“This has to stop”: Josh Homme on the villains of rock ‘n’ roll
The entire concept of rock was never supposed to be tame and family-friendly. The biggest names certainly had a clean-cut image compared to today, but the reason why people got into certain groups in the first place was because of how much their parents might not have approved of them listening to them. Although Josh Homme normally revelled in the idea of being a true villain of rock and roll, he felt that these rockers of yesteryear took everything dangerous about the genre and brought it into homes worldwide.
Then again, if early rock and roll sounded dangerous, what Homme was doing was enough to be inherently toxic. Aside from the overt sexuality in every one of Queens of The Stone Age’s tunes, hearing those detuned guitars made them sound like they had crawled through the dirt before the song even kicked in.
That’s before getting into any of the lyrics, either. Looking through every one of their classic tunes, Homme was no stranger to talking about the darker side of life, whether that meant talking about himself or putting on the kind of voice that made him sound like the smoothest demon to ever come out of Hell.
Before anyone tuned down guitars that low, the instrument was already treated like a sick way for people to get rich. As much as Chuck Berry could write some fantastic songs, people started to look at the wild men of rock and roll and question why they were really in the business, especially when they saw someone like Elvis Presley shaking his ass during his first TV appearances.
Then again, Presley was tame compared to what Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis was doing. Whereas Lewis was known for his wild performances of tunes like ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, Little Richard was enough to give anyone a heart attack back in the day, playing up the kind of androgyny that sparked fear in the hearts of people that were even a touch uncomfortable with their sexuality.
While each of those frontmen was miles away from what Homme was doing, he still had a tremendous respect for bringing a dark edge to rock, telling Guitar World, “I was watching this wild footage of Jerry Lee Lewis from one of his first performances on television He was going into fits and the shakes while he was singing and playing the piano, and basically encouraging the audience to do the same. Early rockers like Jerry, Elvis and Little Richard were so radical for their time, I could just imagine parents saying, ‘These guys are villains—this has to stop!’”
Compared to what was to come, though, people like Presley and Richard were the least of parents’ problems. By the time Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper started rearing their heads in the scene, people were ready to ban them outright for being too macabre for their children to hear or, in Pop’s case, a full-blown lunatic that was let loose for a couple of hours to front a rock and roll band.
But all those concerned parents missed one key thing about these supposed villains. They may have been outside the norm, but what they were doing was twisting rock and roll into different shapes for people like Homme to build on later.
