Vulture Club

Emerson, Lake and Palmer it ain’t. Them Crooked Vultures might have supergroup pedigree (the line-up, in case you’ve been holidaying on some remote Martian colony, includes QOTSA mainman Josh Homme, Foo Fighters leader and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones), but the tunes on the band’s eponymous debut are way too complex and committed to be dismissed as superstar jams. This may not be the most, um, commercial set of songs these gentlemen have ever worked on, but Them Crooked Vultures is nonetheless a wonderfully scuzzy record.

“That was the intention,” John Paul Jones chuckles when we catch up with him shortly before he embarks on a tour that will take him and his new band-mates all the way into 2010. “We wanted to put the gnarliness back into it again because that’s how we all like to play rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, Zeppelin was like that, and QOTSA and the Foos and Nirvana, it’s all got that grit in it, that’s what rock ‘n’ roll’s all about.”
Grohl and Homme always had power and precision, but songs like ‘New Fang’ and ‘Scumbag Blues’ suggest that Mr Jones has taught them how to swing.
“Ha-ha-ha! Well, you could say that, I couldn’t possibly comment! No, we all like to groove. From the very first jam we had in February, I think the first thing was a groove. It gets the girls dancing at gigs, y’know.”
Point of fact, Jones was always a fan of Motown and Stax. A defining characteristic of the 60s blues-based rock monsters, Zeppelin included, was you could dance to them because they always had great rhythm sections.
“I know, yes. I always liked the groove, and John Bonham was the same, I mean we were huge James Brown fans at the time. Rock ‘n’ roll was dance music. I don’t think that in order to make complex music you have to lose the swing and the groove. It’s actually necessary.
“But ( ) clicked pretty immediately, and so we got down to it and recorded and wrote the album at the same time, which was new to me, because normally you rehearse the songs and go into the studio, but we were in the studio writing and switched the machines on.”
The recording of the album took place between January and August of 2009 in Pink Duck studios in LA. Given the complexity of the record, one imagines it was a pretty intense period of work.
“Yeah, and that surprised us, because suddenly you look up and think, ‘Wow, we’ve got all this music which started from absolutely nothing.’ Josh really is a perfectionist... we’re all perfectionists, we all get rough with each other!”
When you have three personalities that strong, it must echo the Led Zeppelin days.
“Yeah, a lot of parallels.”
Did the roles of producer/musician swap around a lot?
“Yeah, especially if you’re doing overdubs. Whoever is in the studio doing the work gets produced by whoever is in the control room. We’re three producers, we’ve all had a ton of experience and that’s great, you can trust somebody else: ‘Am I doing this okay?’ And as we all checked our egos in at the door, you can take advice and even criticism from other people because you know what they’re talking about, and you know that they’re doing it for the good of the band. And it’s great, y’know, I don’t mind being told: ‘I think you did that a couple of times too many.’ And I’ll do it to somebody else. It’s just a very professional, easy, working arrangement. And we trust each other.
“Sometimes Josh will look at us and we’ll go, ‘Uh-oh, he’s gonna go out on a limb here.’ But you trust him. He’ll go, ‘It sounds a bit funny at the moment, but hold on, bear with me on this one, it’ll be okay.’ And it is. And the atmosphere in the studio is hilarious to be honest. Everybody’s joking all the time, there’s a lot of laughter. I’m amazed we got as much music done as we did. Somebody will count off in some stupid voice, and through the tears you concentrate.”
The Vultures, it should be noted, are a real live playing proposition, and the current tour was sold out before they’d released a note of music. This, Jones says, “is the point of the thing.”
Did it take much persuading for him to go on tour?
“A good fifteen minutes! The whole idea was to get onstage and play. I think Dave was gonna go out even without a record, he just wanted to play the drums. I was kind of up for it anyway because I’d been working with Jason (Bonham) and Jimmy (Page) after the O2 thing. When Robert (Plant) said he didn’t want to do any more Zeppelin stuff we thought, ‘Well, it’s silly to have done all this rehearsal and then say goodbye,’ so we thought we’d try and start another band. Of course everybody said, ‘Oh, it’s another Zeppelin reunion,’ and it wasn’t, it was another band, different singer, different material, but nobody would have it, and eventually we couldn’t agree on singers, and so that kind of came to a graceful end.
“And it was around that time when Dave came over to the GQ awards to present us with Men of the Year award or something, and he said, ‘I’m going to do something with Josh – do you fancy coming over?’ And I went, ‘Yeah, I’ll let you know what happens with this,’ and I phoned him a couple of weeks later and went, ‘Still on?’”
Given the success of the Zeppelin O2 reunion show in December 2007, and the grace with which the musicians and the songs had aged, it seemed a shame that it couldn’t continue.
“Well it did. I remember sitting at the keyboard playing something and thinking, ‘Y’know, I’m gonna change that for tomorrow night... Oh shit, there is no tomorrow night!” But we did put a hell of a lot of work into it, and as a consequence your chops are great and the fire’s in your blood again and you think, ‘Wait a minute – this is all going to end?’ So by the time Dave came along I went, ‘Yep.’ I was a pushover.”
How long did it take before Grohl pulled him aside and started asking questions like, ‘You know that track on Physical Graffiti...?’
“Occasionally, occasionally he’d say something. They covered it up pretty well, I only really found out that they were a bit nervous from reading interviews with them. Josh is very cool, he won’t say anything like that. But Dave is less... inhibited shall we say. He’s a killer drummer. And Josh is becoming my favourite guitarist. So between the two of them it’s become a dream-team again. Hurrah!”