The collaboration Josh Homme called “the best thing of my artistic life”
As a teenager growing up in Palm Desert, California, Josh Homme and his buddies jammed out on their guitars like plenty of weed-smoking 1980s kids with a pipe dream. Rather than bashing about in a garage, though, the crew that became Homme’s first band, Kyuss, did most of their work literally out in the desert, far from where any parents, cops, or nosy neighbours could interfere in their business. That massive, open atmosphere helped create the distinctive Kyuss “stoner rock” sound.
By the time the band was getting more national recognition in the mid ‘90s, though, a 21-year-old Homme was already being seduced by a very different sound; something less reverberant, heavy, and spacious and more crude, claustrophobic, and unhinged. When you’re from the desert, the grass is literally always greener somewhere else, even a basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Homme’s new obsession was something, and somebody, not actually new at all. He had discovered, at long last, the music of Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and it had knocked him off his axis in 1994 in the same way it had done to plenty of kids 20 years earlier.
The Stooges’ 1973 album Raw Power became a guiding light, with Homme later describing the record to Rolling Stone as “what rock n’ roll sounds like when it comes off the tap. If you take the craziest band you’ve ever heard, and you play Raw Power first, your ‘Craziest Band Ever’ will sound like a bunch of pussies.”
It was Iggy Pop’s 1977 solo LP The Idiot that fully dislodged Homme’s brain from his skull, however, as he’d later call it a “revelation” and a “punch in the face.“. The record inspired him so much that it directly affected Homme’s decision to leave Kyuss and create a new band more in the spirit of Iggy, which ultimately became Queens of the Stone Age.
That rather dramatic story must have reached Iggy himself at some point, or perhaps he just was a Queens of the Stone Age fan. Either way, something compelled the Godfather of Punk to send Homme a text message in 2014, asking if he might like to work on a project together.
“It was the best thing of my artistic life,” Homme told podcaster Marc Maron in a recent interview. “I got a text and it essentially said, ‘I think we should collaborate on something and that would be nice – Iggy Pop.’ I lost my mind. I immediately romanticised it to the point where I was like, this means even my mistakes have led me to this spot where I am receiving this call. I took it as rubber stamping that I’m heading in the right direction.”
Once Homme and Pop started working together, those instincts were proven correct, as the master and his pupil quickly formed a friendly connection of mutual respect, resulting in one of the most successful albums of Pop’s long career, 2016’s Post Pop Depression.
“[Iggy] is one of the originators,” Homme told Maron. “There is no such thing as somebody else like him. …You know, by the time we got together, it was the perfect time. He was 69, and it was like, what does this 69-year-old rock originator—this music originator—what is their voice now? You don’t hear that perspective that much. And he had a lot to say.”
To take things to another level, Homme was able to join Pop on tour after the record came out, which also meant playing many of the older songs that had rewired his mind as a younger man, including tracks off The Idiot and Lust for Life.
“I treated it like, for a minute, I work at the Smithsonian, and I’m trying to recreate and restore this thing. It felt like that was my role; to try to be as respectful as possible.”
