Melvins’ King Buzzo Picks His Five Favorite Classic Rock Songs

Underappreciated gems by Led Zeppelin, Montrose and Thin Lizzy are among the five tracks King Buzzo selected as his favorite classic rock songs.

The Melvins frontman is currently on tour as one-half of King Dunn alongside Mr. Bungle’s Trevor Dunn, who collaborated with Buzzo on 2020’s Gift of Sacrifice album. The duo have since released a four-song EP under two different names, I’m Afraid of Everything and Eat the Spray. The North American leg of King Dunn’s 2024 tour, which features Buzzo on acoustic guitar and Dunn on stand-up bass, is scheduled to conclude on Sept. 26 in Phoenix, Arizona before heading overseas. You can get complete show and ticket information at Ipecac.com.

“We’re doing a set that includes a couple of song of my first acoustic record, a few Melvins songs and a couple of songs off the Gift of Sacrifice record. And I’m really letting Trevor [run wild.] You bring a guy like that out there, you let him do his job, I let him go off, which is what I want,” Buzzo tells UCR. “That’s the juice of playing live. A third of [the shows] are really good, a third of them are pretty good, and a third of them you can’t do anything right, no matter what. And you can’t tell when something like that is going to happen. You can have the best show on the tour on a Tuesday night in Tallahassee, you just don’t know. Can’t predict it. So that’s the one thing they can’t give you on the internet, is the experience of going out there and playing in front of people. Going to a show and seeing performers play, you can’t download that.

“There’s something about music that moves us more than any other art form, and I don’t know why,” Buzzo said while explaining his choices. “It’s just been with us forever, even the most primitive cultures have always had some kind of music, it speaks to us in a way that we can’t define. It’s magic, to me it’s magical, it takes me somewhere that is not of this earth. I was just going with classic rock, I knew I had to stick with that, but there’s so many bands that do that for me, like the Birthday Party or Tom Waits, there’s a million.”

Montrose, “Space Station #5” (From Montrose, 1973)

“Oh man, I’ve known about them since probably ’77.  … I might have been interested in Montrose because of “Frankenstein” by Edgar Winter, which [guitarist Ronnie] Montrose played on, which led him to his own band. But ‘Space Station #5,’ that was produced by Ted Templeman, that record, which is pre-Van Halen. Ironically, Sammy Hagar ended up in Van Halen years later. That song starts off really weird, with that noisy guitar shit or whatever it is and then Hagar’s  I just think that song is fucking great, that riff is so good. And Hagar’s vocals are.. for people that don’t know, Sammy Hagar is, in the right circumstances, a fucking great singer. That scream he does at the beginning of that song, it just gets to me every single time. It’s just like ‘Oh my God, this is the kind of music I lived for,’ this is what I wanted, I wanted pure adrenaline, you put that on in the morning you don’t need a cup of coffee. The guitar riff is fucking awesome, people just don’t know… It’s a fucking great record, that whole record is good. That song in particular though is the one for me… I don’t care what people say about Sammy Hagar, that record is fucking great.”

Kiss, “Calling Dr. Love” (From Rock and Roll Over, 1976)

“Gene Simmons has got one of the best rock voices ever, I think. Really, people don’t give him the credit he deserves as far as being a singer. I also think he’s a severely underrated bass player. But the best part of the song is that it has [one of] my top two favorite Ace Frehley guitar solos. The solo in “Dr. Love” is fucking unbelievably great, that’s just kick-ass. I love that song, from the very beginning it’s just a great riff, I will never tire of it. But that guitar solo, go revisit it, it’s Ace at his best, it’s really inventive and weird sounding. It’s a benchmark for Ace Frehley guitar solos, right up there next to ‘Strange Ways.'”

Read More: The Melvins Talk Kiss Fandom, Covers and Sharing the Stage

Led Zeppelin, “Achilles Last Stand” (From Presence, 1976)

“A severely underrated record. I think it’s their least-performing record. (This is true for albums released while Zeppelin were together, but it still sold over three million copies.) I could be wrong about that, but I think it sold less than any of their other albums. I think it’s a really good record. That song, a lot of people don’t like that song, I’ve never understood it. It’s fast, really fast for Led Zeppelin, and it’s a crazy song to open an album with. It’s not a hit, it’s what is it nine minutes. It’s massively inventive and it just… I don’t know what it is, if I’m gonna do a workout on my own at home or in a hotel gym, I’m playing ‘Achilles Last Stand.’ You do a nine minute intensive workout to that song, you’ve got it going. The guitar work is really odd in that song. It’s probably, to me, the most underrated Led Zeppelin song.”

Harry Nilsson, “Jump Into the Fire” (From Nilsson Schmilsson, 1971)

“I think the first time I heard it, it was somewhere in the ’80s, and I was like ‘oh that’s a cool record.’ I never knew who Harry Nilsson was until the [Goodfellas] movie, when they used that in the soundtrack. It was so fucking good. And then of course I had to track down that album. I think he died when he was about 53 years old, which is terrible. But that song, I love the vocal effect on that, and the bass playing on it is really good, the drum solo. It’s a great song, I never tire of that song ever. He’s a great singer, and even though he didn’t write ‘Everybody’s Talkin’,’ I think he did the definitive version of it on Midnight Cowboy, that song really upped the ante in that movie. But ‘Jump Into the Fire’ is great, it shows that if he wanted to do straight up rock stuff, he wouldn’t have had any trouble.”

Thin Lizzy, “The Rocker” (From Vagabonds of the Western World, 1973)

“Oh my god, [I found that] when I was about 12. The Jailbreak record, I think arguably that’s their best record to me. I think ‘Cowboy Song’ is really good, it’s always funny to listen to a Black Irishman sing about American cowboys. ‘The Rocker’ is another one where that is one of my favorite rock guitar solos that I have ever heard. I think [Eric Bell’s] wah-wah use is absolutely great. He does the wah-wah solo that is subtle and I just love that. That’s another one like ‘Space Station #5,” where I have not lost the feeling that song gave me when I was 12 years old ever, and I hope I never do. That magic has always been there. A song like that has aggression and fury and passion and just everything that’s good about rock music.”

Hear King Buzzo with Trevor Dunn Perform ‘Mock She’ (Kiss’ ‘Shock Me’)