When Queens of the Stone Age signed with Interscope for their second album, it was because they celebrated the "weird bands" on their roster. This was exciting to their frontman and principle songwriter Josh Homme.
"I felt like if they were excited about Primus then they’d be really excited about me and I’m not singing about nacho cheese or something, I’m singing about LSD," he explained. "They’re very close. They both make you feel bad at the end.”
So, Feel Good Hit of the Summer, then. It was simply a list of drugs repeated ad nauseam cut with insistent drum beat and riff that echoes Big Black’s Pavement Saw.
Initially conceived by Homme as a jokey, throwaway skit to sneak in at the end of their 2000 album Rated R, it was thanks to Kyuss producer and Masters of Reality frontman Chris Goss, that song was given space to get loose and became a single in its own right.
“When we recorded that album, that song was kind of like an afterthought,” explains Goss. “Josh was just going to throw a few seconds of that chant in at the end of the record. I said, ‘No, man. That rocks!’ And it ended up opening the record.”
Written by Homme and bassist Nick Oliveri, the song was conceived following a messy three-day party in the Californian desert at the turn of the millennium.
“Nick and I had gone out to Joshua Tree just before New Years, 2000, and stayed at a place called 29 Palms Inn,” Homme told Mojo in 2010. “Out of that came Feel Good Hit of the Summer. [It] was such a great way to start that record. It said, ‘Look out, here we come.’”
Recorded at the legendary Sound City studio in Van Nuys, California in early 2000, the band bumped into Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, who was recording his solo album Resurrection in the same facility. He was asked if he'd like to contribute his unmistakable vocals to the song. The Metal God gave a resounding yes.
“He said, ‘Will you write the lyrics down?’ and he hadn’t heard the song, he agreed to do it without even knowing what it was,” Homme said. “On a piece of paper I wrote, ‘NICOTINE, VALIUM, VICODIN, MARIJUANA, ECSTASY, ALCOHOL, AND COCAINE’ really big in capitals. I pushed this paper to him and he looked at it and goes, ‘Rock ’n’ roll cocktail – I think I invented that’. We got on great, he’s such a lovely guy.”
While the lyrics are simple, there was the small task of getting radio stations across America to play the song on air. For Homme, the single release was something of a “social experiment”, albeit one using their new paymasters' money.
“How do people react when you say things that are uncomfortable?” Homme said during an interview with the Los Angeles times in 2000. “The song will be censored, but there isn’t a single curse word in it. I just want to hang it out there and leave it for the court of public opinion to decide.”
"The song will be censored, but there isn’t a single curse word in it."
Josh Homme
After all, the song itself isn’t pro-drug. It’s not anti-drug. Either way, Walmart were reluctant to stock the album unless the song was removed entirely. The frontman pointed out the album’s title Rated R was enough to suggest that the music would be about grown-up activities and not suitable for children.
“Some people will cheer and some people's moms will be upset,” he told NME. “And some people may realise that someone may be sticking a knife in some genre... like stoner rock, as an example. I don't feel, though, like we have an obligation to be positive or negative for kids. It's really just a list, isn't it? There's no censurable material involved.”
While the single itself didn’t chart in the US – thanks to zero airplay – it achieved Top 40 status in the UK and remains a staple of their set over 25 years later.
“[European fans] took it exactly as it was; it was a joke,” remembers Goss. “It's a really funny song.”
