by Aaron JentzenFucking Clapton. I’ve never really understood how he went from being hailed as a deity to releasing pop drivel like “Change the World.” Or how he seems to have taken no musical risks in my lifetime, yet still sells millions of records and is revered by everybody’s dads. Is your old man actually hearing Pilgrim, or does it just help him fire the few neurons that can still recall that killer Cream show, where he totally got it on with a girl with flowers in her hair (a.k.a. your mom)?
Perhaps it’s time to ask the same about Dave Grohl and his surprisingly hardy franchise, The Foo Fighters. Has their audience unwittingly turned them into dad-rock, buying records simply to remember when they were younger, slimmer and less in debt? If Foos songs being used as presidential campaign anthems weren’t warning enough, GQ sounded the alarm in October, describing the band’s latest album as “full of power ballads and classic-guitar-crunchy Foo tracks that you can unabashedly rock out to in the Prius. We love those indefatigable Foos, but we’re slightly worried that our mom does, too....”
But unlike Clapton, who’s seemed roughly the same stick in the mud throughout, I can’t really think of the former Nirvana drummer and the current jock-jams purveyor as the same person. I discovered this last night while watching Kurt Cobain: About a Son. In the film, Cobain relates the broad strokes of his life in snippets from music journalist Michael Azerrad’s treasured interview tapes, set to imagery and music that reflect periods in Cobain’s life. At a couple of points, Cobain mentions a “Dave,” and I really had to think about who that was. “Oh, Dave Grohl...wait, he’s in the Foo Fighters now!”
Perhaps I was a little too young and too weird to really latch onto Nirvana when they exploded into mass consciousness, and as Grohl and I have aged at exactly the same rate—weird, huh?—I’m still a bit too young and too weird for “Monkey Wrench” to be my jam. I don’t have the Prius just yet. But my hat is off to Grohl for his ability to remake himself entirely—even if that remake is starting to feel a bit like a rerun.
The Foos’ latest, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, packs more than enough arena-ready hooks to balance out the few lazy clunkers on it (like “Stranger Things Have Happened”), and the mammoth riffs of “The Pretender” set a record for the most weeks at No. 1 on the Alternative radio chart. In the band’s signature fashion, “Long Road to Ruin” launched with a goofy, Footos-style video parodying hospital melodramas. Best of all, it sounds great, thanks in part to Gil Norton, back behind the mixing board after producing the band’s acclaimed 1997 album, The Color and the Shape. It’s a respectable, serviceable album, if not all that that inspiring.
On the other hand, the video for “The Pretender” is fairly thought-provoking. In it, our heroes Dave & Co. square off in an empty arena against a line of identical, numbered riot cops—you know, the man. As the pressure reaches the breaking point—just in time for the last chorus—the storm troopers charge, only to be blasted by a red-tinted wave that explodes from behind the Foos. Pharaoh’s armies, we’re to assume, have been vanquished by the Red Sea.
But it’s hard not to read the video as a scenario in which the riot cops represent the Foos’ audience. After all, they’re the front-row ticket holders to the band’s coolest concert ever, with Grohl singing just to them. Their conformist distance, gradually broken down by awesome riffs, finally erupts in the mosh pit to end all mosh pits, and the audience collapses in catharsis.
Is that what this song is really about? Are the Foos taking a jab at their own mass dad-rock audience when Grohl sings, “I’m just another soul for sale, oh well”? Or have they realized the possibility that cops, too, might listen to “My Hero” to get pumped up? Foo Fighters may be a good band, even a great band, but that’s not really the question. The question is whether they need to be saved from themselves…or from us. Playing Saturday, 26th at Municipal Auditorium
