The one musician Josh Homme called the ultimate guitar player
From the minute he left Kyuss, Josh Homme was never going to be able to settle for the average rock and roll guitar sound.
The stoner rock giants were among the heaviest things that the 1990s ever spit out, and while Queens of the Stone Age was its own unique animal, the number-one rule was to throw caution to the wind and see what could happen with whatever idea that popped into Homme’s head. But that only came from him getting an education to the visionaries of guitar that came before him.
But when Homme was coming up, the idea of being a guitar hero wasn’t exactly the coolest idea in the world. The grunge world practically stomped out the entire idea of anyone shredding solos every single time they placed their hands on the fretboard, and when Homme did manage to play a handful of leads throughout his career, he was practically an example of what a guitar anti-hero is supposed to be. Each solo spot was an excuse for him to do something weird, which is why all of QOTSA’s albums end up with their own identity.
His vocabulary of scales didn’t necessarily change, but it was all about how he implemented them however he played. Songs for the Deaf might be the closest thing that the band have to classic rock and roll record, but looking at how Homme approached every one of his tunes, he was pulling as much from the textures that he heard on Nine Inch Nails as he was from the licks that he copped from ZZ Top back in the day.
When it comes to adventurousness, though, Homme was far from the first person to start changing what most people could do on guitar. His playing was indebted to many of the blues players from way back when, but whereas someone like Jimmy Page took the origins of the blues and lit it on fire the minute that Led Zeppelin formed, Jimi Hendrix did the same thing and launched it into the stratosphere.
Whether they were listening to it live or were exposed to it first on Are You Experienced, most listeners didn’t know what they were hearing. Those sounds didn’t even feel possible to come from a typical guitar setup, but everything that Hendrix touched practically turned to gold, whether that was the beautiful clean tones that he was able to get on ‘Little Wing’ to piling on different effects to get the massive sound that kicks off ‘Purple Haze’ or the beautiful tone at the top of ‘All Along the Watchtower’.
There had been countless guitarists that had come after Hendrix, but even with multiple decades coming and going since his passing, Homme felt that no one could have ever imagined to come close to what Hendrix did, saying, “I listened to Hendrix first and to me Hendrix is the ultimate guitar player. To me there’s two Jimmys: there’s Jimi Hendrix and there’s Jimmy Page.” But it’s not hard to see the way that Homme applied Hendrix’s same sense of weirdness to his own music.
A lot of people forget how avant-garde Hendrix’s techniques were for the time, and while it’s easy to take a lot of them for granted today, seeing how Homme uses his limitations to his advantage wasn’t all that dissimilar to what Hendrix was doing. Hendrix may have been able to do great things had he had technology that could keep up with him, but even in the digital age, what Homme does behind the fretboard embraces those limitations by taking notes out of the scale to make things sound a lot more eerie.
But while there is a strange beauty in listening to how Homme constructed a record like …Like Clockwork, what Hendrix did was always going to be a one-off. Eddie Van Halen may be the definition of what a guitar hero should look like in the broader sense, but when looking at the broad spectrum of rock and roll guitar, there’s never going to be anyone that left the same impact as Hendrix in that short a timeframe.
