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Good times, bad vibes
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When childhood friends Jesse “the Devil” Hughes and Josh Homme hatched a plan to form a band in 1998, their prime directive was simple enough. They wanted to bring hip-shakin’ good times back to rock ’n’ roll, long since crippled by cheap angst. The only two obstacles standing in their way was that Homme had, and still has, a full-time gig with his own band, Queens of the Stone Age. That, and Hughes didn’t know how to play an instrument. Only three months after Hughes first picked up a guitar, the two hunkered down in the studio, with Hughes on vocals and Homme behind the traps, and recorded their debut, 2004’s Peace, Love, Death Metal. They later wriggled free of the “QOTSA side-project” tag with 2006’s Death By Sexy. Although Homme rarely performs live with the band, he remains Hughes’s co-conspirator in the studio and is considered the co-leader of the band. The duo’s main objective—stopping the sad sacks of rock in their tracks while doffing their caps to rock ’n’ roll’s glory days—hasn’t changed one iota, and their last record, 2008’s Heart On, proudly sustained their original intentions. A media storm surrounded the band when, in 2006, Eagles of Death Metal were unceremoniously relieved of their opening slot on the Guns N’ Roses tour after only one show (and Axl Rose referred to them as “Pigeons of Shit Metal” on stage). Since then, Hughes hasn’t been shy about shooting barbs Axl’s way. The Mirror reached the highly quotable Hughes by phone to get his thoughts on a couple of things and just let the tape machine roll. On La-La Land:“The people in L.A. are just people that came from somewhere else to become fucking famous, and if they tell you anything different, they’re lying. That has to be the most self-centred reason to do anything in the world, but when the bars close and the whole city is a ghost town, it’s really an amazing place. There are all of these great places, like streets Jim Morrison wrote about, places where [Love singer] Arthur Lee hung out, and Sunset Boulevard that had the riots in the mid-’60s, and at 3 in the morning, you can really communicate with the spirit of the people from a different time that gave that place its juice.” On friends in high places:“I was a werewolf my whole life and didn’t see my first full moon until I was 30, thanks to my friend Josh [Homme]. You can’t really make new friends in L.A. because everybody is pretending they aren’t watching but they are definitely checking people out and taking notes, and I’m the guy just showing up at the bar saying, ‘Let’s dance.’ Josh told me the first thing you can do to set yourself apart from other people in Hollywood is to keep your word, and it’s true. I was a guy who used to be pretty fat and lost his virginity to my ex-wife, and then I was suddenly in a rock band and my best friend was in Queens of the Stone Age. I didn’t have any illusions about why people wanted to talk to me or girls wanted to sleep with me—I’ll fully admit I rode Josh Homme’s coattails to the top because those were really comfy coattails. Josh cared about me being used up by the machine and really watched out for me. He’s the captain of our gang.” On the ladies (including his mom):“You see a lot of surgical augmentation in L.A. and it really seems like this sexism put on women. Women are not tits or puffy lips and are much more than what the television and magazines try to make us believe. If somebody has to get tits bigger than their head just to be loved, I find that really heartbreaking. I hate to say it but rock ’n’ roll is sadly still a boys’ club and I think everybody is starting to get sick of it. I sing about debauchery, mainly, and people are getting laid after our shows, but people also have their honeymoons at our shows, people have proposed at our shows and I think that’s really cool because even if I’m singing about getting with the ladies and flirting, I’m really still just the guy who doesn’t cheat on his girl, opens a door for a lady and likes his mom.” On stepping out of the shadow of QOTSA:“With Eagles, Josh brought people in the door, but it was up to me to make them stay. From the start, it was critical for this band to just do its own thing and not be a side project. It’s kind of supernatural but this band is almost like it wanted to be made and be real. I got into a band at a late stage and saw a lot of bullshit before that, so it’s really important to me that this band is always about two friends having the time of their lives and providing a philosophical statement of always doing the right thing.” On Axl Rose:“Like any other Guns N’ Roses fan, I find Axl to be really insulting. He cost a lot of people their jobs, a lot of heartache and probably some mental breakdowns while he fucked around on a record [Chinese Democracy] for 16 fucking years—just because he wanted to be a dick. I firmly believe that the gods of rock ’n’ roll just chose me to kick him out of the gang for gross misuse of power. Axl still has the opportunity to do something that no one expects him to do, which is something cool. I honestly think he can do it, but first, he really needs to control himself a bit, and most importantly, get a real friend.” On other assholes in rock:“Lars Ulrich from Metallica is somebody who just really gets my gander up. You can tell the other guys in the band are cool and used to just be serious heshers who were probably whacked out on meth and would’ve kicked your ass in the ’80s. On the other hand, you have Lars, who is just this swishy Mary who grew his hair long, put on a denim jacket and infiltrated this cool gang. The only time I met him, he was wearing a golf pantsuit and everybody was wondering who this fat golfer dude was acting like an asshole in our backstage area. He could’ve been the greatest, but I went up to him after I figured out who he was and told him how much I loved Metallica, and he just looked through me and walked away. Thirty minutes later, Josh introduced me as the dude from the band, and he didn’t even remember me from a half-hour before and went on about how he thought we were rad. The only thing I wanted to do at that point was kick his ass. “The way I grew up, it’s critically important to not be an asshole just because you can sing well or whatever. This is the coolest job in the world and nobody, not even Lars, deserves this job. You don’t earn the ability to exclude people or get special treatment and a sense of entitlement just because you can carry a beat. A scary day for me is that I might not make my plane to go and rock people in Brussels, and I realize that’s a fucking gift. When people are successful at rock ’n’ roll, it can make the world seem like a dream, and that’s what will fuck these people up. I like people and want people to feel they can belong—that’s what real rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be about.” WITH COLDPLAY, THE ROOTS, LYKKE |
