SONGS FOR THE DEAF
Songs for the Deaf is the third studio album by American rock band Queens of the Stone Age. Released on August 27, 2002, the album features Foo Fighters and former Nirvana member Dave Grohl as a guest drummer. Like their other albums, Songs for the Deaf has a large number of guest musicians, a signature of the band’s releases. The album garnered critical acclaim, and the band earned its first gold record certification in the United States, after selling 986,000 copies. Songs for the Deaf is loosely considered a concept album, taking the listener on a drive through the California desert from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree while tuning into radio stations from towns along the way, such as Banning and Chino Hills. (More from Wikipedia)
My wife Peggy Winfree and I were just starting to date back then, and I had already picked up a copy of the Queens of the Stone Age album having the odd name, Songs for the Deaf. Her son Ernie Guyton and his wife Priscilla Dodds were visiting, and I had the CD with me, so I thought, what the hell: Let me see what they think of it. I already knew that Peggy had good musical taste, even though she is a few years older than I am (okay, more than a few). I had already gotten Dido’s first album, No Angel with her in mind, and she loved it.
Well, they started bopping along to “No One Knows”, and I wound up playing the whole CD for them.
(December 2012)
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I told the story of seeing Queens of the Stone Age with my wife Peggy in my last post; but their third album in 2002, Songs for the Deaf is probably when I realized that something was really going on out there in the larger world: rock music with a modern sound but with garage-rock roots. The Queens had a rotating line-up of like-minded musicians and grew out an earlier band with similar sensibilities called Kyuss; while they didn’t sell a lot of albums, they were a pioneer of the stoner-rock scene of the 1990’s. As the Allmusic article (by Eduardo Rivadavia) describes the band: “[T]he signature sound [of] Kyuss [combined] the doom heaviness of Black Sabbath, the feedback fuzz of Blue Cheer, and the space rock of Hawkwind, infused with psychedelic flashes, massive grooves, and a surprising sensibility for punk rock, metal, and thrash.” The connective tissue between the two bands is multi-instrumentalist Josh Homme, who also founded the popular Eagles of Death Metal.
I would view The Sound of San Francisco, a collection from 2003 of songs from brand new bands in the San Francisco Bay Area, as documenting one of the first wave of bands that were directly influenced by the Garage Rock Revival – it was released in the year after the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” single and the Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf album were released, as well as the mini-battle of the bands between the Hives and the Vines on the MTV Music Video Awards.
(January 2013)
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In the same time period, Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider contributed to another of my favorite albums of the early 2000’s, Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age; Johannes co-wrote one of the songs on the album, “Hangin’ Tree” with Josh Homme. Alain Johannes played guitar and bass on the band’s next album, Lullabies to Paralyze (2005); he and Natasha Shneider were also in the touring band that supported the album. Alain Johannes apparently became an official bandmember in QOTSA for the Lullabies album; as best I can figure it, he basically replaced bass guitarist Nick Oliveri (who had also been in Kyuss with Josh Homme).
(April 2015/2)
