{"id":640,"date":"2026-08-27T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/27\/we-had-to-push-people-to-the-side-whether-gracefully-or-violently-the-story-behind-queens-of-the-stone-ages-masterpiece-songs-for-the-deaf\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T16:00:00","slug":"we-had-to-push-people-to-the-side-whether-gracefully-or-violently-the-story-behind-queens-of-the-stone-ages-masterpiece-songs-for-the-deaf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/27\/we-had-to-push-people-to-the-side-whether-gracefully-or-violently-the-story-behind-queens-of-the-stone-ages-masterpiece-songs-for-the-deaf\/","title":{"rendered":"“We had to push people to the side, whether gracefully or violently.” The story behind Queens Of The Stone Age’s masterpiece Songs For The Deaf"},"content":{"rendered":"
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California\u2018s Palm Desert might not be a location immediately synonymous with punk rock, but, just like CBGBs in New York and The Roxy in London, this arid wasteland incubated a rebellious DIY music scene<\/a> whose impact still resonates. Inspired by local skateboarders\u2019 imaginative quests to find new spaces in which to ride, bands such as Yawning Man and Across The River sought out desolate locales in which to spark up, plug in portable power generators and rock out, out of sight of the authorities.<\/p>\n

Fuelled by beer, weed, acid and crystal meth, these impromptu, free-for-all assemblies became the stuff of local legend. And it was here that the teenage Josh Homme served his musical apprentice, in Kyuss<\/a>, a brooding, intense, psychedelic punk band completed by his high school buddy Nick Oliveri on bass, vocalist John Garcia and drummer Brant Bjork.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were a little young to go to see Black Flag and the Misfits<\/a> and GBH and Discharge without getting killed,\u201d Homme recalled, \u201cso we ended up creating what we wanted to hear those bands evolve into. In the desert, it was about having to make your own thing, and being isolated enough to do it without anyone fucking with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kyuss ended up recording four studio albums, peaking with 1994\u2019s Welcome To Sky Valley<\/em><\/a>, before imploding acrimoniously.<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness started to dictate what we were doing,\u201d says Brant Bjork, \u201cand the spirit of creativity and camaraderie and brotherhood, all that made our band pure and organic, started to evaporate.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would have been all too easy for Josh Homme, the band\u2019s most charismatic and confident character, to re-emerge from the wreckage with a vehicle which traded upon the cult success that his former band had enjoyed. Instead, following a summer serving as a touring guitarist in Screaming Trees<\/a>, Homme purposefully took a hard left, renouncing stoner rock for something altogether more nimble, more abstract and more sensual.<\/p>\n

With Queens Of The Stone Age, ‘The Ginger Elvis’ aspired to create \u201ctrance robot music<\/a>\u2026 heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls.\u201d <\/p>\n

Inspired in equal measure by The Stooges, Misfits, Discharge, Can, Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash<\/a>, the band\u2019s self-titled 1998 debut album, with its motorik<\/em> riffs, studied minimalism, louche Rat Pack swagger and obvious disdain for hard rock orthodoxy, represented both a razing of the past and a signpost to new horizons. <\/p>\n

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Is rock\u2019n\u2019roll in trouble Is it drowning somewhere and I don\u2019t know?<\/p>\n

Josh Homme<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The wired, unhinged and stylistically promiscuous Rated R<\/em><\/a> was an even bolder leap forward. Introduced by the remarkable Feel Good Hit Of The Summer<\/em>, on which Judas Priest<\/a> frontman Rob Halford joined Homme and his berserker sidekick Oliveri to deliver a verse resembling a junkie\u2019s letter to Santa (\u201cNicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol<\/em>\u201d) and a single word chorus – the word \u201ccocaine<\/em>\u201d gleefully stretched like bubblegum \u2013 it saw QOTSA anointed as \u201cthe new saviours of rock music\u201d by broadsheet newspapers and fashionista style mags, much to Homme\u2019s bemusement. <\/p>\n

\u201cIs rock\u2019n\u2019roll in trouble?\u201d he asked drolly. \u201cIs it drowning somewhere and I don\u2019t know? I\u2019ve been listening to good rock music since I was a kid. I mean, I love our music, and I want other people to love it as well, but I just don\u2019t know that rock needed saving.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Homme was right, obviously, but with Rated R<\/em> racking up 100,000 UK sales. plus Album Of The Year accolades from Kerrang!<\/em> and NME<\/em>, his band were were now regarded as serious players in an industry which, via indie darlings The Strokes<\/a> and The White Stripes<\/a>, had suddenly fallen in love anew with guitar bands. <\/p>\n

\u201c[Our label] have suddenly realised they\u2019ve got this cool little band on their hands, all ready to go,\u201d Homme observed. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like a challenge to stay ahead now. Some people may say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but I say, Fuck you. Catch me if you can motherfuckers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Expectations for the group\u2019s third album were duly inflated\u2026 which Homme, forever a punk at heart, naturally interpreted as a green light to make Queens\u2019 new songs louder, darker, weirder and more fucked-up. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of people who like heavy music but don\u2019t want to listen to Creed or nu-metal bands,\u201d he reasoned. \u201cI think we can offer something a little more esoteric.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s a three-record plan,” Homme said at the time<\/a>. “The first record needed to step away from Kyuss and announce a new sound, which was repetition, trance, and simplicity. Then the second record needed to fan the music out so we could display it and play whatever we wanted. So, the third record, to get it right, should combine the first two and go even further.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sessions for the third Queens Of The Stone Age album began in October 2001, with Homme confident that he had amassed his strongest set of songs to date. <\/p>\n

Many of these had actually been recorded before, at the Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, during the Homme-helmed Desert Sessions, freewheeling, spontaneous, experimental jam sessions involving the likes of PJ Harvey<\/a>, Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan<\/a>, Masters Of Reality mainman Chris Goss (producer of three Kyuss album and both previous QOTSA long-players), Goatsnake\/Earthlings\u2019 vocalist Pete Stahl and more. <\/p>\n

Homme imagined that he could recreate the loose, organic feel of these sessions in the studio with Queens, but the vibe with new producer Eric Valentine was markedly different, regimented, meticulous and not altogether fun. To Homme\u2019s fury, word began to filter through that \u201cthe adults\u201d, the executives at Interscope Records, were expressing concern over the album\u2019s direction, or, more specifically, its lack of direction. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo other people there seemed to be a lot riding on this record,\u201d he noted pointedly, \u201cand they ended up standing in our way trying to help. Our main thing we had to overcome was other people that were not involved with us and sort of pushing them to the side, whether gracefully or violently.\u201d<\/p>\n

One man who voluntarily stepped away from the project after a mere seven days, due to other obligations, was Queens\u2019 drummer Gene Trautmann. Fortunately, Homme had a back-up option, namely former Nirvana drummer-turned-Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, a long-time friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cI called Dave and said, Do you want to finish this record?\u201d Homme recalled. \u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019m in Malibu. I\u2019ll be there at six o\u2019clock\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Being in Queens of the Stone Age was one of the greatest experiences of my life<\/p>\n

Dave Grohl<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI first met Josh in 1992, at a Kyuss show at the Off Ramp in Seattle because he was touring with my friend Pete Stahl<\/a>‘s band, Wool, and The Obsessed,\u201d Dave Grohl told this writer in 2009. \u201cThis was the first time I’d seen Kyuss and I was blown away, they were fucking great. They seemed like us, like kids who grew up in the suburbs listening to rock \u2018n\u2019 roll records, doing petty crime and drugs, just a little vandals from the middle of nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen we had QOTSA on tour with us for a really long time in 2000. Instead of putting \u2018Queens Of The Stone Age\u2019 on their dressing room door we used to put \u2018Critic\u2019s Choice\u2019 because they were the coolest band in the world, and honestly, we thought that too. So in 2000, as we were touring with Queens, someone asked me what was my biggest regret of the year and I said that it was that I didn\u2019t get asked to play on Rated R<\/em>. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo Josh said, \u2018Dude, if you want to play on a couple of songs\u2026\u2019 Then, that day, I was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, going to the beach, and he called and said, \u2018Do you want to play on our whole record?\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cJosh and I have a connection musically that I just don’t have with anybody else: as a drummer, playing with him, we share this frequency that I haven’t shared with anyone else. It’s intangible and unspoken, almost like ESP. I made a U-turn, went straight to the studio, and we recorded the drums in like 10 days, maybe two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDave came in and made these songs that I thought were good, really phenomenal,\u201d marvelled Nick Oliveri. \u201cIt uplifted not only our spirit, but us as players, including Josh: his playing on it really made everybody come forward. Dave was a champion of all things. He helped us in so many ways we could never repay the guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As the sessions finally gathered momentum, Homme hit upon a unifying concept to tie his band\u2019s \u201ceclectic, schizophrenic\u201d new songs together: they would be presented as a selection of tracks aired on disparate radio stations dialled in on a night drive from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, a road trip Homme had undertaken countless times.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I\u2019d do it, I didn\u2019t have a stereo, all I had was a radio,\u201d he recalled in 2002. \u201cAnd it goes into weird religious stations and really bad, bad music on that trip through the middle of nowhere. I used to really enjoy the silence and then every once in a while the station you were at would all of a sudden let out a screech, and become a new station. I just wanted to bring that to a record somehow. It is kind of a concept record, but as if the word \u2018concept\u2019 didn\u2019t suck.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea was a masterstroke. With friends such as The Cramps\u2019 Lux Interior, Eagles Of Death Metal<\/a>\u2019s Jesse Hughes and Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White recruited to voice mock radio station idents \u2013 \u201cKRDL\u2026 we spoil music for everyone\u201d, \u201cKLON\u2026 we play the songs that sound more like everyone else than anyone else\u201d \u2013 the album was given continuity and cohesion. <\/p>\n

Crystallising QOTSA\u2019s \u2018last-gang-in-town\u2019 outlaw cool, Songs For The Deaf<\/em> is a wild, disorientating joyride into a grotesque world of sex, drugs, violence and death, laced with subtle black humour. On a diverse and challenging album, not everything quite worked – the scorched-earth punk of Six Shooter<\/em> is disposable at best, while The Sky Is Fallin\u2019<\/em> resembles a cast-off from co-producer Chris Goss\u2019 Masters Of Reality \u2013 but when Homme\u2019s band hit their mark, it\u2019s irresistible. <\/p>\n

Opener You Think I Ain\u2019t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire<\/em> boasts a storming route one riff and a manic Nick Oliveri screaming \u201cGimme some more!<\/em>\u201d, First It Giveth<\/em> deals with chasing narcotic highs, Another Love Song<\/em> is surf guitar-driven Motown metal and Go With The Flow<\/em> is a deathless ode to squeezing every last drop of pleasure out of life. <\/p>\n

Best of all is the kinetic No One Knows<\/em>, a Josh Homme\/Mark Lanegan co-write, where the thunderous interplay between guest Dave Grohl, Oliveri and Homme recalls Led Zeppelin at their most telepathically locked-in. <\/p>\n

Like its desert setting, this is music without horizons, all heat, light and awe-inspiring elemental power.<\/p>\n

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Released on August 27, 2002, Songs For The Deaf<\/em> debuted at number 4 in the UK, and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200 chart in the US. Its release was preceded by festival dates for the band, including an appearance at England\u2019s Glastonbury festival, with Dave Grohl on drums. <\/p>\n

This was all the more notable because, at the time, Grohl was supposed to be in a Hollywood recording studio making the fourth Foo Fighters album, One By One<\/em>, a fact that understandably alarmed his bandmates. Some wondered privately whether Grohl might ever return. For a fleeting moment or two, the thought crossed Grohl\u2019s mind too.<\/p>\n

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You invited the outsider in, and now the outsider\u2019s gonna fuck things up<\/p>\n

Josh Homme<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI did a one-off show with Queens at the Troubador [on March 7, 2002],\u201d Grohl recalled, \u201cand we walked offstage and Mark Lanegan said \u2013 and this was one of the few things that Mark Lanegan ever said to me – \u2018You know, it\u2019d be a shame just to do that only once\u2019. My decision was purely musical and motivational.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing in Queens was one of the greatest experiences of my life. If you can say that you were a member of Queens Of The Stone Age that\u2019s like wearing a patch on your chest that says \u2018I Am A Badass\u2019 for the rest of your life, because the only people that get to play in Queens Of The Stone Age are badass motherfuckers, and that\u2019s the truth. <\/p>\n

\u201cWalking through the backstage area of a festival with Queens is like the moment in a Western where the saloon bar doors swing open and the piano player stops playing and everyone just stares. You have Josh, [Mark] Lanegan, [Nick] Oliveri and me walking in a straight line and it’s like being in the coolest gang. We never had a bad show. I was now playing drums in the best band I\u2019d ever been in and fucking loving it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This busman\u2019s holiday ended for Grohl at the Fuji Rock festival in Japan in July 2002. <\/p>\n

\u201cI started missing my friends,\u201d he explained. \u201cThe Foo Fighters had become a family by this point and I\u2019d been away from home for too long.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI always knew that Dave was going to go back to Foo Fighters,\u201d Josh Homme admitted. \u201cI was always trying to intimate that this wasn\u2019t something the other guys needed to worry about. But band people, and I mean this in a very blanket way, are very easily rattled, because many bands don\u2019t last, and they\u2019re such an unpredictable animal that it\u2019s easy to get your confidence rattled.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was great about that time was that Dave did<\/em> go back, and that said that it\u2019s possible to have a musical mistress: it would have been terrible if Dave had stayed in Queens because it would have eliminated and killed the suggestion that you can do multiple things. In a rare moment it had proved that having multiple personalities isn\u2019t a bad thing for someone playing music. Once you feel you can do anything in music, that\u2019s when you can get closer to God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked to ponder his band\u2019s new found popularity in 2002, Homme had this to say: \u201cKyuss got noticed because it didn\u2019t give a shit if anyone noticed it. Bands now scratch and they claw. I don\u2019t wanna show up and go, Please can I get into this club? I want someone to ask me. That attitude is the reason why it\u2019s still fun. It\u2019s like being a deliberate outsider. You invited the outsider in, and now the outsider\u2019s gonna fuck things up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Songs For The Deaf<\/em> ensured that Homme\u2019s band would be outsiders no more.<\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

California\u2018s Palm Desert might not be a location immediately synonymous with punk rock, but, just like CBGBs in New York and The Roxy in London, this arid wasteland incubated a rebellious DIY music scene whose impact still resonates. Inspired by local skateboarders\u2019 imaginative quests to find new spaces in which to ride, bands such as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}