For the recording of Queens' 1998 Sabbath-meets-Devo-meets-Hawkwind debut, Homme re-upped his partnership with bassist Nick Oliveri and drummer Alfredo Hernandez. Oliveri was now sporting a freak goatee and shaved head instead of his former butt-length hair, but was still up for old tricks -- violence, drug cocktails, debauchery. It was a situation Queens happily stoked: They followed the release of 2000's Rated R -- whose opening song's complete lyrics are "NicotineValiumVicodinMarijuanaEcstasyandAlcoholCo-co-co-cocaine" -- with a much publicized beatdown of British band Terrorvision at an English festival. (It was actually Homme and Dave Catching who did most of the brawling, but Oliveri went to jail. "The events are true, but we just blamed Nick," laughs Homme.) And then there was that show in Brazil and what Homme calls "the coolest fucking incident of all time," when Oliveri was forcibly "detained" by police onstage and asked to publicly apologize after playing in the nude to 250,000 people at a metal festival televised live to a national audience. As a result, Oliveri and the band got more attention for their antics than their music.
But side by side with this pranksterism was an ever-widening artistic ambition. Rated R's "Feel Good," for instance, was followed by "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret," an epic guitar-riff song augmented with vibes, saxophones and five other musicians. Homme and Oliveri had become the band's only permanent members, the drummer position was in constant rotation, and the shape of Queens changed as other musicians came and went, tour to tour and track to track. Queens had become a semipermanent Desert Session.
"Even though modern music is more lawless than ever, with people like Björk and Tom Waits and Outkast," says Homme, "I think most bands play by this false set of rules that doesn't exist -- while we know that there aren't rules. We don't have to write everything. It doesn't have to be always all us. It just has to be good. And all these people playing with us aregood."
They are. And with people like Mark Lanegan, exScreaming Trees singer and arguably one of the two greatest rock voices of his generation, joining the Queens as permanent part-time vocalist, the addition of Foo Fighters/Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl to Queens this year shouldn't have been much of a shock. For those who had been following Queens, it was just another pleasant surprise -- and one that couldn't possibly last long.
"This was like, Dave, will you help us out of a bind and play on this album?" says Homme. "Then he wanted to tour, too. And it was great, because it's really the best the band's ever sounded musically. But there's a negative side to it too, you know. Too bad his name isn't Tom Slingerlandsensmithe."
Reportedly put off by the amount of press he was doing to promote Queens' new album, Grohl was back out of the band before Songs for the Deafwas even released. Which means that perhaps now people can concentrate on the extraordinary, varied music this band has made. Songs is a breathtakingly ambitious, accessible rock record packed with humor, artsy musical maneuvers and super-rock guitar riffs. It's got Grohl, it's got Lanegan, it's got guitars tuned high and low, it's got songs written with Mario Lalli and Eleven's Alain Johannes. It's got an orchestral folk song. It's even got genius player and composer Dean Ween. It's a clear progression from Homme's earlier music -- a broadening of tone, range and craft.
"The Queens is an exercise in something," Homme says. "I'm not gonna force it along, because it can't be so wide that you don't know what's happening. When you're a band, you need to move slowly in order to hold hands with whoever is into you. We have a song on this record that I've had for eight years; it just wasn't ready.
"Even though I've been writing stuff like that for a long time, I had to wean everyone else onto it. Now I can do it in Queens whenever I want. There's a song that's full-on pretension, that almost wasn't gonna make it because I don't want to come off like a pretentious dick. But it just happened to turn out this way, you know? So we put it on. I love making records. It's my favorite part -- the sounds you chase in your head are actualized in front of your face. No one can tell you what to do. And I'd like to have done everything, or tried to do everything, by the time I'm dead. Musically.
"We're musicians. We're just the kind of musicians that always like to play."
