Queens of the Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri discussed recording multiple versions, a couple of which are unheard, of “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” with Judas Priest’s Rob Halford in a new Songfacts interview.
“One of my favorite memories was when Chris [Goss] asked Rob if he’d sing on ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer.’ He’s not really featured in there, but I have mixes of CDs from every day. We recorded all those sessions from Songs For The Deaf and Rated R. I took a CD home every day to see where we were, because whole different words would come for a song, guitar parts, piano, you name it.
So I have all these different versions of these songs on CDs in my house in a box somewhere. And one of them is with Rob Halford being more featured with ‘COCAINE!’ – with the Rob Halford-style singing. Josh didn’t want to put that in there. He wanted what he called ‘the more sinister Rob’ for the ‘Nicotine, valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol’ parts. But I liked the “Cocaine” parts with the high-pitched singing.
Stuff like that was very memorable for me – Rob Halford coming in. We asked him, ‘Hey, what do you want to be credited as?’ He goes, ‘Just put down ‘vocals by the Metal God,'” and he walked out!”
