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Rock 'n' Roll: Gather No Moss
For some reason none of my friends are really big fans of Queens of the Stone Age. An ex-girlfriend was pretty into them. A handful of people really like “that one song.” But no one seems to get quite as excited as me when a Queens song pops up on shuffle in my ipod. And I’m not really sure why this is. In my estimation, QOTSA are one of the single greatest rock bands making music today. Each of their five albums is incredibly inventive and seems only to grow finer with repeated listens. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe they’re writing the kind of music that needs to be allowed the time and tolerance to creep into your consciousness and people are too impatient to give albums repeated listens these days. Maybe the intelligence of what they’re doing gets swallowed up in the heaviness of their sound. Or maybe I’m just over-thinking the whole fucking thing. Maybe I’m hanging out with the wrong people …
Queens guitarist, Troy Van Leeuwen, took a few minutes to hang out with me on the phone, and here's what we discussed:
I’ll apologize in advance if I loudly cough or sneeze in your ear because I’ve been sick as hell.
Sorry, dude.
Eh, that’s OK. What about you? You have any tricks for staying healthy on the road?
You know what? I’ve been on the verge of being sick for the last week and somehow I’m, you know, I must be taking the right combination of Vitamin C and alcohol to fight off any bacteria.
I saw you guys play at a very strange spot once at an after party in the Compuware building in Detroit …
Oh yeah, yeah … After the Superbowl?
Yeah. And it was really strange because it was guys in suits and people out to be seen and …
Yeah, and the venue was basically the lobby of this building that our sound guy was like, "Are you kidding?" You look up and there’s like 30 stories of space right above us and he’s like, "Alright, we’re gonna try and make this sound good." There’s this gig we’re doing in Germany, it’s in this old salt-mine, and it’s basically half a mile under the surface. It’s gonna be a trip. We’ll see how it sounds. We’ll be the deepest rock band on the planet. Or the most underground.
You know, if someone asked me to book a show in a salt mine half a mile underground I’d say, "Ehh … probably should have Queens come play that show."
We’re either really adventurous or really stupid, we’re gonna find out.
Any good old-fashioned tour tales of Queens’ rock debauchery you’d like to share?
Well, you know, it’s a good balance right now, ‘cuz there was a time when that kind of lifestyle got in the way of stuff. But at the end of the day, I think the music is important and the lifestyle is less important. So having a balance of it is pretty much where we’re at, you know? I like to dip my toe into the deep end of the abyss, but I don’t like to dive in, you know? | RDW
Queens of the Stone Age • 10/23 • The Fillmore
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