KYUSS LIVES! Interviewed By Austria's MULATSCHAG TV (Video)

Austria's Mulatschag TV conducted an interview with KYUSS LIVES!, the project featuring three-quarters of KYUSS — the influential American stoner rock/metal band, originally from Palm Desert, California — when the band played in Vienna, Austria on March 22, 2011. You can now watch the chat below.

KYUSS LIVES! recently revealed that it will record a new studio album following the band's current tour. The group features bassist Nick Oliveri, drummer Brant Bjork and singer John Garcia along with guitarist Bruno Fevery, who most recently played with Garcia in the GARCIA PLAYS KYUSS project.

In a recent interview with UGO, Oliveri was asked how the idea for KYUSS LIVES! came about. "MONDO GENERATOR was on tour — we went to Europe and did a festival in France called Hellfest, and John Garcia and the guitar player, Bruno Fevery, were playing a version of KYUSS called GARCIA PLAYS KYUSS, and he was going out," he replied. "He hadn't toured for a bit and wanted to go out and do some KYUSS stuff. They were headlining one of the side stages, and Brant Bjork's band was playing, and MONDO GENERATOR was playing on the same day. John asked us to come up and play some songs with him, so me and Brant up and did it, and it felt really great. It was great to play those old tunes — we hadn't thought about them for a long time. I think Brant being the first drummer that I ever interacted with as a musician — I played in their bedrooms playing these songs — kind of just felt normal and natural. I got a call from him when I came home, saying, 'Hey man, do you want to do some more shows?' And I said, 'Yeah man, that sounds cool. Let's do it.' So that's how it started — John was doing it and it was getting good response from people that never got a chance to see any version of KYUSS at all. We didn't realize there were so many people that wanted to see it, so it's been a pleasant surprise and it's been a lot of fun."

Regarding why KYUSS guitarist and founding member Josh Homme is not involved in the reunion, Garcia told Rock Sound, "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."

KYUSS, the inventors of Desert Rock, have been in the last ten years much more popular than when they were still around in the early Nineties. So, due to massive public demand over the years to play songs from his old cult band KYUSS, John finally made the decision to give the fans what they want.

The last couple of years John Garcia thought often about reviving his KYUSS legacy on stage. The more he thought about it, the more he really wanted to do this. John commented: "I don't want to do this just for myself, but especially for the fans. Both for the ones that have seen KYUSS live back in the days, and especially for the ones who haven't had that chance. This could be as close as they could get to the real thing."

In October 1995, just three months after releasing what could be argued as their breakthrough album "...And The Circus Leaves Town" (thanks to MTV airplay),KYUSS broke up. Their last recording was a 10" vinyl on the now-defunct label Man's Ruin Records, which was later re-released on a split CD with Homme's QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE. The band has been on an indefinite hiatus ever since and has reached a legendary status, influencing thousands of new young rock bands.

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