“It’s good to be back at the Forum,” says Queens of the Stone Age frontman Joshua Homme, early in his band’s Saturday night. “Much, much better than last time already. So let’s have a fucking wonderful time, shall we?”
It’s his only reference all night to the incident that made international headlines last December, when Homme kicked a photographer in the face during Queens’ set at the annual KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas concert, held in the same fabled L.A. arena to which his band now returns. That night back in December, Homme appeared to be out of control and possibly intoxicated, at one point even cutting his own face with a sharp object. (A couple days later, he issued a public apology to the photographer, Chelsea Lauren, admitting he had been a “dick” and adding somewhat cryptically, “I’m gonna have to figure some stuff out.”)
But tonight he’s relaxed and jovial. Even his trademark foul-mouthed banter (at the KROQ show, he told a heckler, “I used to fuck guys like you in prison”) is dialed back to nearly Dave Grohl-like levels of congeniality. “Are you having a good time?” he asks the crowd, not for the first or last time, during ‘Feet Don’t Fail Me,’ the stomping opener to QOTSA’s latest album, Villains. “Well then fucking clap with me. It ain’t gonna hurt.”
A kinder, gentler, non-face-cutting Homme is a better fit for the latest incarnation of Queens, a group of musicians currently led by guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and anchored by former Mars Volta drummer Jon Theodore who are especially adept at laying down the swaggering grooves that have always underpinned QOTSA’s hip-shaking brand of stoner rock. It’s the same lineup featured on Villains, on which producer Mark Ronson helped Homme channel an appealing combination of Diamond Dogs-era Bowie, Lust for Life-era Iggy and less celebrated ‘70s boogie rock — Golden Earring, say. You could slip a cover of “Radar Love” into Queens’ current set and it wouldn’t sound out of place.
Beyond the six Villains tracks that feature in tonight’s set list, Homme seems to have cherry-picked songs from his band’s extensive back catalog that best suit his current lineup’s gift for hard-driving boogie and high-precision riffage. The menacing groove of ‘You Can’t Quit Me Baby’ from QOTSA’s 1998 debut is right at home next to the interlocking guitars of Villains’ ‘The Way You Used to Do,’ and the sexy strut of ‘Make It Wit Chu,’ off 2007’s Era Vulgaris, sounds more like a Mark Ronson-produced track than anything on the Queens album Ronson actually produced.
The crowd, heavy on older fans who have clearly been with the band since the early days, appears unsure at times how to react to this friendlier, more polished version of the shambolic desert rockers. If they were hoping for some Homme wild-man antics and profanity-laced rants, tonight they’re going to go home disappointed. Not surprisingly, classic tracks ‘No One Knows’ and ‘Little Sister’ gets the evening’s biggest roars of approval, even as both serve as reminders that Villains is just a logical progression in Homme’s long-running love affair with danceable riffs and not the left turn some fans and critics viewed it as.
For their encore, the band does deliver a left turn — a surprisingly faithful cover of Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,’ with Ronson sitting in on piano, no less. But then, as if to satiate those veteran fans, they finish with ‘A Song for the Dead,’ one of the stoniest, doomiest songs of QOTSA’s many early flirtations with stoner-doom metal. No one gets kicked, but Ronson’s piano does get upended — a parting gesture from Homme, a man who’s clearly trying to figure out how to still be a rock ’n’ roll badass while also being less of a dick.
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Words: Andy Hermann
Photo: Levan TK
