whole thing down.
Even when he got around to talking about his time in Kyuss, Homme said that he was determined to make sure that Kyuss died so that there could be a better outlet for everyone in the group, saying, “I felt that in Kyuss, we were so fiercely defending something that when we looked up we said ‘Fuck!’ and realised that we were painted into a corner of our own making. I wouldn’t change a moment of my time in that band, but I left because I loved it, and I wanted to preserve it by destroying it.”
Even so, some of the greatest moments on the first QOTSA records did have a few riffs left over from his old outfit. Half of the tunes on their self-titled record sound like the dying gasps of Kyuss, only this time with the guitar sound being a bit rounder and coming close to the “robot rock” tag that Homme intended for his new outfit.
While Queens of the Stone Age has always been fairly elastic with who is in the band on any given record, chances are the reason why is because of what Kyuss did to Homme. It might be fun having artists to rely on in the studio and onstage, but where’s the fun in that when music is supposed to be about having no rules?
