Witchy vocalists, rock gods, and … “The Satanic Everly Brothers”? Some bonds go beyond the stage.
Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme and Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl are as close as brothers,
and they've known each other for close to a lifetime. They were already old friends in
2002 when Homme invited Grohl to play drums on the Queens of the Stone Age album Songs for the Deaf.
Throughout their respective careers, Grohl and Homme have collaborated with each other
several times. The culmination of all of this was surely the rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures,
which they formed with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. As Grohl noted to NME in 2018,
"When Josh and I play, it's like a conversation
between two old friends that have had too much to drink."
In 2022, Them Crooked Vultures reunited for the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert
that was organized by Grohl. It's safe to say that fans will keep
seeing these two best friends play together many more times to come.
Iggy Pop and David Bowie wreaking havoc together was a common sight in the 1970s. Bowie produced
Iggy's first two solo albums, and the two were also flatmates in West Berlin. Their
friendship lasted until Bowie's death from cancer in 2016. Following the tragic news, Iggy tweeted,
"David's friendship was the light of my
life. I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best there is."
Iggy also opened up to The New York Times about
the deeper meaning of their close bond, as he revealed,
"The friendship was basically that this guy salvaged me from certain
professional and maybe personal annihilation – simple as that [...] He resurrected me."
"Put it this way:
before I made that record, I was basically — I was a street person, in L.A., basically."
Both musicians were abusing hard drugs at the time, but Bowie was sober enough to help Iggy
renounce his self-destructive habits. Iggy went on to write his song "Nightclubbing"
about his and Bowie's experience while on tour in Europe. In turn,
Bowie visited Iggy's parents in their Detroit trailer home, worrying their
neighbors with his fancy car and bodyguards. In addition to saving his life, Iggy credits
Bowie with teaching him how to behave like a rock star and introducing him to the Beatles.
When the mockumentary film The Nowhere Inn premiered in 2020,
a close-knit musical friendship was on full display. Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent,
has been best friends with rocker and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein for
quite some time. They met in 2006, when Brownstein was performing with her band
Sleater-Kinney and Clark was performing with the Polyphonic Spree at the SXSW festival in Texas.
In 2020, the two friends decided to make a film disguised as a documentary,
with Brownstein playing a director making a documentary about St. Vincent. As Clark
explained to Nylon, the movie is a meditation on life and the authenticity of art and friendship,
with Clark and Brownstein at the center of it. Their friendship is slightly fictionalized for
the sake of creativity and humor, but the fact that they're BFFs in real life remains unchanged.
"Oh! So now you care about my boring life."
"Annie, I feel like we can differentiate between who we are in the movie and real life."
Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy Kilmister's friendship spanned the course of five decades. They met in
the 1970s when Kilmister was playing with the band Hawkwind and Osbourne was Black Sabbath's
frontman. They then became inseparable, as they collaborated on musical projects like
Osbourne's songs "Mama, I'm Coming Home" and "I Don't Want To Change The World."
Osbourne was shocked by his friend's aptitude
to stay awake for days on end. They used to joke about which one of them
would be the first to succumb to their crazy lifestyle. As Osbourne recalled,
"I curbed my ways [...] a long time ago. But Lemmy said to me one time, 'What's the
point of living to 99 if you're not enjoying it? It's my life and I want to have fun with it.'"
Kilmister succumbed to cancer in December 2015,
just a few days after turning 70. On his last day, he wanted to say
goodbye to his best friend on the phone. As Osbourne revealed to Classic Rock Magazine,
"I was talking to Lemmy on the morning that he died,
but I couldn't understand what he was talking about."
Both Brian May and Tony Iommi are legendary guitarists and acclaimed songwriters,
the former with Queen and the latter with Black Sabbath. Despite their respective
accomplishments, when they talk about each other,
they do so with the utmost humility and admiration. As May told Total Guitar in 2020,
"He is really my dearest friend in the business and has been for so many years. I could write
books about Tony because he's [...] a luminous human being [...] with a wonderful, kind nature
and an incredibly baffling sense of humor. And, of course, he is the father of heavy metal."
Iommi returned the favor, as he called May a "rock god" to BBC Radio and revealed,
"We had a very fast connection and we used to talk
to each other at all hours of the night in the early days."
Iommi also noted that the two are best friends to this day,
and that he always has an extra guitar at home when May decides to visit him for a jam.
"Well, our backgrounds aren't that much different,
you know. We were probably both playing Shadows numbers about 40 years ago."
"30 years ago."
It's no secret that Stevie Nicks is Lana Del Rey's
hero and witchy rock star inspiration. As the latter gushed to KROQ in 2022,
"She's just everything you hope she's gonna be. She’s so contemporary,
and she knows all the new music that’s out weekly."
Del Rey also praised Nicks' willingness to go wherever her creative inspiration may take her.
After Nicks sang on Del Rey's 2017 album Lust for Life, it became clear that their friendship would
permanently change the young singer's life. Since then, the two have become best buds,
which was abundantly clear in a 2017 V Magazine interview. As Nicks revealed,
"I think all of these little things, in a really fairy tale way, lead me to you
and lead you to me in a strange witchy way [...] We are witchy sisters and that's it."
Nicks even went so far as to say that Del Rey makes her a better person,
and that's the reason she wants to keep singing with her, in this life or the
next. While they may have come from different generations, their connection is undeniable.
There are quite a few similarities between Dave Grohl and Paul McCartney. Both were
founding members of legendary rock bands, and both had long and impressive careers
after their original bands broke up. Despite their similar histories,
when the two first met each other, Grohl was dumbstruck. As he revealed on Instagram in 2021,
"I don't recall exactly how Paul and I were introduced, what was said,
or how long we talked, but I do remember putting on my best 'this is not the most incredible thing
ever to happen to me' face while trying to keep from making a fool of myself."
Grohl might've been intimidated initially, but the two eventually forged a very close
friendship. As Grohl confessed on The Graham Norton Show in 2021,
their wives are also besties now. One time, McCartney visited the Grohl family
for dinner and ended up writing a song on the piano with Grohl's daughter Harper.
When he also played the Beatles song "Lady Madonna," Grohl couldn't help but think:
"This is like the most full-circle crazy moment of my entire life."
Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page's friendship might be one of the oldest in rock 'n' roll history. By
the time Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds in 1965, the two were already friends. That same year,
Beck joined the band, with Page following suit a year later. Neither of them was a Yardbird for
very long, though, as Page went on to form Led Zeppelin, and Beck enjoyed an impressive solo
career. Even in the face of massive success, their friendship never fell by the wayside.
As Page recalled in a 2019 interview with Fender, they were initially brought together by Beck's
sister. Beck was teaching himself to play guitar on a homemade instrument by listening to records,
and he went to a record collector friend for some help. That friend then brought Beck and Page
together, simply because there weren't that many guitarists in Epsom, England in the early 60s.
"There was a knock on the door and there — there was Jeff's sister and there was
Jeff holding his homemade guitar and we — we just bonded immediately."
According to Page, he and Beck became instant besties,
and remain close friends to this day. Led Zeppelin would eventually jam with Beck,
and, reportedly, the session went so well that Zeppelin drummer John Bonham tore his clothes off.
In a September 2020 tweet,
Elton John remembered meeting T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan. As he recalled,
"Marc Bolan seemed like he had come from another planet, just passing through Earth on his way
somewhere else. At a time when I was still becoming Elton John, he was a great mentor."
The two musicians had a shared love of glam rock and otherworldly fashion,
and they formed a tight bond around 1970. During a 1971 appearance on Top of the Pops,
they performed together on the T. Rex song "Bang A Gong (Get It On)." The more John saw Bolan play,
the more he was inspired. As he told the Guardian in 2020,
"I thought, 'This guy doesn't give a f---, he's just being who he is
and he's loving every single minute of it.' And that had a great effect on me."
In 1977, Bolan died in a car crash at the age of 29,
but he remains forever in his friend's heart. As John put it to the Guardian,
"He was always encouraging, never belittling;
being with him was like having a hundred B12 injections at once."
Metal fans immediately recognize Corey Taylor's blood-chilling growls in Slipknot. As it turns
out, he's not very different in his day-to-day life. As his best friend,
Prong bassist Jason Christopher, put it to SlasherPepper in 2022,
"I'm a loud drunk, I like Jack and Cokes, and a lot of cocaine,
and, just — I like to be the center of attention, and so does Corey."
Taylor and Christopher met at the Rainbow Bar and Grill while they were both drunk.
They accidentally touched each other's backs, then started yelling at each other,
but then a mutual friend recommended that they hang out instead of fighting. A second later,
they were best buds. As Christopher recalled,
"It was like when you're eight years old and somebody's being
mean to you and then all of a sudden you're best friends."
In 2020, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder talked with Howard Stern about his lifelong friendship
with Chris Cornell. Pearl Jam originated in 1990 in Seattle, and Vedder had to move to form the
band. By a stroke of luck, he became neighbors with Cornell. They instantly became best friends,
and their lives were forever intertwined. Vedder taught Cornell's daughter to surf,
and she in turn is like an older sister to Vedder's two daughters.
In 2017, Cornell was tragically found dead in his hotel room. It was ruled a suicide,
but Cornell's wife insists that her late husband he was never suicidal.
She blamed a mixture of mind-altering prescription drugs for his untimely
passing. Vedder is still not fully over losing his best friend, as he told Stern,
"I was just terrified where I would go if I allowed myself to feel what I needed to feel."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please dial or text 988 to speak with
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also seek help by visiting 988lifeline.org.
Alice In Chains bandmates Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell were closer than
brothers throughout their time together. As Cantrell once put it in an interview,
"He's very insightful [...] very sensitive, you know,
very intuitive to what's going on around him and with other people."
"He's my best friend in the world."
In 2002, Staley tragically passed away at the age of 34 following a speedball overdose. Cantrell
then went on to pursue a solo career, but he believes that he reached his musical peak with the
incredible harmonies he would perform naturally with Staley. As he recalled to Louder in 2022,
"We felt like a natural fit [...] Think of The Beatles, Floyd, the Eagles,
that attitude of 'You take this line and I’ll take that one' – it adds more color
to the canvas. Someone reviewed us once and called us 'The Satanic Everly Brothers.'"