Now I'm not going to brag here, but people who know me well, also know that I've 'found' a lot of bands before they hit it big. Nirvana was one, Soundgarden was another.
Almost all of it was by accident, but we have a great record store in Fredericton called 'Backstreet Records', it's been there since I was in my early teens. Our junior high school didn't have a 'play ground', so we students had downtown Fredericton at our beck and call for lunch hours. The comic book store and the record store were both usual daily stops for lunch hours, if not every couple of days. Backstreet Records is still open to this day and has just as great a selection of new awesome material as it did back then and Eric still works there (Eric was a dude who worked at Backstreet I think pretty much since it opened and later sometime bought the store of it's owner - There's also a Backstreet in Saint John, New Brunswick)!
Fast Forward to 1992
I'd generally judge an album by it's cover. if it had a cool cover and name and brutal or strange song titles, I'd pick it up, so band's like 'Smashing Pumpkins' and 'Nirvana' were captivating to me, Redd Kross, and Jellyfish, just as much.
When one day I found the Kyuss album 'Blues for the Red Sun', I was interested by it's blood red cover of the Sun, plus KYUSS was a weird word I've never heard before.
(Blues For the Red Sun - Kyuss 1992)
I bought up the cassette and took it home and like most albums I fell in 'love' with, it didn't leave my cassette deck for weeks.
If you're unfamiliar with Kyuss, they are a California band, from the 'Palm Springs' area in East California. Band's from this area are generally known as the progenitors of the 'desert Rock' scene.
Those NOT familiar with Kyuss might be more familiar with 'Master's of Reality' or 'Queens of the Stone Age'.
Flashback to 1987!
Like the West Coast, which was somewhere that I spent a lot of time at when I was in my teens, the desert regions of the Southern states have always been in my heart. In 1987, during one of our Summer trips across the continent with our Father (On his way to teach Summer session at a University in British Columbia), we traveled as far South as the Northern tip of New Mexico, we visited the Grand Canyon and then drove down South past Flagstaff, Arizona and into 'Death Valley'... I loved the dry Summer heat of the place and the terrain, all of it.
In Death Valley that day we drove through the temperature said that outside the car it was 110C, even with the car's air conditioning on we were all sweating in the car (sadly, I had brought a lot of my vinyl records with me for the stay in Victoria BC and they all melted). The place is so hot, (how hot is it??), so hot that every so many miles there's a huge water tank for drivers to spray off their engines and fill/cool radiators. At one of those stops, when Dad was cooling off the car, I got out and walked up the bank beside the road and over the bank, just to see what this place was like...
I could see the heat waves rising all around me and I could feel the heat rising past my legs... I walked out far enough and the bank was high enough, that when I looked back i couldn't even see the car, so it was like I was out in the desert all alone.... I loved it! I loved that heat (and I also love to cool down!)
When I listened to that Kyuss album, the music reminded me of that day in Death Valley, the music conveyed the heat and dryness of that area (though Sky Valley is hundreds of miles from Death Valley). Kyuss' music I told my friends would 'sear their brain pan'. I wasn't even a smoker of cannabis at that time and the music still had a profound effect on me and so did the next's album they put out 'Welcome to Sky Valley' - 1994 and 'The Circus Left Town' - 1995 and then sadly for us fans the band broke up. Just a little after 'The Circus Left Town' the band and their record company put out 'Wretch' which was music by former members before the release of 'Blues For the Red Sun' and a track or two from when the band was called 'Son's of Kyuss' and was also the name of the bands first EP....
It was odd tonight I watched a documentary called 'Low Sound Desert', which is a documentary on the South Eastern California's 'Desert Rock' scene, the film featured loads of bands I was both familiar and unfamiliar with.
Josh Homme, Scott Reeder and Nick Oliveri made appearances and when the documentary began to talk about Kyuss, well it wasn't good.
It seems that when 'Wretch' first came out around that area, well they said it sucked, the band was horrible, no one really liked them, one band member was beaten in sports by Josh Homme at school a lot lol.... And then, the band Kyuss exploded and everyone was shocked to see them end up on tour with Metallica in Australia...
Things settled down and the animosity (maybe a bit of jealousy) eased as Kyuss frontman Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri were very courteous about bringing 'scene' bands on tour with them, merely when asked to. The guys from other bands said that they respected what Kyuss did for the scene, but also mentioned that if you went to 'Sky Valley' and expected to hear bands that sounded just like Kyuss, "that you'd be sadly disappointed" (Although in the documentary, there were a lot of bands with that 'sound', the "stoner Rock" sound, low tuning, droning, and feedback).
I own the entire Kyuss discography and to this day have the original 'Blues for the Red Sun' cassette
I bought way back in the 1990's. I also have a huge love for Queens of the Stone Age and like Dave Grohl, there's not a thing that Josh Homme has released musically that I dislike, again, like Grohl, I don't believe it's possible for Homme to write a bad song.
SO check out 'Kyuss', Master's Of Reality' and of course 'Queens of the Stone Age', but also be sure to check out 'Fu Manchu' 'Excel', 'Life Leone' and 'War Drum'... Roll a big fatty or take it straight, but put on your sunglasses throw on the heater close by and close your eyes as you'll be transported into the deserts of California and if you're lucky, you'll even get out alive and unsinged.....
Kyuss -circa 1992
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