I saw stoner rock band Kyuss Lives! last November at the Wiltern during their huge tour reunion featuring singer John Garcia, bassist Nick Oliveri, guitarist Bruno Fevery and drummer Brant Bjork, and totally enjoyed the ride. But they are back in the news for some far less glorious events.
Queens of the Stone Age founder/guitarist Joshua Homme and bassist Scott Reeder are now suing their former bandmates Garcia and Bjork ‘for perpetrating what they believe is trademark infringement and consumer fraud’.
Whereas they were first very supportive of the project (Reeder even performed with Kyuss Lives! on a series of international dates when Oliveri had to deal with legal issues regarding a police standoff during a domestic dispute with his girlfriend), things have changed. Although 'Lives!' was added to Kyuss for a good reason (Homme, the main guitarist and songwriter for Kyuss from 1991 to 1995 was not involved in the reunion), Garica and Bjork have apparently taking some underground actions to steal the ownership of the name. Homme and Reeder issued the following statement via their publicist:
‘It sucks. To think we went to a meeting in January solely to help them with their request to continue Kyuss Lives! With open arms, we made every attempt to help them continue Kyuss Lives! respectfully. Only to discover while they looked us in the eye, Kyuss Lives! management and band had filed federal documents in 2011 in an attempt to steal the name Kyuss.’
‘This is desperately what we were trying to avoid. It’s a sad day for us and for John but most of all for the fans. What a needless mess.’
Last year, Garcia explained to Rock Sound magazine why Homme was not involved in the Kyuss reunion:
‘I have nothing bad to say about Josh — he's extremely intelligent, very smart, a great guitar player, great songwriter, a great vocalist — he is a bad-ass, there is no question, and I love him dearly but he is busy with his own thing. He has Them Crooked Vultures, Queens of the Stone Age, he's a father, a businessman and even if we asked him to do it, I don't think he'd say yes, so I don't want to set myself up for a big fat no which is 99.9 percent what he would say.’
Homme had effectively explained in a 2010 interview, he did not want to take part in a Kyuss reformation.
‘The offers come in all the time. They're getting more and more expensive, and more and more elaborate. The money is crazy, but I've never been tempted — I don't really care about the money, I never have. That's not what Kyuss was about, so to punctuate the end of our sentence with that would be blasphemy… Kyuss has such a great history that it would be a total error. I like that nobody saw Kyuss, and that it was largely misunderstood. That sounds like a legend forming to me. I'm too proud of it to rub my dick on it.’
This is sad when former band mates reach this extremity, Homme is the frontman of a very successful band, and as he said, Kyuss is an underground legend, so should he be suing for a name?