Whatever, It's All Good

The world’s most popular bands aren’t necessarily the ones who shill cola for name brand global corporations, or the artists who ride the latest chart trends to temporary fame. The world’s most popular bands are the ones who tour the most, who directly connect with their fans on a regular basis. It helps to have a sound that people can dig, too.
Queens Of The Stone Age, for example, ensnare fans with a mix of catchy hooks and alluring vocal harmonies with heavy hitting riffs and a no bullshit attitude. On top of that, they seem to be on the road an awful lot. Currently traveling with this summer’s Lollapalooza tour, Queens will drop off the festival just before it hits the West Coast, and head to the UK to play at the V2 Festival. After that, Queens bass player Nick Oliveri is scheduled to perform with Queens second guitar man Mark Lannegan’s new band at the Reading Rock Festival, then Queens will play at another festival, and then it’s back to the US for a few more Lollapalooza dates. The band plans to tour the American East Coast in September, then mount a headlining tour of the West Coast in October.
Catching up with bassist Oliveri via telephone from a hotel room in Zurich, Switzerland, the obvious question looms: does he ever get any time off?
“Yeah man, actually, I’m just chillin’ right now. It’s all good. Sometimes you gotta say fuck it, man,” offers the bald and bearded bass player, in an affectation that blends Southern California stoner / beach tongue with a slight country drawl. His laidback demeanor and casual phone presence don’t indicate a man who has just started a stint on the road that will last over six months. His relaxed nature could be attributed to the fact that he’s enjoying three days off, but when asked if, rather than enjoy the time, he goes a little stir crazy, he answers emphatically. “Hell yeah.”
Oliveri explains that he fills his time off with whatever he can, including an acoustic gig here and there, and even a side project, Mondo Generator, which is scheduled to release its second album while he’s still on the road with Queens.
“It was all stuff that I had for Songs For The Deaf before we even started messing with anything else,” begins Oliveri, explaining that the songs on Mondo Generator’s sophomore effort, A Drug Problem That Never Existed, originally came from ideas he had developed for Queens’ last album, but that were never used. “We knew what songs we wanted for that record, and we were filling in the gaps. Those were songs that weren’t what we were looking for to fill in those gaps. I think there are a couple of screamers on the Queens record, but too many of those kinds of songs for Queens is kind of weird because of the three different singers and stuff. It made more sense then to put those songs away, but they’re fun songs so why just trash ‘em, you know? I’d rather just put them out. It’s another avenue for music.”
Oliveri’s motivation is as genuine as it gets, and to be fair and honest, not all of the new Mondo material seems like it would be suited to Queens Of The Stone Age very well. A Drug Problem That Never Existed certainly isn’t a bunch of Songs For The Deaf second-string tracks.
“Some of the songs are Queens fueled, and that’s just what they are,” concedes Oliveri. “But I knew which ones were going to make it on to Deaf. If Josh [Homme, vocals/guitar] and the rest of the guys were backing them, then they were Queens songs. But you know, nobody cried if their songs didn’t make it. If it ain’t gonna be a Queens song, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good song, it just means that it didn’t work for this band. So it was one of those things, man, where I just saved those songs for something else.”
Queens Of The Stone Age has, at its core, always been Nick Oliveri and Josh Homme — both of the SoCal desert rock band Kyuss — but the pair have done a lot together and apart. Homme’s Desert Sessions series of releases (Volume 9 & 10 of which is set to hit store shelves in late September) are particularly of note, and Oliveri has been working on Mondo Generator since 1997, when he began shopping the side project’s first album, Cocaine Rodeo, to record labels.
“I first did the stuff for Cocaine Rodeo in ’97. I got Josh [Homme] and Brant [Bjork] and all the Kyuss dudes together and I had a few songs and we recorded them. Nobody wanted to touch the record, and I think Amphetamine Reptile was the only label that even called us back,” recalls the bass player. AmRep made the band a ton of cassettes of the album in lieu of an actual recording contract, but it wasn’t really enough for Oliveri, so after a short tour with the band, he shelved the project. “I just set Cocaine Rodeo on the shelf for a few years and didn’t even try anything with it. A friend of mine — Greg Anderson — asked me about it because he was one of the people I sent a tape to years before. He said he wanted to put it out, so I just let him do it. I mean, why not man?”
Mondo Generator seems like a very laid-back, non-committal project — three years between each release, only tentative plans for future tours and other time-monopolizing obligations. But it’s not all that lazy, says Oliveri. There is, in fact, a method to his madness.
“I’m planning on doing a new Mondo album with each Queens record. So every time there’s a new Queens record, the songs that don’t get used for that will be [on] the Mondo record,” explains a laughing Oliveri. “But it’ll have to be more than just that because Mondo is a band now — with Brant [Kyuss and Fu Manchu] Dave [Catching, QOTSA and earthlings?] and Molly [Maguire, earthlings?] — and those guys like to write too. So it’s gonna be interesting to do the next album. I know we’re planning to go back to the desert where Dave’s got a studio, and try to get some stuff done, but it’s a matter of the, like, three days I got off between tours. It’s hard to do stuff that way sometimes, but it’ll happen, and it’ll be cool.”
There’s a casual confidence in Oliveri’s assertion, like he doesn’t ‘think’ or ‘hope’ that it’ll happen or that it’ll be cool. He just knows it. The band itself works much the same way. Though the music is tight, it’s casually so, riding the moment, taken what came to mind when the energy was just flowing.
“The music is whatever is flowing out of us,” tells Oliveri. “It’s not about censoring ourselves. It’s like, ‘Go ahead dude, shit on the floor, I don’t care man. If that’s how you’re feeling, just do it.’ This is about having a sense of humor and having fun…but not being a joke band, either. There are a lot of bands that are shitty and are supposed to be punk rock, but they’re not — there’s no attitude, there’s nothing heavy about them, and it’s kind of a drag, man. I guess I’m still pissed off about something — I don’t really know what — but I really like doing the Mondo thing. It’s a good outlet.”

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