Jesse Hughes was on a roll, then the Paris attacks happened. So he turned to music to heal

When I pull up in front of Jesse Hughes’ Los Angeles home, the Eagles of Death Metal frontman is already walking down the driveway and gives me an order to walk with him to the gas station on the corner.

Hughes buys a pack of Excedrin and flirts with the cashier with big hair behind the counter. “Come party with us sometime,” he says. When she laughs and tells him she doesn’t have time, he replies, “Come over on your lunch break for a 30-minute party.”

On the way out, Hughes says the "30-minute party" is the next big thing after the “eight-minute abs” craze of the '90s.

His next stop is the bakery across the street for a sandwich. Hughes doesn’t drive a car — he got rid of it a while ago — and rides an Indian Motorcycle, which he explains is easier to control if things go wrong.

Back in the living room at his bungalow-style home in Atwater Village, a neighborhood a few miles away from Dodger Stadium, a "South Park" marathon plays on his TV as he eats.

Hughes’ personality is a combination of a raunchy stand-up comedian and a charismatic televangelist. He admires former President Ronald Reagan, refers to himself as a “very devout Christian” and believes in the “Spirit of 76” sentiments of individual liberty and self-reliance. A sign in his living room says “No Democrats, No Racists, No Nazis, No Bullys (sic).”

Suddenly, Hughes walks over to where I’m sitting and pulls out an AK-47 from behind the chair, takes out the magazine and places it in my hands. I try to remember what my grandfather told me about handling firearms as a child when showing me his M1 Garand rifle from World War II.

After I give the AK-47 back, Hughes pulls out a loaded Western-style six-shooter revolver. He twirls it with his index finger, then cocks the hammer back and forth and places it in my hands.

As I notice the bullets sitting in the barrel, Hughes explains the term “cock the hammer” is in reference to drawing the hammer back in preparation to fire. Then, he takes the gun from my hands and puts it back in the holster hung over a chair.

Hughes launches into, without inquiry, his views on the Second Amendment for nearly four minutes, explaining the arguments he uses to counter gun control advocates: “What does ‘shall not be infringed' mean to you? If they made Bibles illegal today, everyone would want one tomorrow.”

Four years after terrorists attacked an Eagles of Death Metal show in Paris, Hughes' Second Amendment views remain the same.

On Nov. 13, 2015, during the band's show at the Bataclan theater, terrorists with automatic rifles, grenades and suicide vests killed 89 people. It was one of several terrorist attacks across Paris that left 130 dead, leading to a two-year state of emergency in France.

The country has some of the toughest gun restrictions in the world, only allowing ownership for hunting or sportsmanship, and requires constant renewals and psychological evaluations.

"I trusted in (their) gun control and I was in a country where no one can own a gun. It's been that way for 100 years and until someone can explain to me how it stopped the bad guys from being the best armed attackers, then I'm not interested in hearing about that as a solution for what's currently plaguing us," Hughes said. "In Texas, there was just a church shooting that ended because of an armed parishioner. We can't pick and choose the examples we're going to have for this argument because people are dying, and I feel like we're asking, 'Do we really want to stop a problem, or are we saying no matter what, we want to take away guns?'"

Hughes and two other members of the band made it out of the venue unharmed. Guitarist David Catching, who owns Rancho de la Luna recording studio in Joshua Tree, hid inside — without injury — until police rescued him. Former Kyuss guitarist and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, who plays drums in the band periodically, was not touring with them at the time.

The band had been enjoying a wave of success during live shows, after their album "Zipper Down," which released a month earlier, received higher than average reviews. Today, Hughes feels the album’s success was eclipsed by what happened in Paris.

“We were coming into this energy that felt unstoppable,” Hughes said. “I’ve finally been able to watch some of that show and I’m possessed by the power and fury of rock 'n' roll."

Hughes says he doesn't have post-traumatic stress disorder and doesn’t like to refer to the 2015 show as “the Paris attack.” But he still has a hard time talking about it. Tears flow and his voice chokes up when he does.

“I see it this way – it’s probably provided to me and to many others the ability to witness some of the greatest examples of beauty, human love and kindness you can possibly imagine,” Hughes said. “The second the first bullets flew, people were jumping in front of bullets for their friends. When the dude was going to shoot in one direction, someone would jump out and say, ‘No, look at me!’ The Bible tells us the greatest example of love that you can have is to give your life for your friends.”

Hughes has also found strength through his personal faith. What happened in Paris only confirmed it, instead of making him question.

“I don’t have a different outlook (on life)," he says. "It allowed me to be grateful for my faith, because I never had a moment where my concept of the world was shaken and shattered. Faith spared me from that. If that isn’t the healing touch of God, I don’t know what is.”

Not everyone agrees with Hughes. About two years ago, he faced backlash after posting on his Instagram account an altered photo of Emma González, one of the survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., tearing up the United States Constitution. Gonzalez became an advocate for more restrictive gun laws following the shooting, and delivered a speech that received national attention at an anti-gun rally in Fort Laurderdale days after.

The photo had been doctored from its original, which showed González tearing up a shooting target. Hughes said he "knew it wasn't real" when he posted it in March 2018.

His friend and Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan said on Twitter that Hughes had "gone off the rails," but added, “I know Jesse to be a guy who would give you the shirt off his back. Not someone who’d attack someone for their opinions that differ from his.”

The posts on Hughes' account were later removed, and he posted an apology video.

"In a country where you believe in freedom of speech, the topic of conversation should never matter," Hughes said by phone a few weeks after we met in Los Angeles. "I'm just curious where a victim of a mass shooting is either completely able to say whatever they want if they're a child, or if I'm not supposed to say anything. I went through the process of leading a group of people to honor the dead of an event that I was involved with. I have vast experience in that. I was on the world stage with it and meticulously handled that. When I was critiquing the manner of which another group of people were handling this situation, I feel like of anybody that could say anything, I'm actually the one person who could."

But how does one heal after going through an event like a terrorist attack? For Hughes, it was making an album under his Boots Electric moniker called “Boots Electric Performing The Best Songs We Never Wrote,” featuring covers of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In) and KISS’ “God of Thunder." It released last June.

“Those are the songs I danced away to,” Hughes said. “That’s what I’ve always done. I love music and obsess on it, and it gave me a place to escape when I felt alone in high school. My house is Ferris Bueller’s bedroom times 10. I just retreated into music and in the corniest of ways, I believed in it and I danced my way through it. It’s a place we go to when we’re worried. Dancing helps and there’s a rock 'n' roll song for almost anything you experience.”

He doesn’t see himself as a rock 'n' roll innovator but said, "I want to be the same (type of performer) as Little Richard and I want to be on a family tree with Angus Young, and I’ll shoot for that. Rock 'n' roll is a world that is extraordinary and beyond reality, it’s hyper-reality.”

Currently, Hughes and frequent collaborator Homme are recording a new Eagles of Death Metal record, to be released soon. He plays some of the instrumental tracks for me, which have the band's signature sound of classic rock 'n' roll with simple drum beats and catchy hooks.

"Josh Homme isn’t just a mentor, he’s my Butch Cassidy. Maybe even beyond that. It’s more like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday, only if they were brothers," Hughes said of his Palm Desert High School classmate. "With the exception that we are both attracted to women, we would be the best gay couple. I think we would be the flagship gay couple for the world. If aliens were discovered and we had to have some intergalactic thing, they would want to send us to represent the gay community."

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Hughes is also working with a label in San Diego to produce a series of 7-inch records featuring bands from Los Angeles. He modeled it after the "Rodney on the ROQ" series, a compilation record curated by KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer that includes LA bands like Adolescents and Social Distortion in the '80s. Hughes built a makeshift studio in his house and, on the day of our interview, was preparing for a jam session later in the evening with some friends.

“I want to put out seven bands, seven 7-inch records, so that at the completion of the series I will be able to compile them all and have the option of putting it out as a compilation album," Hughes said. "There are very few ways right now for artists who haven’t already signed and aren’t established by a major media operation or scheme to be able to be exposed. The days of a regional show, when a band would go on tour and select bands from each region, that’s going away because of the way the business is modifying. Those things are necessary, otherwise we won’t be feeding our system and it will die.”

Later in the day, Hughes and I take a walk through his neighborhood. Walt Disney is a famous former resident and many of the homes were built in the 1920s. He points out the architecture of certain houses with rotundas as being unique for the time they were built. He tells me some legends of the area, and the desert, that he's read about. When I ask if he's a voracious reader, Hughes says he is.

“Your brain is a muscle. Use it or lose it,” he says.

Despite his life in Los Angeles, Hughes said he comes back to the desert regularly to visit his mother, Jo Ellen Hill-Hughes, in Palm Desert. He also holds the desert's culture and music scene close to his heart.

The last time Eagles of Death Metal played a “local show,” per se, was in 2017 at the Desert Daze music festival in Joshua Tree, which was a special homecoming for the band.

“It means a lot to me when I get to come back home, and ‘hometown boy done good’ is a big thing to me,” Hughes said. “That whole show, Iggy Pop had stayed even though his set had already come and gone. This is what I love about that man – he is a true lover of rock 'n' roll, but his attention can feel like winning an award bigger than a Grammy. Iggy Pop being hidden from my left stage monitor speakers, watching us, messed me up and so many times I’d be like, ‘Come on, dude! Stop, please!’”

Both Hughes and Homme have made amusing videos over the years to promote Eagles of Death Metal records. For "Zipper Down," they created one of the band playing bridge among a group of seniors, asking who wanted to hear the album and getting no reply, and another where they shared amusing ways to promote the album while wearing different costumes for each idea.

To promote their debut record, they made a mock press conference video with actors portraying journalists who criticize the commercialization of music. Hughes points to it as a reflection of the band's – and his – mission in rock 'n' roll.

“Journalists going, ‘Mr. Hughes, is it true that you made songs intentionally to be attractive to commercialization and use in commercials?’ I said, ‘Duh! Next question,’" Hughes said. "When you stop making that rule for yourself, you’re not breaking it. There’s nothing to be held accountable for. You don’t have to feel that punk rock guilt that infects everything. Corporate rock only sucks if it sucks. A corporation is only evil if it’s evil. Money is only evil if it is only being used for evil, otherwise it’s good, because it’s being used for good. These things are true and, as a result, I only did my part to make it better.”

Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or (760) 778-4617. Support local news, subscribe to The Desert Sun.