A Past Tense Word

Rick Beato just published another one of his long-form interviews. This time, he interviewed Josh Homme. Josh is from Palm Desert, California, where there were no clubs, so his band Kyuss, which he founded when he was 14, played parties outside in the desert. Out there, as Josh puts it, there’s nothing for the sound to bounce off of and everything just goes away. So he tuned down as low as the strings would go, played through bass amps, and somewhere in the distance you could hear a generator complaining about the load. And all of a sudden it had enough size to be pulverizing. He had found his sound, a way to sound like himself. That’s how “desert rock” began, and with Kyuss and later Queens of the Stone Age, Josh kept pushing it further. At one point in the interview, Rick and Josh also talked about radio, and how it used to be shaped by DJs whose taste you could trust. Radio today, Josh said, is all about safety: “But music isn’t about safe­ty when it’s good.” Safety, he added, is…