Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme recently shared why his seven-year-old son begged to leave a party during an impromptu performance by Harry Dean Stanton, discussing the incident on Dan Soder.
“I’ve always had this thing where anyone who picks up a guitar and starts playing at a party, I think, ‘You’re f*cking embarrassing, dude,'” Homme said.
“Harry Dean Stanton is a national treasure. But there was a guitar within eyeshot and he’s sort of like, ‘Oh…’ He picks up the guitar, and I’m standing there with my youngest [child] Wolfie, who at the time was like seven, and Harry Dean Stanton starts singing in Spanish. And of course the party starts to go like, ‘What?’ Everyone starts looking, and they gather around; it was like a movie. I was looking for hidden cameras.”
“Yeah, I love Harry Dean Stanton, and yeah, it sounded great, but I just was like, ‘This is cheesy right now,'” Homme continued. “So he finishes this song, and everyone’s like ‘What the?’ And my son goes, ‘Jesus, let’s get out of here!'”
The anecdote lands differently once you know how seriously Stanton took music, and how the Homme household looked at the time. The man Homme describes as a national treasure was not a hobbyist who happened to own a guitar; he was a working musician for most of his life.
Stanton had a parallel career as a musician, playing guitar and singing in The Harry Dean Stanton Band. He was also an accomplished singer who played harmonica, bass and guitar, and he toured the country with The American Male Chorus early in his career.
Stanton’s bands over the years included The Harry Dean Orchestra and Harry Dean & the Repo Men, alongside solo performances. He did not write songs, but he interpreted them, which is exactly the kind of performance Homme witnessed at the party.
Music was not a side pursuit for Stanton. Music was one of his deepest loves rather than a hobby, and as a young man he sang in a barbershop quartet with his brothers and a friend. His passions in life were music and the crossword puzzle, and he never cared that much about movies.
Stanton addressed his own singing directly in an interview with Uncut, where he also covered songs such as George Jones’ “Tennessee Whiskey” and “Canción Mixteca,” which he originally recorded with Ry Cooder for Paris, Texas.
“You know, I was a born singer, I sang when I was a kid,” Stanton said.
The boy in Homme’s story was Wolf, the youngest of his three children. Homme and his then-wife Brody Dalle welcomed their third child, a son named Wolf Dillon Reece Homme, in 2016. Stanton died in September 2017, which places the party scene in the years when the actor was still performing regularly and was well known among friends as a musician first and a movie star second.
