Queens of the Stone Age: No One Knows

By Joel McIver

This updated edition of the first ever book about Queens Of The Stone Age takes in nine years of chaos. Since the first edition appeared in 2005, Josh Homme's band has undergone multiple line-up changes, toured the world and released two acclaimed albums. They have taken on a new version of Homme's old band Kyuss in court and helped to spawn multiple projects such as Them Crooked Vultures and a supergroup featuring Homme, Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Along the way there have been death, near-death and physical confrontations of all kinds, with Homme's near-fatal asphyxiation during a knee operation in 2010 almost ending the band. Want to know about the pitfalls of being in a rock band? Read it all here...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2005
• ISBN: 9781783233939

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@joelmciver.

Introduction to the 2015 edition

THE first edition of this book was published in 2005, at least 10 years ago as you read this, which is an eon in ‘rock time’. Nowadays, bands come and go with ever-increasing frequency, at least partly because the music business has been starved of cash for a decade or so and there’s not enough money to go round. Fortunately, Queens Of The Stone Age, now almost 20 years in business, got in before the cash dried up and, although times are hard for them as there are for everyone in this strangest of industries, built a foundation of solid albums before iTunes and CD burners were widely available. They’re still touring the globe and playing the world’s biggest festivals, shedding a member here and there as they go, but managing to outface more or less all of the problems that have beset them along the way.

These have on occasion been serious: founder Josh Homme, the Queens’ leader, came close to death after a botched knee operation in 2011, and a band comprising members of Homme’s former band Kyuss led him to take legal action. And yet the musicians bounced back to new heights, with the creation of the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures one of their recent achievements. How and why QOTSA have so far failed to succumb to the pitfalls which have taken down so many of their contemporaries is one of the major themes explored in this book. This is a band of fighters. Enjoy their story.

Joel McIver, 2014

www.joelmciver.co.uk

CHAPTER 1

The Eighties: Desert Rats

PALM Desert is where wealthy, sun-worshipping Californians go to die.

A two-hour drive from Los Angeles, the Coachella Valley town (population circa 42,000) is surrounded by desert and started life as a community of Agua Caliente native Americans, who had been living there for over 2,000 years before the US government arrived in 1853. The authorities brought with them law, order, civic amenities and also smallpox, which wiped out most of the Agua Calientes a decade later. Generously, the officials handed out parcels of land as a consolation prize of sorts, although the recipients weren’t permitted to sell the land they were given. By 1890 a few white people were living in Palm Desert, with hotels, railroads and a business infrastructure springing up in their wake. The fearsome heat that envelops the town didn’t put anyone off for long.

A century later Palm Desert had seen a fair bit of life come and go: President Eisenhower’s Equalization Law of 1959 enabled the Agua Calientes to make money out of their land – thus shifting economic power more squarely across the community – and more than a few Hollywood legends and visiting royalty from Europe had made homes there. A stint as a training ground for troops in World War II led to the construction of an airfield in nearby Palm Springs, which a couple of decades later had become Palm Springs International Airport. With the lush environment of the desert and the nearby Joshua Tree National Park, which offers visitors the chance to see some of the most awe-inspiring natural beauty in America, tourism boomed and the area is now a popular retirement destination for ageing Los Angelenos who want to spend their autumn years in the countryside. There are casinos, convention centres, celebrity tennis tournaments and plenty to do if you’re of a certain age and disposition.

But Palm Desert has an underbelly, of course, and it’s this dark, amorphous but vivid zone that we want to explore in this book. Unimpressed by the locale’s cheery tourist face – the Fabulous Palm Springs Follies musical revue, musicals at The Annenberg Theater in the Palm Springs Desert Museum and the McCallum Theatre for the Performing Arts – a generation of bored teenagers grew up with nothing to do in the Sixties and Seventies. Just as they do in every hick-town on earth, the kids turned to music as a means of escape and self-expression – but in the case of Palm Desert, the disaffected youth had a major advantage: they could escape to some of the most spectacular open spaces the planet has to offer.

By the mid-Eighties, there was a flourishing ‘generator-party’ scene, where groups of teenagers would drive out of town to a secluded spot where only the moon and the sand could be seen, fire up diesel-powered generators, play music and settle in for a night of drugs – mostly home-made speed (or ‘meth’/methamphetamine) – booze and sex. Local bands would bring amplification and lights, and play unhindered by restrictions of volume or curfew. Just as for Jim Morrison two decades earlier, the desert became a playground for experimentation of all kinds, where miracles could occur and the universe would give up its secrets if the music and the hallucinogens did their job properly.

The band that had kick-started the generator-party phenomenon was Across The River, a local punk trio who enjoyed a cult following in the area. The band – made up of singer and guitarist Mario ‘Boomer’ Lalli, bassist Scott Reeder and drummer Alfredo Hernandez – had enjoyed some Californian success, residing in LA for a while, playing the occasional major festival and travelling the scene in their van, nicknamed ‘The Provolone’. The band organised and played at many desert parties, but split up, with Reeder going on to join the soon-to-be-legendary stoner metal band The Obsessed. Lalli and Hernandez recruited the former’s cousin Larry on bass and a second guitarist, Gary Arce, and renamed themselves Yawning Man. The music Yawning Man would make would be a revelation.

Joshua Michael Homme was born in Palm Springs in May 1972 and attended Palm Desert High School, where he met Nick Oliveri – who, a year older than Josh, was born in LA and whose family moved to the desert in 1982 – and John Garcia, who was a year older still. Homme (pronounced ‘hom-ee’) was given his first guitar, a $50 acoustic Seville, by his father at the age of 10. Remarkably, his earliest musical training was a long way from rock. I started out taking polka lessons, he said later. "It went from that to hardcore punk in about two weeks. My earliest influences were Jock from GBH and Bones from Discharge. When I first heard punk music it was so fucking bad ass. It got you completely pumped. When I hear that, I feel like I can jump off a 30-storey building and live. They never played solos that you could really hear, but they had this real straight up-and-down style of strumming chords. I still play that way.

Originally, I wanted to play drums, he added. When I was a kid I made a deal with my dad and he said I had to play a real instrument. Because of that, I got locked into guitar and I’ve played it ever since. The only thing that has helped me has been constantly playing. I don’t really practise. I’m comfortable with the guitar and I know where my good spots are. I don’t feel the need to become like Steve Vai. I don’t feel that sort of pressure to take it to the ultimate level and become a guitar master. I’d rather sit out on the porch and strum the thing.

Of his early heroes, he said: I’ve always been a huge fan of Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn. Plus a number of other early punk rock stuff and Can had an impact. I’m influenced by different instruments and trying to translate that to the guitar. Anything that makes a noise, I try to translate that back to guitar. I play the guitar, but I’ll play anything that’s around.

Homme grew up surrounded by influential music, as he recalled, My parents would only buy one record from any artist. When I was in my single digits, I remember hearing Kenny Rogers. I find it interesting that ‘Coward Of The County’ is about gang rape and ‘Ruby’ is about a crippled guy watching his wife go to town to sleep with some other guy … The first record he bought was a punk classic: "It was a live compilation on Alternative Tentacles called Eastern Front, with DOA and Flipper. Vinyl. It had a cool cover. There were these soldiers shoving a Japanese flag into the ground. I liked it so much I bought it twice, and the first one wasn’t even worn out. I haven’t done that since."

The first generator party that Homme and his drummer friend Brant Bjork – 16 and 18 years old at the time – attended featured Yawning Man. As Bjork later recalled: Yawning Man was the greatest band I’ve ever seen. We saw them many times at their generator parties. We had been trying to get into the punk scene that didn’t even exist any more. We were into Black Flag, Minor Threat, Misfits. But when we finally tapped into the local scene, it’s Yawning Man, and they’re playing this really stone-y music. It wasn’t militant like Black Flag. It was very drugged, very mystical. But we got into it.

He explained: You’d get to the location, be up there partying, and then the Lallis would show up in their van, all mellow, drag out their shit and set up. It was more like something in the Sixties than some gnarly punk scene. Everyone’s just tripping, and they’re just playing away for hours.

Bjork and a bass-playing friend named Chris Cockrell were inspired by the Yawning Man shows to form a band, with the drummer roping in Homme on guitar, who he knew from the occasional previous jam session. John Garcia was also persuaded to become the band’s singer, and they named themselves Katzenjammer.

Despite their love of extreme music, none of the musicians were particularly extreme people. As Bjork recalled, School was fine. Sure, I got bored there like everyone does, but I didn’t have any terrible experiences like some people do. The drummer, who had known Josh since childhood, described him as one of the funniest guys I’ve ever known. He was a tall guy, and he had red hair, so he stood out, and he kinda had to live up to that. Clever dude, great musician, had his shit together. Garcia explained, I was a normal kid in high school, smoking pot behind the bleachers, doing that type of shit. We all played football. We weren’t jocks. But when it came to music, he added, We just wanted to get in there and fuck people up!

People say, I got into music for the girls, said Josh. But I didn’t realise that until later. I got into music because I loved it, and it was like chasing shit in your head, and everyone else in our scene was the same way. Once it was like, let’s be different, it became, well, how can we be different, really? You hear your favourite song and you say, that makes me feel so good. Now what if no one else played it, so I had to? In the desert, it was about having to make your own thing, and being isolated enough to do it without anyone fucking with you.

This mission was made much easier by the recruitment of Nick Oliveri on rhythm guitar, who was drafted into the band a while after Katzenjammer had first formed. Homme was responsible for bringing him in, having got to know him in 1984, two years after Nick had arrived from LA. At this stage, as Oliveri later recalled, Katzenjammer were truly forgettable, attempting to emulate the music they liked best – American punk bands like Black Flag and The Descendents, as well as others signed to the cult punk label SST – with little or no success. We were literally in like eighth and ninth grade, and Josh was in seventh or something, sighed Nick much later. However, Oliveri’s arrival did consolidate the band to a degree – he was ‘a legend at school’, explained Bjork: a guy with long hair who fought and drank and smoked weed – which gave the band a touch of cool. As Homme put it: Nick played guitar and when John left after a rehearsal one day, he sang. He sang better than John, but we didn’t have the balls to kick him out … But we did have the balls to keep Nick in.

Although Oliveri was decidedly a metal kid, Josh explained later that he himself avoided the scene like the plague as a kid: Punk rock kicked me in the balls. I’ve never been into metal. I’ve never felt a part of it. I always get dragged in – we want you to be in the metal scene! And I’m always like, ‘I don’t wanna be in the metal scene!’

Bjork recalled of Oliveri: Nick was the guy wearing Vans, jeans, Ozzy shirt, flannel, hair down to the middle of his back. Smokin’ cigarettes, doin’ blow. Just partying. He’s been going like that since the early Eighties! He’s a radical. Josh and Nick couldn’t have been more opposite, really. But equally interesting … Growing up, Nick was definitely the free spirit, he came from the tough side of the tracks, and we were all buddies and he was always just a couple of steps ahead of us … I mean Nick, he just can’t be stopped!

Homme added: Nick was the guy in high school that I drank with in the parking lot before school. We used to play for hours and hours. SST bands like Black Flag, SWA and The Minutemen were the only bands that would play in my home town. So that shoved the do-it-yourself thing in our faces. Oliveri was the most metal-aware member of their circle, as he recalled: When I was a kid, I really liked Ozzy Osbourne’s music a lot and I still do. I like some early Judas Priest. I love Slayer: to this day, I think they’re awesome, man. That band never, ever change what their vision was musically. And consistently they’ve sold records and they’re not concerned about getting on the radio. They have very dedicated fans and they don’t have to, you know what I mean?

Katzenjammer rehearsed for a while and then set up a first gig. It sucked. Arriving at a party in a friend’s back yard, the band were mortified to see that the audience were all much older than they were and in a mood to party. Unfortunately, singer Garcia wasn’t there: he was parked in his car across the street, running through the song lyrics in a last-minute crisis of confidence. There were these guys yelling at us, says Homme. They were screaming, ‘You better fuckin’ play right now!’ So we did – without a singer. The band had almost completed their six-song set when Garcia arrived. After the set finished, Oliveri sniggered, they made us play the entire thing again. Nick didn’t remain a guitarist for long: Cockrell soon left the band – going on to other notable bands such as Solar Feast – and Oliveri switched to bass, where he remained for many years.

Despite the dismal start, the members of Katzenjammer persevered: Oliveri spent his free time at home trying to figure out punk songs by ear, while Homme practised during the day in garages which – he pointed out years later – would be converted by their owners into meth labs at night.

Brant and Josh had this band, said Nick later, and I played in my room to Ramones records trying to teach myself guitar, so it was fun to go and play with the guys that were in my grade at school. It was a very small area, and fortunately for us everyone who lived there played music, or was trying to.

Usually, however, the intense heat meant that rehearsals had to be held in houses, not garages – the band would find a room with an air-conditioning unit and attempt to refine their own musical approach. If the room was a bedroom, the musicians would push the beds and wardrobes towards the wall to make space. In hindsight, recalled Homme, that shows me how truly committed we really were … because if you have to completely dismantle a full bedroom set every time you play and put it back together just to go to bed, that means you love music.

Both Homme and Bjork came from relatively affluent backgrounds – as the latter put it, My dad is a judge in Indio, my mom is a teacher. Josh came from a real well-to-do family – and could see both sides of life in the desert towns. Homme in particular was keenly aware of the dead-end nature of both the rich and poor faces of his home town, recalling: There’s a bunch of small towns in the desert that are connected. At the start is Palm Springs, where retirees and Hollywood types like to have nice places. And then it ends at the Salton Sea, where it’s speed freaks and ranches and farms and Social Security folks and RV campsites. It’s like an onion: there’s that rich retiree layer, and then the people that work for them, and then the people that steal from them … and they’re all locked together.

Bjork later drew a distinction between the high and low desert – that is, areas of land divided by the nearby mountain range: The high desert is probably closer to what people imagine the desert to be like. It’s less populated. Less mountains. It’s more vast. Little houses. Real, real small towns. Josh – who explained, I was born and raised in the low desert: I lived in Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Cathedral City, Palm Springs – described the high desert with subtle rancour: You don’t want to run out of gas out in the high desert. The people that live out there? You go to breakfast at the Country Kitchen, you’ll hear, ‘Well, Clara was supposed to babysit little Timmy, but all she did was stay up and do speed and never even saw the kid, and he was eatin’ paste in the back’ … It’s very much like getting caught in a David Lynch movie. But wherever you are, whether it’s the low or the high, you’ll be driving through the desert, and it’s hot as shit, and you’ll see a guy just walking on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. That’s Walking Guy. There’s one in every desert town.

As the band slowly evolved from unlistenable to tolerable, they began to play gigs at generator parties around Palm Desert and in Joshua Tree with other similarly minded local bands. A common venue was a disused nudist colony, where a drained swimming pool – nicknamed the ‘Nudebowl’ – filled with skateboarders and party-goers. As Homme recalled with nostalgia: "When we went to throw a party at the nudist colony, guys were getting photographed for the skate magazine Thrasher while the sun was going down. They’re like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ They already have a generator, so do we, and the party starts … It’s too bad, I heard they filled it with sand. People are digging it out already, though – they’ll do it. I’ve had a lot of good and bad times there, played a lot there. I had friends die up there, people stabbed, and also had some of the most amazing parties. When all the walls were up, it was brilliant. People would sit on walls and in the windows, there would be a fire behind the drummer, and we’d play as loud as the generator would let us go. One time this guy was running around stabbing everyone with a penknife. Our last show on tour with [legendary punk band] The Dwarves was at the nudist colony on Halloween. They borrowed all this equipment from another band and then destroyed it all after 10 minutes!"

Although the parties were sometimes busted by prowling police officers, the kids knew how to minimise the risk: We’d drive four-wheel-drive trucks up there because the cops would get stuck in the sand, remembered Oliveri. There would be three or four bands, a keg of beer, and a raging bonfire. We were all under age. People would run around naked and there was sand everywhere. In your amps, in your ass, what you coughed up the next day. But it was worth it.

Josh explained the attractions of the generator scene with the words, It had moments of true beauty where it was, [we said] this is amazing. There was one time in Indio Hills. There’s a bonfire in front of us, so no one’s standing directly in front of you. But they’re on the edge of the fire. The canyon was tight, and there’s little fires in the walls of the canyon, in these perches, where people were standing around these little fires. And you could see the shadows on the canyon walls. And you’d look up and see girls on top of the hill, dancing. And I remember playing, in that moment, going, this is definitely it. He added that playing in the desert was the shaping factor. There’s no clubs here, so you can only play for free. If people don’t like you, they’ll tell you. You can’t suck.

Sometimes, however, the parties turned sour, when gang members would arrive, with violent consequences: There were plenty of moments when I was like, ‘Everybody’s dancing and drinking and having a good time,’ and then there were other times where I was like, ‘Look at the Mexican with the shotgun’ … the problem with anarchy is that anyone can do whatever they want. Whether it was the wind telling us what to do, or Mehi [Mexican] gang guys coming in and stabbing someone in the ass with a penknife, or someone [with a gun] and they’re freaking on acid, that kind of shit can stop a party fast. I remember when they lit a car on fire. And it was like, this is definitely not it.

Mostly, however, the scene functioned as it was supposed to, with the bands who played either improving their act or being booed off. With no conventional restrictions on what they played and for how long they played – apart from the notoriously unreliable generators, which would sometimes go into meltdown without warning – Katzenjammer could extend their songs into long, psychedelic jams that twisted and turned according to the players’ whims. After all, the crowd were happy as long as the noise the band made was loud, heavy and didn’t stop.

After a few months of playing desert parties, the members of Katzenjammer changed their band’s name to Sons Of Kyuss, the meaning of which was much debated in ensuing years. The word ‘Kyuss’ rhymes with ‘pious’ and comes from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game so beloved of American youth since the Sixties. Kyuss was the name of an evil high priest created by the D&D authors in 1981 who created ‘Sons Of Kyuss’ – revolting undead corpses with green worms oozing from their skulls. Not that the band were particularly interested in the word’s derivation, simply adopting the moniker as a suitably obscure name that no one else had, as Garcia later explained.

The band had also evolved its own musical direction, focusing on down-tuned, super-heavy jams which combined the crushing, ominous guitar riffs of Black Sabbath with the trance-like extended repetition of Hawkwind and other space-rock giants. It took some time for them to hit the right approach, as Garcia later reported. An early rehearsal saw a complete musical about-turn: They were playing this mean, heavy, fast punk rock music. Wow! I started singing this really fast punk rock style, blah balalalahhha! And Brant stopped right after the first verse and he goes, ‘No, John. Try singing it like this.’ And he started singing me this really beautiful melody. I said, ‘Well, fuck, you want me to really sing!’ As for the heaviness of the guitar sound, Homme – the man most responsible for this aspect of Sons Of Kyuss’ sound, now that Oliveri was on bass – explained that this was accidental rather than intentional: We didn’t have enough money to buy tuners! And so we kept tuning down and down and down, until the strings were flopping, and then you’d just bring it barely up. Then we would all tune to each other, and the gig would start.

The initial problem faced by Sons Of Kyuss was trying to avoid sounding like their influences – an obvious mistake to make in front of the desert audiences. As Homme said: That was the main thing in the desert: you had to sound like yourself, or else people would talk shit about you. The toughest thing for me was trying not to copy Mario Lalli of Yawning Man. He’s my favourite guitar player in the world, because he’s so original. Like I have a certain lead flick that I do all the time, and it’s from him. I can’t help it, it’s so bad ass. This was made all the harder by the fact that Sons were playing some of their own material by this stage – a brave, some might say suicidal, move. We played original songs, which is pretty shocking to think about today, as Oliveri explained. Normally, you go and play Ramones covers or something. We did some covers – ‘New Rose’ by The Damned and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ by The Ramones. But we also had four originals. And to us, that meant we had a band.

But the musicians had found something – a sound and a style all their own. Drummer Bjork and Homme had a mutual spark that made their band something special, even at this early stage. Garcia explained in awe: The majority of our material was written by Josh and Brant. That was the best chemistry between two people I will ever, ever, ever see in my entire life. Oliveri pointed the finger at Brant’s diverse influences: Brant would make the beat roll. It did something to the music. We loved our music so much, we would play and pay no attention to the audience. Never wrote a set-list. We could jam any of our songs at a moment’s notice.

Bjork had a punk background like the rest of his bandmates. He explained: "I started as a drummer and then I got an acoustic guitar not long after that, so I’ve been noodling on both instruments for quite a while. I came from the school where you try to play to Ramones records, drums and guitars, and after you learn the whole Ramones catalogue, you move onto your own. And for me, I learned a lot of guitar from listening to Jimi Hendrix … obviously I’m not even in the same universe as him as a musician, but just his basic curiosity and being unafraid to do anything with rhythm [was]