Screaming Queens

It’s two hairs past my elbow on the umpteenth of whenever, and we’re stuck in a stuffy, centrally heated hotel room on the fifth floor of the Gresham hotel, looking out the open balcony window at the relentlessly depressing, depressingly relentless pissing down rain. Queens Of The Stone Age mainman Josh Homme is standing beside me, sharing the view, such as it is.

"Fifty weeks of this rain a year does something to your psyche," I say, filling in the blanks while I get the tape recorder set up.

"Tell me about it," he says. "I used to live in Seattle. It was like this all the time. That’s why I had to move."

And move he did. The musical location of the Queens’ third and latest opus is a little further south and about 90 degrees hotter. Songs For The Deaf is an evil little barracuda of a record. It’s not quite as diffuse and daring as its predecessor Rated R, but the thematic focus and intensity of the thing makes it nothing less than the hard rock headfuck of the year, a trip in every sense – all thirteen tracks are chained by links of radio dial-surfing, from mariachi to death-metal to pop-mulch to Jesus-freak evangelism, a theme Homme hit on while driving from his old stomping ground in Phoenix, Arizona to LA via Palm Springs.

"For a while I lived in Phoenix and I would have to drive back and forth, and I had nothing but a radio," he says, looking less like a rock star than a college student who spent the summer navvying for the real life experience. "If the town was big the DJs got a little bit more sappy, and then it would get to where there was nothing but AM religious stations, no matter where I would switch it would go: "…and the lord says… – ccchhhhhch – …you will not be saved… – ccchhhhhch –’ and I would be like, ‘Oh my Gaaawd’. I’m always driving back from LA to the desert, and that drive is very much a decompression, from the manic-ness of the city to the low frequency hum of the desert."

He pauses, snorts up a glob of snot and sends it rocketing out the balcony door into the rain. Following this phlegmatic arc out of the corner of my eye, I ask if Homme grew up as fascinated as everyone else by the rock ‘n’ roll mythology of the Mojave: Keith looking for UFOs, Gram’s cremation at Joshua Tree, the Manson clan tearing around the Spahn ranch on dune buggies like something out of Mad Max II.

He shakes his head. "No, because those people went to where I was born, and so they have a love and appreciation for what I never second guessed. I never really appreciated it until I talked to people who went there and were fascinated by it."

Does the landscape really look like the surface of another planet?

"They used to do lunar training there and in Utah in order to acclimate to some of the terrain. It’s very Mars-like, or what my perception of Mars was."

Does that environment breed a different kind of person?

"Absolutely. As you said when you came in, you know, to have it rain like this all the time, your geography and your weather affect how you are, and I think a lot of people think the desert is a very dead place, but actually it’s just a place where everything that’s alive is very bad-ass. All the flora and fauna. Even the bunnies there are like: ‘Uaaahhhhh!’ They’re skinny and fast and dangerous, whereas in the forest there’s chipmunks and birds. Our birds are roadrunners – they don’t fly and they eat snakes and they look pissed; they put their head down and run full bore.

"And I also think the desert’s got a way of making you feel very small, like an ant crawling on a rock, so I think it’s humbling to be there. And it leads to paranoia. A lot of people who’ve moved there have moved to escape something in their life, and if someone’s coming you go, ‘Yep, someone’s coming.’ And then 40 minutes later you’re like, ‘Yep, still comin’,’ because you see forever. Sneaking up on someone is an art form there."

The comedian Rich Hall once said that where he comes from, if your dog runs away, you see him going for three days.

"You can see him being eaten where I’m from."

Point of fact: most heavy rock is either comic book macho jock bullshit or squeaky teenage knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism. But when it’s smart, it can be lethal. And when it’s funny, it’s wicked.

The Queens are one of a handful of bands of recent years to break rank with the nu-metal norms, being surly, smart and slightly strange. They are the ultimate gonzo rock doo-dah dada band: razor sharp but bent on communicating something ugly and psychotic and car-crash compelling.

But beneath all the weird and wanton craziness, they are stoked by a deadly serious anger, stemming maybe from a feeling that the American Dream Version 2002 has been squandered, that some ideology has been trampled and forgotten in the gold rush of rock ‘n’ roll-as-leisure-option. Rewind 30 years and you can imagine Songs For The Deaf blasting from Hunter S’s Great Red Shark somewhere around Barstow as the corpulent figure of The Attorney Huey-and-Ralphs a mescal-laced technicolour yawn out the passenger side.

And yet, whomever first dubbed QOTSA stoner rock was talking out of the wrong hole. That term, evoking the somnambulist swirl of Texan elders like Roky Erickson, might’ve applied to Homme’s last band Kyuss, but it just doesn’t fit here.

The Queens’ noise is neither full-tilt lysergic nightmare nor grass-fed mellow yellow – it’s closer to the reds-and-wine cocktail favoured by long-haul truckers; a bleary buzz, hotwired awake, fuzzy round the edges but focused in the centre. This combo could forge a perfect reconstruction of Sacramento band Thin White Rope’s lost nugget from 1985’s Exploring The Axis, the one that goes: "Something affected him down in the desert."

Josh Homme rubs his brawny arms and nods, anticipating where I’m going with this.

"I could take you to areas of the desert and the analogy we use is it’s like being trapped in a David Lynch movie that you can’t get out of," he says. "The third last time I was in Joshua, I was buying some beer at this place, Sam’s Liquor, and I was coming through this doorway and this Mexican guy with one leg tried to trip me. I don’t really know why, he put out his leg and then he looked at me dead in the face and went (disgusted look) ‘Tssssh!’, and I went, ‘What?!’ And I just kept going and I started laughing because I thought, ‘This is one of the only places that a potentially speed-freaked one-legged Mexican would deliberately try and trip me and test my moral fibre over nothing that I fully know.’

"And we have a thing that I call Walkin’ Guy," he continues. "You’ll be driving in the desert and there’ll be a guy walking, and it’ll be hot and there won’t be anything for miles and you’ll be like, ‘What the fuck is this guy doing?’ It feels very bittersweet to be that guy too, because I’ve had to walk it. It feels very empty and very fulfilling at the same time."

That’s the desert. How does Homme deal with the reality – or surreality – of the city of LA?

"I used to be unable to withstand my hatred for LA but now I understand what LA is and I understand how to use it," he says. "I just think growing up we were taught to hate LA – the punk scene was like, ‘Fuck Hollywood!’ But LA now makes a lot of sense to me because it’s so big that it’s a town full of secrets; you can never know everything about it, there’s always something more to discover that isn’t on the Hollywood map. People that dislike LA, they go into Hollywood and go, ‘This isn’t for me’. And it’s like, well no shit, if I take you to a pigshit ranch that’s not for you either. It’s where you go.

"Trying to build utopia, that was the LA mission. And what that does is that attracts everyone to go there, it attracts a bunch of assholes too. So it’s like these cool people that were born there and Spanish culture and Native American culture mixed with a bunch of fuck-ups."

Consult Mike Davis’s City Of Quartz for further background on LA’s extreme culture clash of magic and realism, murals of the Madonna adorning Spanish crack houses, cool jazz meets hardcore punk. Either way, Josh Homme’s pre-teenage ear found solace in late 70s/early 80s Angeleno acts like Black Flag and The Germs.

"Our drummer was in Wasted Youth which started in ’81," he says, "the punk scene that came out of there was much more experimental than any other one that I’m aware of. Black Flag becomes jazz at the end. And X and the Minutemen, my experience with early punk, even though I’m only 29, we were kind of at the last wave of all that, but in my hometown it kept going. The only bands that played were SST bands, so we were like the escape route for SST."

The Queens recently got to pay tribute to Black Flag on Rise Above, the album Henry Rollins put together to raise awareness for the plight of the West Memphis Three.

"Yeah, imagine the honour for me, being 12 and listening to Black Flag… Henry goes, ‘Here’s this lyric sheet’ and we’re like, ‘Let us show you something, let us display what Black Flag has done. You wanna see what Black Flag looks like this many years later?’ We did everything in one take, knew every lyric."

Of course, musicians and artists like Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon doubled back and connected with the LA noir lineage via the Night Stalker and Manson. X’s Los Angeles went even further into history, translating Chandler and Hammett into a punk squawk on songs like ‘Johnny Hit & Run Paulene’. Same with Hole’s Celebrity Skin, although that record never got the credit it deserved, largely because of all the cult of personality crapola that trails Courtney Love around.

"Yeah, it’s so easy to dislike that raving lunatic bitch."

I’ve never met her, so I’ve tried to hold off from…

"…from making that judgement…"

…and I probably like the records all the more as a result.

"Right. I know when I hear a song I like, it doesn’t matter who makes it, because music’s for liking. I don’t spend time on things I don’t like: ‘This tastes like shit – taste it!’ I did that for years in Kyuss, so insulated, and really you spend more times being against things. It’s really easy to throw a rock; it’s really hard to deflect ’em. And I’d much rather get hit with them than just sit and wing ’em all day long, I don’t want to be that type of person. That being said, I’ve met Courtney – she’s a total bitch!"

Which brings us, unavoidably, to Dave Grohl, who of course played drums on almost all of the latest Queens record. Grohl has spoken in these pages of his Stone Age sojourn as being largely responsible for getting him right with his God and recharging him to the point where he could re-record the latest Foo Fighters album in 12 days. Was it as good for Josh as it was for Dave?

"Ha ha ha. We both sat in bed smokin’ together, and that’s all we could think to ask each other!"

His playing on the record is pretty remarkable.

"He’s playing like somebody with something to prove, that’s true. It’s like, ‘In case you forgot what I do as well . . .’ I had two and a half notebooks filled with what this detailed, kind of ambitious record could be, (wondering) ‘Can we do it without it being pretentious, without being too heady?’ And Dave’s skill level and understanding of music is the best it gets, so I was able to do everything in that notebook. I thought, ‘I’m gonna push Dave so hard, he’s never been pushed like this in his life’. And all of a sudden I realise he’s pushing himself harder than I was gonna push him.

"Like, to watch Dave play this beat and not be able to do it initially and to get frustrated (and go) ‘Godammit – guys, can I just get five minutes to work on this ’til I can get it?’ To see him do that was a huge moment, watching this guy who’s a friend of mine and who I regard as one of the best rock ‘n’ roll drummers ever push himself so hard that he’s mad… and that guy generally doesn’t get angry. He’s a Ritalin kid, bouncing off the walls, he’s got a lot of energy. So that was the long answer to your question."

One thing I’ve come to understand about the Queens after talking to Josh Homme: very few of the things I like about that band are accidental. They know exactly what they’re after in terms of music, visuals, live shows and marketing. To that end, they have specific ideas about how they want to be promoted – or not. Take the videos for example: the manhunting deer in ‘No-One Knows’ is just the latest in a long line of fucked up creations to inhabit the band’s clips.

"The director Dean Carr has been a long time friend of ours and he’s almost certifiable," Homme explains. "He goes: ‘I got a concept for a video and I don’t really give a shit what song it is’. And when he told us what it was, I was like, ‘Are you gonna be able to pull this off?’ Because it needs to be dark and bizarre and unsettling but also black humour, and it needs to display the real personality of the band; there’s all these factors.

"And I like it when I feel like the director is going out on a limb."

Which was also the case on the animated nightmare that accompanied ‘Feelgood Hit Of The Summer’, a song whose entire lyric consisted of the words "Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, Marijuana, Ecstasy and Alcohol" repeated deadpan over jackhammer backing. Josh once mentioned that he got a huge kick out of using so many offensive words without swearing.

"Yeah, what do people do when you don’t swear, but you say words that they’re unsure of?" he says. "It’s like, you walk into a room and you go, ‘Hey! Cocaine!’ Some people go, ‘Where?’ and some people go, ‘I haven’t done that for 15 years, I don’t want my children to even hear that word.’ It’s the same thing in America if I go, ‘Hey, that kid’s retarded.’ And they’re like, ‘He’s mentally disabled.’ And it’s like, ‘Oh you passive fuck. I’m explaining his condition. His condition is retardation.’ The word is not inherently bad. The only thing that’s bad is when you’re like, ‘Oh, I feel so sorry . . .’ and it’s like, he doesn’t, he’s happy, this guy’s running around the room, y’know, and he’s totally excited – what’s your fuckin’ problem. I think that we’re just so un-politically correct that when I meet someone that is, it’s so easy to make them crazy in an entertaining fashion. I mean in America it’s like … I don’t have a dog anymore, I have a Canine American!"

Okay, last question. The Queens are currently at a stage where, with the aid of some blanket bombing from Interscope, they could easily cross into the big league with Limp Dickspit and Puddle Of Crud and Greed and all those other phonies. Why do I get the feeling they’re holding back?

"For me I’ve wanted for the band to not be overly photographed and overly shoved in someone’s face," Homme says. "They’ll find us. I’m not trying to get everyone to buy it – just the good people!

"I’m involved in the business so that we don’t get fucked over, but I want to just play man, that’s what I know about. This is a peculiar business; it’s the mixing of art and commerce, which is always a hairy situation. I don’t want to ever get bitter about it, I love doing this shit. I’m about to go to Australia – how do ya like them apples? – that’s fuckin’ badass. Fuck man, you’ll have to pry my cold dead hand off the guitar. I don’t want to have anything ever make it so that we don’t like this. It’s entertaining. This is the business of fuckin’ with people’s heads."