Chris Goss lit the fuse on the 90s stoner revolution, and worked with bands including Kyuss and QOTSA. Meanwhile, his band Masters Of Reality remain hardly known despite having made some truly great records.
Ginger Baker wasn’t an easy man to deal with, but Chris Goss learned early on how to put his head in the tiger’s mouth without getting it bitten clean off.
“It depended on your approach,” Goss says of his relationship with the ex-Cream drummer. “Hit him at the wrong moment, and you’re gonna get an acrid reaction. I knew when the right moments were available for me, and we got along wonderfully.”
Baker was a member of Goss’s band Masters Of Reality during the early 1990s, and played on their second album, 1992’s psychedelic desert-blues jewel Sunrise On The Sufferbus. In the end, Baker stayed with Masters longer than he was in Cream. “Oh yeah,”
Goss says drily but fondly. “I heard that every day.”
Baker isn’t the only notable musician to have entered Goss’s orbit in the past 35 years. He’s the thread that connects much of modern American rock, working with everyone from Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and Rick Rubin to Scott Weiland, Mark Lanegan and honorary Americans The Cult. He helped spark the early 90s stoner revolution via his production work with Kyuss, and subsequently became a key part of the extended Queens Of The Stone Age family. He almost produced Nirvana, and definitely did produce Gladiator star Russell Crowe’s long-forgotten rock album.
Yet despite all that, Goss remains a fringe figure. Masters Of Reality may be beloved by those who have heard them, but those who have heard them are in the minority. The Masters’ career has been fitful, with brilliant records – six albums at the last count, the most recent of which was released in 2009 – followed by long periods in which the band have gone dark.
“I just directed it in whichever direction it went in,” Goss says of his career. “And that’s where it ended up.”
It’s 6am UK time when Goss calls from California, making it 10pm over there. “I can’t shed these music hours,” he says, his speaking voice as smooth and hypnotic as his singing voice. “I’m old and I still have them.”
He’s not old, though. He was born at the end of the 1950s and came of age during the dawn of the rock era. The Beatles, the Stones, Cream and Hendrix were his early guiding lights, later augmented by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Aerosmith. Goss credits Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page with fostering his interest in magick and the esoteric.
“I wanted to know what he knew,” he says. “And I stepped through that door. It blew my mind. I learned how to astral project, to leave my body at will. I lear
