Queensryche roams 'Hear in the Now Frontier'

(April 3, 1997)

With three children and one more on the way, Queensryche lead singer Geoff Tate is determined to give them the guidance he lacked in his youth.

He touches on that subject in "Sign of the Times," the leadoff single off the Seattle-based rock quintet's sixth full-length album "Hear in the Now Frontier" (EMI).

"Sign of the Times," a plea for tolerance, doesn't offer solutions, but it does ask plenty of questions.

"I'm fascinated by the human condition," Tate said recently. "It's our commentary on that, looking at what's happening today. Like, how violence is so prevalent in schools.

"Being a parent, it opens a lot of doors to awareness for you. Till you start raising kids and you start passing on your outlook on life to them, then you can analyze things a little closer."

The biggest thing that came into focus for Tate was how girls are treated.

"Girls have it especially tough," he said. "They're pretty much hit over the head in grade school that there are things boys do and things that girls do. They're like second-class citizens."

Tate said he plays an active role in helping to knock down stereotypes and other barriers for his children by assisting them with their school work, limiting their TV time and allowing an open dialogue on drug and sex issues.

"My parents never talked to me about these things," he said, "and they never talked to me about it because no one talked about it to them when they were kids. It gets passed down through generations.

"I was once told a story about a woman and her daughter who were preparing a meal. They were cooking ham, and the mother cuts the ends off the ham, and the daughter asks why she does that. The mother says, 'I don't know, that's just what I do. That's what my mother always did.'

"The daughter says, 'Let's call Grandma,' and she asked her grandmother the same question, 'Why do you cut the ends off the ham?' The grandmother says, 'It's just that I didn't have a pan big enough to fit the ham.' See, that's how things gets passed along. Thoughts and ideas get passed along that way as well."

"Hear in the Now Frontier" finds Queensryche in a decidedly more upbeat mood while not straying too far off the lyrical path it cut with its multiple-platinum hit albums "Operation:mindcrime" (1988), "Empire" (1990) and "Promised Land" (1994).

They teamed again with producer Peter Collins, who oversaw "Operation:mindcrime" and "Empire," and split their studio time between Nashville's 16th Avenue Sound and Seattle's Studio Litho (owned by Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard).

"The last album ('Promised Land') took six months to make and we lived out in the middle of nowhere on a remote island," Tate said. "For this, we wanted to capture the spontaneity of the band, raw and unrehearsed. Our engineer, Toby Wright, his forte is minimalism, using the old-style approach, like the placement of mikes.

"It captured the band quick, fresh and loose, letting it all happen magically like bands do. It worked beautifully. The chemistry is still there for us. We trust it now."

BWF (before we forget): The Queensryche album discography - "Queensryche" EP (EMI America, 1983); "The Warning" (1984); "Rage For Order" (1986); "Operation:mindcrime" (EMI, 1988); "Empire" (1990); "Operation:livecrime" (1991); "Promised Land" (1994); "Hear in the Now Frontier" (1997).

Queens of the Stone Age: as strange as they want to be

(July 23, 2000)

California's arid oasis in and around Palm Desert is known for more than just paralyzing heat, tumbleweeds, Gila monsters and cactuses.

It's the home of stoner rock.

In the late 1980s, teenage singer-guitarist Josh Homme formed Kyuss in that vast wasteland, hell-bent on scorching the airwaves with a blistering combination of Black Sabbath-like heavy metal and Black Flag-influenced punk rock.

A product of his environment? Indeed.

After four full-length studio albums, Kyuss ran out of steam in 1995. From its ashes rose Queens of the Stone Age, an even more unyielding champion of loud, aggressive, repetitive and surprisingly melodic rock 'n' roll. Homme calls it "robot rock."

Though the group's self-titled debut album barely made a sales ripple in 1998, it prompted Rolling Stone magazine to call it one of the "Ten Most Important Hard and Heavy Bands Right Now." The Queens' second album, "Rated R" (released June 6 on Interscope), solidifies that declaration.

The first single, "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret," is climbing Billboard's mainstream rock tracks charts and Pause & Play's Picks chart, and the dark humor of the album's opening track, "Feel Good Hit of the Summer," waits in the wings.

During a recent stop on the Ozzfest 2000 tour, Queens bassist-vocalist Nick Oliveri - a onetime Kyuss member - says he can't believe there's any talk of having a radio hit. It never entered his mind.

"I don't really know how it works and how it all happens," he said. "I've never had a record like this. The records that I've played on, they've always been cult records with a cult following. They haven't really ever taken off or anything. At the same time, you can't just sit down and say, 'All right, I'm going to write a song for radio.' You just write what comes to your mind, and you decide which one you're going to push as the single after you've done it.

"We've played to a lot of people on this tour, and hopefully we'll sell a couple of records and get a little bit of airplay, as strange as that sounds. It's going to take some time, but the kind of record we wanted to make was something that took you a couple of listens to really get what we were doing. I think we pretty much accomplished that."

The group - also featuring keyboardist Dave Catching and drummers Gene Trautmann and Nicky Lucero - isn't going to win any songwriting contests, but the twisted tracks, such as "Feel Good Hit of the Summer" and its infectious, rapid-fire verse ("Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol"), is stuff of legend.

"We definitely love what we do," Oliveri said. "We just kind of try to go with it, go with the flow and do what we do. We try to make music that we would want to listen to. 'What's not available for me to buy and listen to, that I can get, that we can write? What's not around that we can write and put out there, something that we could listen to?'

"I think this pissed-off music that everyone's into right now is going to slowly die away. We're very ahead of the game. We're going to just swoop right up in there. We just try to kind of have a good time, play rock, turn the lights down and play a little grab-ass with the girls and rock! Let's try to bring some of the element back into rock that's been missing, get rid of the guilt and the pissed-off music and just rock."

"Rated R" also has its share of special guests, including Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan and Earthlings' Pete Stahl.

Oliveri says they just wanted to make an album that was drastically different from their first.

"We wanted to make something as diverse as the band is," he said. "From song to song, we can sound like a completely different band, but the same tones with a different style. We wanted to set up on this record so when we start to make the third record you'll be surprised at the direction that any song could go in.

"If we think it doesn't suck, we're going to play it. It's just that simple. We don't stick to a formula. There's no 'We have to play heavy all the time.' There's going to be some psychedelic songs, there's going to be some in more of a punk-rock vein, there's going to be some with a lot of space and air and movement between them, and there's still going to be the heavy ones, too. We're going to be as strange as we want to be."

Stoner rockers have that prerogative ... but please don't call Queens of the Stone Age stoner rock, Oliveri says.

"I just don't get the whole stoner-rock tag," he said. "We're just playing rock. We don't want to sell ourselves short and call it any one thing. As soon as you title yourself, it sort of limits what you can do."

Queens of the Stone Age has a lot more music in it, Oliveri says, unlike Kyuss, which was its own worst enemy.

"Kyuss was a band that sabotaged itself a lot," he said. "If the band started to do well, the band did something else. 'We can't do well, it's gotta stay where it's at or it's a sellout.' The band started to do well and then the band broke up.

" 'To preserve it is to destroy it.' That was the whole philosophy with Kyuss, get in and get out, and leave what we left behind. It's one of the things I think we accomplished. We made some pretty cool records, and it was fun."

THE FIRST RECORD I EVER BOUGHT: "I'd say, maybe it was Black Sabbath, 'Paranoid,' or Kiss' 'Destroyer' or something. When you're a kid, you play with Evil Knievel and Gene Simmons dolls. Kiss was a perfect thing for a kid."

THE FIRST CONCERT I EVER WENT TO: "It was a heavy metal thing called the US Festival (in San Bernardino). It was in '82, something called 'Big Heavy Metal Sunday.' It was like 300,000 people, something ridiculous. It was like Judas Priest and Ozzy and Motley Crue and all these bands, Scorpions and Van Halen and all those bands that were ruining music at that point in time. I was like 11 years old, so it was a pretty big impact. It was a big party."

THE LAST CD I BOUGHT: "I just bought a box set of Cheap Trick's first three records - 'Cheap Trick,' In Color' and 'Heaven Tonight.' I thought, 'I've gotta get it!' ... You know, they're one of the greatest pop bands ever. Robin Zander's voice is still golden, man. I went and saw them last year, when they did the three albums-three nights thing, they did the first album the first night, the second album the second night and the third album the third night. Still a golden voice, still kicks ass, amazing."

BWF (before we forget): Rock on with Queens of the Stone Age @ www.qotsa.com.

Quickspace goes into orbit

(Jan. 29, 1998)

British singer-guitarist Tom Cullinan, former frontman of Th' Faith Healers, is his own worst critic. He thinks his new band, the trippy quintet Quickspace, can do better than what it has offered on its self-titled debut album, released in November on Slash/London.

To be honest, Cullinan's not too attached to the album.

"It went astray and kind of annoyed me," he said recently from his home in London. "It took ages to do and cost shitloads of money and I think the result doesn't really justify that.

"First off, we bought all our own recording equipment and we overran on time and had to move places and our machines broke down. We had to move three times, and by the end of it, we were up in (singer) Nina (Pascale's) attic mixing it, and it was really ... ow."

Cullinan's refreshing honesty makes Quickspace's debut all that more appealing. He's a little hard on himself; an atmospheric track like "Rise," punctuated by Pascale's beguiling voice, should feel right at home at college radio.

That doesn't matter much to Cullinan. He's too busy working on the next Quickspace album, tentatively due in May.

"It's part of the distant past," he said of the debut LP. "I haven't heard it much either. I haven't gotten around to sitting down and playing it.

"I'm over here, I don't know how it's doing over there (in America), I don't know what's happening with it. I hear that there's a problem with distribution, but I've been told it's gone down quite well at college radio."

Don't get him wrong, Cullinan is committed to Quickspace. It's just that he has faced several major roadblocks along the way.

It began in 1995 when Cullinan left Th' Faith Healers and started his own label, Kitty Kitty. He recorded the single, "Quickspace Happy Song No. 1," by himself and later added bassist Sean Newsham and other members to the group. A few singles later, the others departed, leaving Cullinan and Newsham in the lurch on the eve of an important gig opening for The Grifters.

Did Cullinan have doubts?

"I had doubts before it happened," he said, laughing. "People who leave bands normally have good reasons. I just had to act quickly and carry on."

Undaunted, Cullinan put new pieces to his hypnotic-groove puzzle literally overnight. He recruited Pascale, who was dating a member of fellow Kitty Kitty act Penthouse, and then added keyboardist Paul Shilton and drummer Chin, both of whom played for the first time at the gig.

Positive reactions to the singles "Friends" and "Rise" led to a hasty recording session for Quickspace's full-length debut album.

"We just wanted to get it out, get it out of the way and do the next one, really," Cullinan said. "We rush-released it over here, before last Christmas (1996)."

Quickspace didn't waste any time. It went right back into the studio and, Cullinan said, they have enough material for a double album.

"It will probably be released as a single album, really edited down," he said. "We're getting into doing songs in different ways. If you come up with a melody for a song, you can either leave it there or explore it, which is what we're going to do.

"Our sound won't change drastically. It's really hard, though, when you're in the thick of it, surrounded by all of it, it's hard to have an objective view, but I think we're on the right track."

BWF (before we forget): Fans can go into Quickspace on the Web @ www.quickspace.com.