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In 2007, Queens of the Stone Age played 115 shows to promote their fifth studio album, Era Vulgaris.

They played clubs, theatres, arenas and festival dates over the course of the year, but one event in particular stands out – an intimate show 2300 feet under the surface of the earth.

The date was November 20, 2007. They’d played Löwensaal in Nuremberg the night before, a venue which holds around 1500 people and doesn’t necessitate the need for safety equipment for fans and performers alike.

“We were tired of the same old concert experience, so management got us some interesting ones – a castle, a church, and old slaughterhouse,” said the band’s former sound engineer Patrick ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson in an interview with Heil Sound. “We played an old salt mine in Germany.”

Their label Interscope Records held a contest to give away 300 tickets to fans to see the band play the Erlebnisbergwerk Glückauf in Sondershausen. It would take around a day to transport the equipment down into the cavernous venue and allow it to acclimate to the surroundings. The fans, who looked like Fraggle Rock’s Doozers in their matching yellow hard hats and hi-vis jackets, were met with their own logistical challenges when navigating their way to the bottom of the facility.

“I play rock n’ roll to have that classic moment and you never know when something like that is coming,” said Josh Homme. “But this had classic written all over it from the word ‘go’, you know? We were looking for something good to do that was off-kilter and bizarre, somewhere to play that would be very special.”

“What I like is that there’s so much hard work done in here,” he added of the cavernous room. “This place exists from hard work. It’s nice to throw a bit of a party here too, celebrating miners… and I don’t mean young kids.”

Ba-dum-tss. The band played a stripped-down show, opting to change up their set list for the special occasion.

“This place was so psychedelic,” remembers Patrick. “The excavation machines left spiral patterns everywhere. The idea was to play a semi-acoustic set – it quickly turned a lot heavier with everyone getting excited.

“My mind got the better of me after being a half-mile closer to the centre of the earth. Maybe we shouldn’t be rocking out. What if we cause some seismic destruction?

“An epic rock ‘n’ roll death – what a way to go,” he added. “Looking around we saw the giant machines and quickly realised these things eat rock and spit it out. We weren’t going to cause a cave-in making rock; these machines ate rock and they were bigger than all of us and our gear combined.”

Their 14-song set featured songs from Era Vulgaris, as well as some, ahem, deep cuts for the event and covers of Billy Idol’s White Wedding and Tom Waits’ Goin’ Out West.

“Playing semi-acoustic is great for us and the songs translate,” explains Josh. “We did do some rehearsals as we felt this place was so unique we should do songs that we never play or quite often don’t play, and we were changing them up until last night and it involved rewriting stuff. You know how Elvis would do those medleys of like, five songs? It’s just like that, except it’s not fat and in a jumpsuit.”

The set was filmed for future release. A teaser trailer was released in early 2008 followed by interviews and a clip of Make It Wit Chu, but footage of the full show remains “locked in a vault” somewhere in Germany.

Following the performance, the frontman and guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joked about the next unusual venue they could play.

“Our next record is going to be called Hot Lava, so we feel we need to play a volcano,” said Josh. “I think we’re officially the most underground rock band in the world.”

It’s a good job no one mentioned that Finnish metallers Agonizer had played 4169 feet underground at the Pyhäsalmi Mine in Pyhäjärvi, Finland just a few months previously. But still, it’s an impressive feat.

Almost two decades later, the band would make music history of their own by becoming the first band to officially perform deep in the Catacombs of Paris on July 8, 2024.

Maybe that volcano show isn’t too far away.

The lazy, hazy summer of 1990: Every day was warm and woozy. Or so it seems now. LA rocked, and so did London. Guns N’ Roses were number one, permanently; Mötley Crüe were number two; the rest were duking it out for position. Rock was out of the ghetto; even dudes like Run DMC and Public Enemy thought so. They were hooking up, connecting, remixing.

Wanton record companies had more money than sense. They signed anything with hair and a pulse. Hundreds of albums came out every week – great ones, okay ones, funny ones, disastrous ones, dirty and dumb ones. The scene fed on itself. Everything was hot, everything was sunny, everything was beautiful.

Right into this wide open space dropped Burning Tree – great name, taken from the street sign outside the guitarist’s girlfriend’s house. Classic line-up: the power trio. Cool concept: a retro-rock take on trippy metal. They had the look, but they’d cut their hair and gone shopping in 1966. They had the muso chops, but they subjugated them for the benefit of their songs.

They had the chance to fall in line, but they preferred to make their own way. Burning Tree was a singular record in a time of general conformity. It stood out, but got itself swamped by the tide. It left a legacy, though: the guitarist and singer in Burning Tree was Marc Ford, who would go on to join the Robinson brothers in the Black Crowes.

The album was released as part of the Epic label’s Epic Rock series – essentially an excuse to throw a bunch of crap against the wall to see what stuck. Nine albums were released on the same day, but Epic ended up cannibalising their own marketing budget. None of the bands made videos, and the stunt failed. Only Suicidal Tendencies’ Lights… Camera… Revolution! was a commercial success, and Burning Tree was lost.

Perhaps Burning Tree wasn’t quite immediate enough in a time when subtlety was often swamped by straightforwardness. The record took a while to tune up, to get going; the eponymous opener was woolly and indistinct, probably their worst song; Wigs, Blues And High-Heeled Shoes was a woozy wig-out, and Fly On was a clunker. But they imparted the Burning Tree vibe well enough. This was rock from a desert climate, blurred and soft-edged in the heat haze.

Mistreated Lover was the album’s first great song, with barely the momentum to move above its semi-spoken beginnings before its shimmering chorus; Playing In The Wind might have come off Cream’s Disraeli Gears; Turtle should have been the last tune at an all-night party.

But what made the record rare and worthy were Crush and Baker’s Song. The former could have been remixed by PM Dawn; it’s a lyric about the seductions of being in a band set to a tune that should have filled stadiums. When the band sang – and they all sang – the hip little ‘nah nah nahs’ at the end, all felt right with the world.

Baker’s Song, though, is the tune the Black Crowes might have covered. A doomy tale (‘Worried me none/that the river rolled by my loaded gun’), it nonetheless had the epic sweep of all truly great songs; you could hum it forever.

Marc Ford got his due in the Crowes, and joined Rich Robinson’s The Magpie Salute when the Crowes were on hiatus. Drummer Doni Gray played in the Chris Robinson Brotherhood during the same period, and bassist Mark Dutton recorded with Izzy Stradlin before hooking up with LA Guns, and joined the Black Crowes in 2025.

Sporadic reunion shows have taken place in the decades since Burning Tree’s 1992 breakup, and a studio reunion in all but name occurred when the three musicians worked together on Ford’s 2007 solo album Weary And Wired.

A second Burning Tree record might have been special, but such is the band’s timeless sound that the first wouldn’t sound out of place if it were released today. It’s that good.