Queens frontman doesn’t hold back
Josh Homme is not well. As the red-haired, 6foot-4-inch singer and guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age took the stage with his band at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium on Thursday, Feb. 1, there was a glint in his eye that suggested imminent chaos.
The Southern California desert rock band has long championed overindulgence and excess in its music (its signature song, 2000’s “Feel Good Hit of the Summer,” peaked with the chorus “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol! Co-co-co-co-cococaine!”), but some fans have started to wonder if reality is too closely resembling the masculine posturing that appears on the records.
In December, the 44-yearold Homme kicked a female photographer in the face during the band’s set at a radio station concert
in Los Angeles — the same night he cut his own forehead and taunted the show’s headliners by shouting “F— Muse!”
In San Francisco — a makeup date for the band’s canceled appearance at last year’s Outside Lands music festival — he was in a defiant mood as he strutted in front of the sold-out crowd of 8,500.
“It’s good to be f— up in San Francisco,” Homme crowed in one of his numerous, not always logical rants between songs.
He alternately appeared humbled (“This next song is about the time I went crazy,” he said, introducing “You Can’t Quit Me Baby”) and indignant about the latest twist in his story line.
“There’s no reason to be perfect,” Homme said at one point in the evening, following it later with another thought: “Safety is bull—. There’s no such thing as safety . ... If you risk nothing, you get nothing.”
Either way, the audience — made up of nearly as many women as men — seemed eager to overlook his transgressions.
With the volume cranked so loud the walls trembled, the Queens’ two-hour set stuck largely with the material from its two most recent albums, 2013’s “... Like Clockwork” and last year’s “Villains.” Even though the latter was produced by Mark Ronson, known for pop hits like “Uptown Funk” and Lady Gaga’s “Joanne” album, at the Bill Graham Civic the muscular guitar riffs ruled above all else, nearly suffocating the band’s swinging grooves and explosive melodies.
The Queens — Homme, guitarists Troy Van Leeuwen and Dean Fertita, bassist Michael Shuman and drummer Jon Theodore — tore through roaring songs like “Monsters in the Parasol” and “The Evil Has Landed,” playing amid a forest of light poles that the band members would occasionally kick to the side (maybe to save the photographers?). It also worked up a knockout version of its biggest hit, “No One Knows,” with determined efficiency.
In his more lucid moments, Homme reminisced about playing at the Bottom of the Hill, growing up in a small town and the value of chasing your dreams.
“What I do love about San Francisco is that I can let loose and take my pants down,” he said, an illicit cigarette dangling from his bottom lip.
Before the Queens took the stage, the band’s spinoff act, Eagles of Death Metal, opened the show. The band was at the center of the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bataclan in Paris, and there was conviction in singer Jesse Hughes’ voice as he preached about the power of rock ’n’ roll.
During the band’s highvolume 45-minute set, it dug into audience favorites like “I Only Want You” alongside a blistering cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream.”
Those who made it through the sizable security line outside also got to witness a rare airing of “Speaking in Tongues” with parttime member Homme joining the band onstage behind the drums.
The audience — made up of nearly as many women as men — seemed eager to overlook Josh Homme’s transgressions.