Primitive Cool

As you join us, Queens Of The Stone Age are nearing the end of the road, or at least, the end of the Songs For The Deaf campaign. When they first set out with Dave Grohl in tow, fresh from the making of that third album, they were a well-respected but still marginal mutant metal band with friends in high places. Since then, they’ve settled on a line-up, toured like blazes and established themselves as one of the most intense live acts around.

But right now, what they need most is to get back home and repair the tendon tearage that any band sustains through existing in close quarters and heightened circumstances over an extended period.
So, Josh Homme, the Queens are a notoriously tight bunch, but how do they keep from killing each other?
“Well, I carry a stun gun,” the singer wisecracks, “so whenever anybody pisses me off I just – ccccch – and then they just pass out and I don’t have to deal with them. I want to kill Nick from last week.”
For any particular reason or just…
“He’s just an annoying bastard.”
Are there any techniques you develop to let off steam on the road? Long Zen-like walks in the woods? Beating the crap out of a punch bag?
“No, y’know, I think we’re just people, so you create a little distance for a moment, then you get over it.”
Talk to any band and they’ll say the same thing: this is where the hairy stuff starts, a year or more into touring a successful album. Here’s where the arguments over stinky runners become fistfights.
Josh has been around enough to have heard this one before.
“If they can make it through this, right now, yeah… I don’t know for sure if it’s even the size of the album so much as the intensity of our association from touring so long.”
Similarly, one bad gig at the wrong point can trigger backstage post-mortems, finger pointing sessions, recriminations. Does the level of playing plane off after a while? Do they keep getting better, or do they still go to hell some nights?
“I think we continually try to outdo ourselves,” Troy says. “Sometimes we think it’s shit but everybody else seems to buy it (laughs) so, we’re just gonna try and be better and better for ourselves.”
Okay, more received wisdom: musicians generally agree the best time to record is hot off the road, but very few do because they’re all sick of each other by that stage.
“I’ve done that quite a few times,” Josh says, “and as far as being at the peak of your ability, it sort of guarantees that. But you can still be at the peak of your ability if you wait too, you just have to prepare longer before your record.”
So how come nobody seems to be able to write on the road? You’d think there’d be nothing else to do with all that dead time in hotels and airports.
“We do. That’s all we do. We have 24 songs, that’s just between me and Troy, I think Nick’s got three or four things happening. And it’s the best shit we’ve ever had by far, to me it sort of shits on the last record. I wanna record it now, but I just can’t I can’t do it. I’d probably take my own life: ‘I’m taking you fuckers with me!!!’”
Still, you won’t catch the Queens whinging too much. In fact, their appetite for roadwork harkens back to the days of bands like Black Flag, who not only played like maniacs, but also built the PA systems, sometimes the stages, probably even a few venues.
“Well I think we really enjoy it,” Josh concedes. “I just think we’re at the first time where we’re questioning if we’re going on too long. It’s still fun, but we’re going, like, ‘Wait a minute.’ But [that’s] not bad after 17, 18 months.”
Did it help to have a stable line-up for the last year or so, with Mark Lanegan and Joey Castillo signing on for the long haul?
“It helped so much to know you weren’t gonna change. In the beginning, changing was fun and it was about moving it around and getting different takes on the songs, but once you have three records out, it’s about teaching someone 40 songs and that’s a fuckin’ bitch because you’re not really expanding on them, you’re just getting them to a starting point.”
All the same, with someone like Lanegan, who has his own well-respected career going on, his level of commitment to the band is even greater because he’s only on stage for a handful of tunes and therefore his degree of release is less. And he still has to put up with the same amount of customs officers and snotty check-in clerks.