The term "supergroup" was first coined back in the 1960s when bands like Cream, Humble Pie, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young dominated the record charts. Over the years these reconfigurations of well-known musicians have spawned groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Bad Company, and Audioslave, each of whom have left a unique mark on the musical landscape. Some five decades later, however, the term has become somewhat commonplace, abused even, but if ever the title applied, it would fall to Them Crooked Vultures.
The origins of this latest supergroup can be traced back to 2007 when Led Zeppelin came together at London’s O2 Arena for a one-off concert to honor the late Atlantic Records founder, Ahmet Ertegunat. At the time, Zeppelin hadn't played a full set together since disbanding in 1980. The show went splendidly, so well, in fact, that reunion rumors ran rampant. Well, sadly, a reunion didn’t happen, but something almost as thrilling did when Zep's phenomenally talented bassist, John Paul Jones, suddenly found himself with a hankering to hit the road again, three decades after Zeppelin's final tour.
In the years following the demise of Led Zeppelin, Jones had done some solo and session work and had branched out into album production, but the watermark set by Zeppelin back in the ‘70s made it hard for him to be part of a band again. “I didn’t really want to join another band after Zeppelin,” he says, “because I knew nothing would ever be as good as that.” When Robert Plant passed on a reunion, Jones, guitarist Jimmy Page and drummer Jason Bonham, son of the late Zep drummer John Bonham, decided to give it a go without him. The trio wrote and rehearsed new material and put out feelers for a singer, but when they couldn’t agree on a replacement for Plant, the project unraveled and it was back to square one for John Paul Jones.
Enter Dave Grohl, former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman, who himself is descended from some pretty distinguished rock ancestry. Having worked with both Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age on their 2002 release, Songs for the Deaf, and with John Paul Jones when he made a guest appearance on the Foo Fighters’ 2005 album, In Your Honor, an event Grohl calls “the second greatest thing to happen to me in my life,” Grohl approached the Zeppelin vet about giving Queens vocalist and guitarist Josh Homme a shot. After proper introductions were made, the three men spent a couple days jamming in Homme’s Burbank studio and quickly realized they wanted more from their collaboration than the kind of casual musical experiments Homme routinely engages in.
Calling themselves Them Crooked Vultures, this cross-generational, transatlantic dream team has worked stealthily since their inception in early 2009, dropping a downloadable tune here, there, and making only a handful of unannounced live appearances. With little fanfare, the band’s self-produced debut album, Them Crooked Vultures, dropped just last month with the buoyant, bluesy “New Fang” as the lead-off single.
Vultures has received generally favorable reviews and debuted at #12 on the Billboard 200, selling 70,000 units in the U.S. in its first week. Says Steven Hyden of The A.V. Club, “The biggest pleasure of Them Crooked Vultures is hearing three supremely gifted players fall together quickly and easily on songs built on simple riffs that sound like they were made up on a lark five minutes earlier.”
Vultures is a wrecking ball of an album with music that is slightly weird, dark and heavy. From the Zeppelin-esque blues rock of the opener “No One Loves Me & Neither Do I,” to the psychedelic feel of “Spinning in Daffodils,” the songs on Vultures could’ve easily fit onto Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy or Presence. While the whole may not quite add up to the sum of its parts just yet, the Vultures, with their built-in audience that spans multiple generations and with the recent resurgence in mainstream popularity of heavy metal bands like Kiss and Metallica, have the potential to be a force in heavy rock in the coming decade as long as this supergroup isn’t merely out to scratch an artistic itch.
Them Crooked Vultures are currently on the European leg of their Deserve the Future Tour. Tickets for the UK shows sold out in just under 12 minutes, making it one of the UK’s quickest-selling tours, and this without benefit of the band having released a song. For updated concert information, check out their website at www.themcrookedvultures.com. And if you’re one of the lucky ones to catch the Vultures live, drop me a line and let me know what you think.
