Palm Desert grad brings Queens of the Stone Age back to the desert — and it feels like a reunion

On a night when cold winds shut down Stagecoach, causing a temporary evacuation of the country music festival in Indio, warmth radiated from the stage and backstage area of The Show in Rancho Mirage.

Queens of the Stone Age, led by Joshua Homme, Palm Desert High School’s most famous alumnus, was making its first non-festival concert appearance in the Coachella Valley since a 2007 benefit concert at the McCallum Theatre.

Homme, who turns 53 next month, has recorded in Joshua Tree and made several local appearances since then. He has become one of the desert’s greatest ambassadors by frequently touting it around the world in interviews he does to promote not just QOTSA, but his collaborations with the likes of Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, and Izzy Pop.

Homme and his family moved to Malibu while he was going through an acrimonious divorce and friction arose between him and some of his former colleagues in Kyuss, the 1990s band that helped turn Palm Desert into a nationally-known rock scene.

But several of those colleagues showed up to see their childhood friend Saturday at the Agua Caliente Resort Casino Spa showroom, including John Garcia, Scott Reeder and Nick Oliveri, and fellow Palm Desert High School grad and Eagles of Death Metal co-founder, Jesse Hughes. Dozens from the Palm Desert “scene” also had warm backstage reunions with Homme’s mother, father and brother.

They not only shared hugs, they admired the way Homme has grown into one of rock’s most accomplished, genre-busting musical figures. QOTSA’s show, inspired by their concert film, “Alive At the Catacombs,” is a three-act mini-opera, like Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” and Karol G’s three-act celebration of Latin culture, which recently debuted at Coachella.

Homme’s magnum opus takes us on a dark personal journey contrasting the public persona he’s built since helping to carve out a new punk-driven genre called desert rock and the personal travails he has endured behind his multiple scenes. We must remember he also was part of the Seattle grunge movement with Mark Lanegan’s band, Screaming Trees. He spent time in the Netherlands, where he helped seed the flowering of desert rock in Europe, and he owned an important recording studio in Burbank, where he helped grow perhaps the last great rock scene in Los Angeles in the 2000s.

But he always came home to Palm Desert and the Joshua Tree studio, Rancho de la Luna, where he mixed local rockers such as Mario Lalli and Fred Drake with internationally known artists like Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and Billy F. Gibbons of ZZ Top to concoct a series of recordings called Desert Sessions. QOTSA’s quietly compelling opening act, Libby Grace, was part of the last Desert Sessions in 2019.

Homme waited until after his first act to address QOTSA’s sold-out audience, which he was told was the fastest sellout in the venue’s history. He would go on to lambast scalpers for leaving some seats empty by pricing re-sell tickets out of the reach of many fans, but first he exclaimed, “It feels so good to be home. It’s been a long time."

He frequently referred to the crowd in Rancho Mirage as “Palm Desert.”

Homme created this show by supplementing new material with deep cuts from past albums, including the title track to QOTSA’s 2013 LP, “…Like Clockwork,” and “Spinning in Daffodils” from his 2009 Grammy Award-winning project with Them Crooked Vultures. In this new context, songs from more than a decade ago served as breadcrumbs to what was going on with Homme and those closest to him outside of the spotlight.

In “Kalopsia” (which Homme recorded with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails based on the esoteric word meaning “a delusion of things being more beautiful than they are”), Homme sings, “Copycats in cheap suits are playing it safe/ While cannibals of bad news consume a parade.” In “Villains of Circumstance,” he sings, “There's no magic bullet, no cure for pain.”

QOTSA has long recorded songs engineered by pop master Mark Rankin (known for his work with Adele, Harry Styles and Florence + the Machine), and Homme and Norah Jones recently re-recorded the 50-year-old Frank Sinatra-Nancy Sinatra duet, “Something Stupid,” after Homme sang it at the “Rock the Plaza” benefit for the Plaza Theatre in 2022.

But this “Catacombs” show was presented with eerie, dark red lighting inspired by QOTSA’s visit to the Paris underground burial site while Homme was seriously ill. It began with the bandleader appearing alone on stage, sans guitar, with his face lit by a modern lantern, like Diogenes looking for an honest man.

When he ambled into the audience with a meat cleaver, summoning the demons of his past like a psychopath knowing when his meds would wear off, he asked ominously, “Do you think you’re safe from me?”

The new songs and arrangements with a small chamber orchestra of strings and horns revealed his visionary sophistication as a composer/lyricist and his skill as a bandleader to evoke what he first heard in his head.

Just as impressive was his skill as a vocalist. Homme didn’t start his career as a singer. Yet he navigated the complex vocal lines of these new arrangements without the anchor of a drummer or even the prompts of a keyboard player through most of the night.

He and bassist Michael Shuman ended the show with a beautiful a cappella two-part harmony of “Long Slow Goodbye,” a de facto tribute to Homme’s many deceased friends used by CNN to promote the final episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s traveling food show, “No Reservations,” after Homme’s good friend committed suicide.

This casino show, which was added to the QOTSA tour schedule after a McCallum administrator couldn’t find an open date for it (much to the chagrin of theater board chairman Garry Kief), would be considered disruptive to the careers of most music stars. The set didn’t include the band’s biggest hits, such as “No One Knows,” “Little Sister” or “The Way You Used To Do.”

But Homme has never been a copycat playing it safe. And his desert friends and colleagues have always been there to support his growth, ever since they partied together in the middle of the desert to music powered by Mario Lalli’s generator.

There may have been some friction along the way, but that feels gone now. Homme dedicated “Auto Pilot” to Oliveri, singing, “I wanna fly, I wanna ride with you” – years after firing Oliveri from both Queens of the Stone Age and Kyuss,

A sense of pride now exists among the growing, extended QOTSA family that this one-time desert outlier has found a dynamic way to sustain his musical growth and popularity long after the expiration date of most of his musical contemporaries.