Rock (No Stoner Required)

08/24/2000 2:00 AM, LAUNCH
Rob Kemp

"To the guy at Entertainment Weekly, I'm in a stoner-rock band that dresses like Matchbox Twenty," grouses Queens Of The Stone Age leader/ primary singer/ guitarist Josh Homme some three hours before his band hits the stage of New York City's Bowery Ballroom. The show is one of a couple of club dates that Queens are playing during a break from the Ozzfest tour.

Your correspondent prompted this riposte by handing Homme a copy of the July 14 EW, which contained a quick, quippy round-up of bands playing the Ozzfest. Queens, a shifting combine of musicians from California's Palm Desert of which Homme and bassist Nick Oliveri are the constants, and who are easily the most distinctive, tuneful, and idiosyncratic of the bands on this summer's bill, have indeed been glossed over as a bunch of stoners with Rob Thomas's fashion sense.

Homme, a strapping redhead with the bearing of a thoughtful surfer, is inured to such nonsense. His first band, Kyuss, is considered the template of what's now called, in one of popular culture's greatest modern redundancies, "stoner-rock." This was due to the band's affinity for extended, brooding Black Sabbath/ Hawkwind-style soundscapes; many groups, such as Nebula, Orange Goblin, and Fu Manchu, have followed suit.

But Homme is having none of it. "To music lovers who hate my band, they know Queens is not a stoner-rock band," he snorts. And of course, he's correct. Rated R, the second Queens Of The Stone Age album, is so much more than a riff-rock exercise: "Monsters In The Parasol" evokes a heavy metal song the way XTC's Andy Partridge would arrange it; "Quick And To The Pointless" is a warped rockabilly singalong; "Lightning Song" and "In The Fade" are gentle reveries; "Tension Head" and "I Think I Lost My Headache" are riff-rock songs, but of a rarefied and nuanced sort.

Recorded in 60 days (Homme laughs at people who labor for months and spend millions on recording), Rated R is by some distance the best rock 'n' roll record of the year. While devotees of (bear with us) stoner-rock are unnerved that it's more varied than the altogether more homogeneous Queens Of The Stone Age, anyone else wishing to sup on eminently tuneful, humorous but still vicious hard rock are served notice that a great band unburdened by turntables and a need to be down with hip-hop is out there.

"I am the deliberate outsider; I don't want to be in anyone's club. It doesn't matter if I go on the H.O.R.D.E. Tour, Ozzfest, the Warped Tour or the Habby-Flabby-Babby tour. I want to be the turd in the punchbowl," Homme says, indicating a disinclination to be defined that rivals that of one George W. Bush. The current climate "couldn't be any better for a band like us," he continues. "How could it? No one sees the lone wolf. If everyone played a version of rock that had the same elements as Queens, I would be stuck in a crowd. If you like our songs, you're going to like them whether it's '85, '95, or 2000.

"The instruments we choose to play are guitar, bass and drums, lap steel, and keys. We don't have a DJ and we don't rap," he says with no malice whatsoever. "At the same time, ultimately I believe that hooks are what people want, something that gives them a juicy feeling in their chests. Like when you go out on a date, and a chick's got you excited, and you say, 'Ooh, wow, I wish we could go up in her room.' It doesn't matter how it gets delivered. When you hear it and like it, that's what you get into, and I don't need to have a bunch of bands that are similar to us to get that across. It's better for me that Korn and Limp Bizkit and Vertical Horizon and Live are all doing their thing."

Homme seems confident--or at least hopeful--that there are folks who need a band like his. But he wants Queens' appeal to be, in the words of Spinal Tap's manager Ian Faith, "selective." "Take the Ozzfest. Do I want everyone there to buy our record? F--k no. I don't want the morons; I just want some of [the attendees]. There was some guy trying to heckle us before we walked out [at a recent Ozzfest stop]. He was a fool--I have a P.A."

Therefore, Homme needled the hapless metal dude. "By the time we were done, he was so red-faced and mad that he charged the stage. I don't want to sell records to this Budweiser-drinking mullet f--k. But the people who knew what I was saying to him, the people who got it--that's who I'm going for."

Whether or not Queens get the audience he's after, Homme tries to be dignified in the face of the demands of commerce. "You never want to claw your way into a club; you want to be asked to go there, to walk in the front door with your shoulders back. Not like you're a bad-ass, but as if to say, 'You asked me to be here, I'm here.' The Queens thing is not 'Hey, Howard Stern! Fred Durst! Will you help me sell a million records?' If [huge success] happens, I will not cry, or be guilty or ashamed, because I will feel good."

Interscope Records would feel good, too, as any similar component of a multinational corporation is currently more inclined than ever to want quick and vast returns for its investments--all the better to answer to the shareholders. And Queens, an acquired taste as far as modern metal goes, may be unloaded sooner rather than later. Homme is very conscious of this. "The one thing you need to understand about labels is that they're there to make money. Don't kid yourself that they're there for art. They want to do well, they need to, or they disappear. This is not a handout organization. It doesn't matter if I like that or not."

At the moment, Homme is comfortable. "I like Interscope," he says. "I love SST, but I see those 'Corporate Rock Sucks' stickers, and I say, 'How many people has [SST Records head] Greg Ginn stuck it in and broke it off to?' Just as many! I don't care. They're all evil, they're all good, they're all everything. I have no problem going with Interscope. I'm sure someday they'll hit me harder than I've ever been hit. But here I am now."

Unlike many artists preparing to forgo the entire brick-and-mortar label hassle--majors or indies, you still get screwed, so the thinking goes--Homme seems to have no interest in selling his music straight to fans via downloads on his own website. This probably has to do with the fact that he's about as unwired a musician as you're likely to hear about these days. "I'm not a computer user. I'm not necessarily against them, but they were delivered under the guise of making your life easier, and I say, 'Did they? Is your life easier now? Now you have to worry about your RAM and ROM?' It hasn't become necessary in what I do."

He dismisses folks who have downloaded Kyuss and Queens tracks from Napster, thereby denying him remuneration for his work, thusly: "You're no fans of ours. You don't give a sh-t about us. It's the ultimate f--k-you. I should grab a flute and skip around the countryside? I already don't make [enough] money," he muses darkly, "sitting in this beautiful bus with 20 bucks in my pocket for the next three days."

In other words, Homme still lives the hand-to-mouth existence common to most musicians. He and his band also continue to share a "healthy" attitude towards indulgence, one that has been mythologized since the druggy days of Kyuss. "We're equal-opportunity people," he says. "We have no prejudices or habits. We like to be fair to everything we eat or drink or hang out with."

"I don't quite know what you mean by that," I say.

"That's okay," he chuckles.

"Well, it's my job to make you be more specific."

"And my job is to make you be not too specific about [subjects] that I don't like," he says, not budging an inch. "If I say, 'Yeah, we take drugs and f--k girls,' it's like I'm in a stoner-rock band again."

Three hours later, Queens Of The Stone Age take the stage. Homme says, "I'm so glad to not be at Ozzfest," and the band slams into "Feel Good Hit Of The Summer," the complete lyrical text of which goes, "Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, Ecstasy, and alcohol." By the end of the show, it's clear that a band that began its performance with a remorseless catalog of vice is no stoner-rock band, but merely the best rock 'n' roll band in America.