In the long tradition of rock mockery, the bass player and the drummer are almost always the whipping boys. Jokes about only being able to play one string at a time, or unflattering comparisons to tub-thumping Neanderthals, are par for the course for the rhythm section — but you’d be hard pushed to find anyone aiming these kind of cheap cracks at Them Crooked Vultures. Behind their kit is Dave Grohl, a man who spent the 1980s learning his chops in the American hardcore punk scene before joining Nirvana in 1990 and providing the kind of sonic muscle that would help them to redefine rock music. And that’s to say nothing of his role as front man in the multimillion-selling Foo Fighters. For a bass player, Them Crooked Vultures go one better by boasting John Paul Jones, a man whose session work in the 1960s spanned hundreds of recordings before he eventually joined Led Zeppelin, where he would help inject guitar music with a dynamic, soulful groove like no band before them. And that’s to say nothing of his multi-instrumental contributions to hundreds of records since.
“Dave and John are the greatest living rhythm section in the world,” Them Crooked Vultures’ front man, Josh Homme, remarks matter-of-factly in a dressing room at the Fox Theater, Oakland, shortly before he leads his band of icons on stage. The guitar-wielding singer for Queens of the Stone Age was previously a member of the stoner-rock gods Kyuss and, briefly, the grunge heroes Screaming Trees — so he’s hardly lacking pedigree himself. Yet Homme happily concedes that in this most distinguished of supergroups, it’s he who ranks as underdog. “When it comes to Led Zep and Nirvana, people are always like, ‘Don’t ruin my perfect thing.’ It’s a lot of pressure, but you have to put it in your back pocket and forget about it.”
If the sudden arrival of Them Crooked Vultures feels like an ambush, it was very much planned that way. The band initially came together out of a proposed collaboration between Homme and Grohl last year. The two met in the early 1990s and have been as thick as thieves in recent years, with Grohl joining Queens of the Stone Age on drums for their 2002 album Songs for the Deaf, and the subsequent tour. The inclusion of Jones was a little more arbitrary. He and Grohl met at an awards show in London last year, allowing them both to catch up on a professional relationship that had begun when the former Zeppelin man contributed piano and mandolin parts to the 2005 Foo Fighters double album In Your Honour. Grohl floated the idea of Jones coming to LA to make up a trio, and Jones — still fired up from Led Zeppelin’s one-off show at the O2 in December 2007 — enthusiastically accepted.
“After Robert Plant said he didn’t want to do any more Zep shows, the plan was for me, Jimmy [Page]and Jason [Bonham] to start a new band,” the soft-spoken Englishman recalls. “But we couldn’t agree on a singer and it just fizzled out. I’d been playing all year and the blood was up, so when Dave asked me to play with him and Josh, I was ready to go. I joined not knowing what it could be or what it might turn out to be — but I knew it couldn’t be boring.”
The nascent band jammed in utmost secrecy during the first part of the year, even going so far as to socialise publicly only in pairs, so as not to give the game away. Finally, the feverish rumours that surrounded their existence became reality in August, when they played their first show together (with the guitarist Alain Johannes as their live fourth member) at the Chicago Metro. The only promotion for the show was a logo of each member’s best-known band posted on a flyer on the venue’s website — enough to help the 1,100-capacity venue sell out in a matter of minutes.
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“It made sense to be secretive,” Grohl reasons. “Otherwise, we would have had press wanting us to talk all the time, we would have had a record company trying to get involved... there would have been all those things that can poison what you’re doing just as it’s being born. It was obvious that it was going to get attention from the get-go, but it needed time to become its own thing.” Even after these birds were let out of the cage at the Metro, the band fought hard to retain mystery by not releasing any music and avoiding interviews — all of which actually increased the hype surrounding them.
“I had people coming up to me and saying, ‘Dude, the marketing for this has been genius!’” Grohl laughs. “They assumed that it was some kind of business ploy, but it was just because we didn’t want anyone to know. We figured that until we have something to say, let’s not say anything at all.” In an age of hypermedia and instant gratification, it’s a campaign that has been remarkably covert, but the veil was finally lifted three weeks ago, with the release of their self-titled album. It revealed that Them Crooked Vultures now have a lot to say — and that they’re saying it very loudly. It’s a thunderous collection of songs, filled with dexterous riffing, seductively heavy grooves and sexual energy.
Indeed, for all the focus on the rhythmic dream team, it’s Homme and his libidinal lyrics that are the key ingredient. In Them Crooked Vultures, Grohl is the heart, Jones is the brain and Homme is the genitalia. And in the traditionally licentious world of rock’n’roll, there is no part more important than that. “It’s one of the greatest things ever, and there’s not enough of that in music,” agrees Homme, who confesses to having been hellbent, at first, on calling the band Caligula, before realising that numerous others had got there first.
“We’re just that far away from animals... and that sounds great,” he says. “I think people like to do what they want to in the dark because they feel like the dark protects them. I’ve always played to those people. I don’t think you need the dark to do what you want, but if that’s where most people start, I’ll start there with you too. And maybe we’ll get you out of there and you can be who you want all the time.”
Homme has never been one to shy away from his hedonistic tendencies in his other musical projects, either. Arguably the greatest moment in the entire Queens of the Stone Age back catalogue is the ferocious one-chord chug of Feel Good Hit of the Summer, the lyrics of which consist solely of a list of the drugs Homme took during a millennium party. The only difference is that in Them Crooked Vultures he has the equally decadent throbs concocted by Jones and Grohl to back it up with. The end result is a carnal onslaught few other bands can match. It’s a lifestyle Homme continues to embrace wholeheartedly, if only because he feels he owes it to himself.
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“Every single time I’m on tour, and every time I leave my hotel room to go to a show, I always let go of the doorknob and say to myself, ‘And little did he know what was about to happen.’ If I’m gonna tour and leave everything that I love behind, I want my eyes to be open to everything that’s out there. Sometimes, that’ll end with me losing a tooth. I’m ready for all of that.”
As our time comes to an end, Homme leaps off the sofa and prepares to bound out of the room on the way to his next adventure, only to stop momentarily and look back. “Hey, do me a favour,” he says. “Find yourself a girl tonight and...” At which point he trails off and pretends to put his arms around an invisible woman, while making an amusingly suggestive growling sound. Before I can tell him I have a long-standing girlfriend waiting for me at home, he’s gone.
The next words I hear from him come about an hour later, as Them Crooked Vultures walk on stage and kick into the set (and album) opener, Nobody Loves Me and Neither Do I. Grohl puts down a swaggering beat, Jones strokes out an assuredly sexy bass line and Homme sets the tone for the night perfectly by lustily crooning the opening lines: “Think I saw her for the first time maybe in a newsstand/She was picking a mag and dressed oblique.” It isn’t long before I hear the growl Homme left me with being repeated by the couples in the darkness all around me. It’s the kind of primal response that Them Crooked Vultures would undoubtedly take any day over awestruck applause for their technical prowess.
Them Crooked Vultures is out now