Somewhere in all the sanctimonious glad handing of the annual South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, there’s a man with an acoustic guitar, a shit-hot falsetto, and the kind of monster lip rig that would make Tom Selleck blush. Jesse “The Devil” Hughes is that man. As ringleader and spiritual backbone of the Eagles of Death Metal, Hughes commands a musical lineup that currently includes two drummers (Queens of the Stone Age vocalist/guitarist Josh Homme and ex-Shift/Hole/Mötley Crüe stickstress Samantha Maloney), an impeccably coiffed guitarist (Diamond Dave Catching of Earthlings?), and a bassist with huge fucking paws (Brian “Big Hands” O’Conner). “The crowd got a little wild at the last show,” Hughes enthuses. “But that happens when they see this mustache.”
Truth be told, the mustache is just one aspect of the Eagles’ considerable appeal. The band’s 2004 debut, Peace Love Death Metal, was loaded with ultra-catchy semiacoustic booty jams, including a cover of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.” Featuring just Hughes, Homme, and guitarist Tim Vanhamel, the album presumably bummed out at least a few Cannibal Corpse fans who were expecting some sufficiently brewtal Hammer Smashed Face action.
At the first-ever Eagles gig, just such a misunderstanding took place. “I was out front smoking a cigarette, and I had just bumped into the girl who would eventually become my wife and then my ex-wife,” Hughes explains. “Anyway, these four dudes walk up—total heshers—and they go, ‘Dude, is there death metal here tonight?’ I go, ‘Yeah, but death metal more in the vein of Little Richard—not Vader or Cannibal Corpse.’ They were like, ‘Thanks for the warning, man,’ and they took off.”
These days, Eagles audience members harbor no such misconceptions. “It doesn’t matter who shows up at an Eagles show—you’re gonna have a good time,” Hughes promises. “When you see little baby girls dancing and smiling, nobody’s gonna be fucking sad. Rock ‘n’ roll kinda forgot about women, you know? It turned into a big, sweaty boy party.”
Make no mistake: The Eagles haven’t forgotten about the ladies. On the band’s latest album, Death by Sexy, Hughes, Homme, and a cavalcade of special-guest pussy hounds—like Dave Grohl, Jack Black, and Mark Lanegan—try to keep their raging boners in check on the hyperkinetic power-stomp of opener “I Want You So Hard (Boy’s Bad News),” swivel their hips to the Stonesy jangle of “I Like to Move in the Night,” and then pop Viagra, Phil Spector–style, on the honky-tonk bubblegum anthem, “Cherry Cola.” On “I Gotta Feeling (Just Nineteen),” Hughes sends a shout-out to barely legal honeys everywhere. “I wrote Peace Love Death Metal in a week, and there was this urgency to it,” Hughes offers. “You don’t want the first album to seem like a fluke, but you also don’t want to lose any of your charm on the second one. So I didn’t shave.”
But that’s probably because Hughes gets requests for mustache rides on a daily basis. “I grant about three or four per day,” he admits. “Occasionally there will be a charity granting, though. You know, we’ve probably got the strangest and most all-encompassing groupie situation there is—we’ve got pretty boys, pretty girls, dandy boys, older women, mothers, fathers… Anything goes, and everybody wants some.”
The fans in Austin are no exception. “Last night, we didn’t have a dressing room, so after the show we had to walk across the street to where the bus was,” Hughes explains. “About 30 or 40 people squeezed out of the club before us, and everybody was grabbing me, but I slipped through their fingers because of the sweat. A couple of people were like, ‘Do you wanna come to my house right now? I’ve got Nintendo!'”
At a show in Denver last year, Hughes was given a different kind of home-entertainment device. But true Eagles never settle for substitutes when they can have the real thing. “This dude and his girlfriend gave me one of those really expensive latex pussy molds. It was the Asia Carrera model. They were like, ‘We’re really big fans of your music, and we hope you can get some use out of this.’ I was like, ‘Dude, you keep this. Give me your girlfriend.'”