rock candy

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For several weeks now I’ve been contemplating buying a Telecaster. I learned a little bit of guitar when I was a kid, but didn’t have the patience to stick with it. Over the years, I’ve picked it up on and off again, just for kicks, but now I’ve become obsessed with at least cultivating some competence. It’s not because I dream of ever performing in front of anybody (though my sister tells me that it can be a total chick magnet), but rat

her that it’s just so satisfying to be able to play for myself and my cat in the solitude of my bedroom. So anyway, I have my eyes on a Telecaster, which in my mind is the perfect guitar in its design, versatility, and, most importantly, tone. I’ve been making several trips a week to the guitar shop in Pasadena, waiting for the prices to come down after x-mas, but ogling the guitars in the meantime, anticipating the moment of ecstasy when I pull the trigger, take the thing home, and can wake up every morning and feel so blessed to finally own a Telecaster…a fucking Telecaster!

…Last night at the guitar shop, I plugged in and played all the riffs I’ve learned or re-learned over the past few months – Day Tripper, Cinnamon Girl, Substitute, Rebel, Rebel…and No One Knows, the Queens of the Stone Age song that has one of the greatest riffs of all time. A guy working at the shop gave me the thumbs up and said “Queens!” (dudes who work in guitar shops always seem to be hard rock lads). It made me feel good because I can never tell whether I’m playing the riffs in recognizable form. We got to talking about QOTSA, and about Josh Homme, and Kyuss, Homme’s first band. One of the biggest disappointments of my life is that I had a chance to see Kyuss live in the mid 90s and passed it up. I just didn’t like their stuff at the time, and I still think their last album, And the Circus Leaves Town, is the only one that’s any good. It’s certainly their most accessible. But even when they’re accessible Kyuss remain extremely heavy, both in their sound and their overall vibe. The reason Queens of the Stone Age are so damn good is that Homme dispenses with some (though certainly not all) of that heaviness, maintains the hard edge, but also adds incredible melody lines and hooks. He has a poppy sensibility that he never really had a chance to hone during his time in Kyuss, and he pays a lot of attention to crafting great, self-contained songs. Homme does admittedly go over to the dark side with some regularity, but QOTSA resonate most with me when he keeps things tight and tuneful. And needless to say, the guy is a master of the catchy riff. And he’s also very intelligent from what I can tell… When I mentioned to the guitar shop guy that Homme’s guitar often seems like it’s tuned down a full step to get that low vacuum cleanerish sound of his, a la Blue Cheer, he laughed and said, “dude, he has that thing down at least a step, sometimes close to two.” Tonight’s song is a case in point. It starts out innocently enough with with some hash brownie sounding meanderings on a guitar and a weird repetitive bicycle bell. But what at first sounds like sloppy farting around quickly crystallizes into a lead pipe of a riff, replete a discombobulating tempo change. There’s a lot going on here, yet somehow, improbably, the melody remains just barely intact, and I mean just barely. And listen to how low to the ground those guitars are! It almost sounds like a tractor pull… Kyuss’ is generally way heavier than anything I wanna spend a lot of time with these days, but I’ve been thinking about music that’s hard and tuneful. QOTSA are one of the great hard and tuneful bands, and it’s interesting to trace Homme’s approach to making this type of music back to its roots…