FEATURE:
Groovelines
Foo Fighters – Monkey Wrench
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I featured Foo Fighters…
PHOTO CREDIT: Martyn Goodacre/Getty
in Second Spin last month, as the band’s beloved drummer Taylor Hawkins unexpectedly died. I felt compelled to write about them because there was so much shock in the air. Listening back to their albums, I was struck by the quality and consistency – perhaps something I had neglected before. One of the band’s best albums, The Colour and the Shape, turns twenty-five next month. Even though Hawkins was part of the band around the time of The Colour and the Shape, it was Dave Grohl who was taking care of drumming duties. It was not until 1999’s There Is Nothing Left to Lose when Hawkins stepped in full-time to drum. Even so, I wanted to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of The Colour and the Shape’s mightiest tracks, Monkey Wrench. That was released as a single on 28th April, 1997. One of Foo Fighters’ signature songs, it is time to get a bit deep with the song. The music video for the song was the first to feature Hawkins on drums, although the actual drum track is performed by Grohl. I shall come to the wonderful and acclaimed video for Monkey Wrench soon. Produced by Gil Norton and written by the band (Dave Grohl, Nate Mendel and Pat Smear), Monkey Wrench helped take Foo Fighters from this side project of Dave Grohl to a bona fide group who meant serious business and were their own entity.
Not that there should have been doubt or scepticism before 1997. The eponymous Foo Fighters album of 1995 was a debut essentially of Dave Grohl. As Monkey Wrench pre-dates the release of The Colour and the Shape, I guess there was still a feeling that this was Dave Grohl mucking around or figuring out a new project. Monkey Wrench really helped establish Foo Fighters as a terrific band who made this enormous impact in 1997. I will get to the music video and why that is so special. Prior to that, Louder ran a feature in 2016 about the importance and impact of Monkey Wrench:
“In 1997, as Britpop crumbled, Radiohead went even more miserable with OK Computer and drum ’n’ bass 12”s were top of every teenager’s shopping list, it was hard to work out exactly what Monkey Wrench was. It wasn’t punk. It wasn’t grunge. It wasn’t metal. It wasn’t pop.
In fact, it was all those things and more. It was three minutes and 51 seconds of driving guitars, pop melodies, and a soft-then-loud dynamic that culminates in a bridge full of shouty metal-inflected vocals. Sound familiar?
The lead single off 1997’s The Colour And the Shape album, the song was born out of difficulty. Grohl knew that this album had to answer their critics. “I knew it had to be good,” he says. “I knew it had to solidify the band as a legitimate band. It couldn’t be just another six days in the studio. It couldn’t be a basement demo.”
Grohl’s songs became more ambitious. They got in producer Gil Norton – a guy who had produced indie’s superleague: Sugarcubes, Pixies, Echo And The Bunnymen – and a renowned perfectionist. “Gil is awesome in that he fucking wrings you out,” says Grohl. “He wants every last drop of performance and song. It was intense.”
Dave Grohl’s private life was pretty intense too. “I was going through a divorce. I was falling in love with someone else. I was living out of my duffel bag on this cat-piss-stained mattress in my friend’s back room with 12 people in the house. It was fucking awful.”
With the recording almost finished, the band realised that their grand vision wasn’t really coming across. Drummer William Goldsmith was unhappy and ‘wasn’t really gelling’ so Grohl started re-recording some of the songs himself, adding his own drum tracks. Impressed, producer Norton urged him to come into the studio to record those versions. Left on the subs bench, drummer Goldsmith left the band. Now a three-piece, Grohl – recently voted rock’s greatest living drummer by Classic Rock magazine (second only to his hero, the late John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, in a poll to find rock’s greatest drummers) – played the drums as the band re-recorded almost the entire album.
Seen in this context, Monkey Wrench’s lyrics about not wanting to be a spanner in the works, could be seen to be as much about Goldsmith’s departure as Grohl’s divorce, with Dave singing from Goldsmith’s/the spurned lover’s perspective. A bitter kiss-off to someone, lines like “I’d rather leave than suffer this” and “one last thing before I quit” sound more like the ending of a working relationship than a romantic one.
If the lyrics are downbeat, the music is anything but. Kicking off with a slamming, punk-pop guitar riff, there’s a spectacular moshpit-confusing stop-start before the verse begins. Performed live or heard down your local rock club, the pause completely wrong-foots you: all you can do is jump, headbang or attempt some air-drumming. Either way, from that moment on it’s got you. From then on it just builds and builds, propelled by some spectacular drum fills, the emo-like shouty bit in the bridge, and the anthemic “fall in, fall out” backing vocals.
Even old-fella-of-rock, Queen’s Brian May, thinks it’s a classic. In 2002, Brian compiled an album called The Best Air Guitar Album In The World… Ever and included Monkey Wrench alongside classics like Smoke On The Water, The Boys Are Back In Town and Paranoid. “The number one criterion was, if you hear the song you have to jump up and do something,” explained the curly one. “Preferably in the first 10 seconds. To me, the Foo Fighters are totally at the cutting edge of what rock music’s about today. Monkey Wrench wasn’t as big a hit as it ought to have been, but I think it had a big effect on all bands in general.
“[With Taylor] you’ve got two of the greatest drummers in the world in that band,” says May. “And one of them plays incredible guitar, sings incredibly well and writes incredible songs. So, Dave Grohl, thank you very much and I hate you”.
American Songwriter ranked Monkey Wrench as the seventh-best Foo Fighters song in a rundown late last year. Considered to be one of the defining tracks from the band, the fact it was the lead single from the band that were, now, more than Dave Grohl makes is so important. The assimilation of Taylor Hawkins on the next album solidified the band further and brought their music to a new level. I like the fact that he is in the video. What makes it so awesome is that is was directed by Grohl. Foo Fighters had this sort of independent and D.I.Y. spirit where they were not relying too much on other people and creatives. Wikipedia write about the stunning Monkey Wrench video:
“The music video was directed by the band's lead singer/songwriter, Dave Grohl. In the video, Grohl arrives at his apartment with groceries in hand, but finds the door secured from inside by the chain latch when he tries to open it. Looking through the peephole, he finds black-clad duplicates of the band members playing the song. The rest of the band soon joins him at the door, peeking in through its mail slot, and eventually start trying to force their way in as the duplicate Grohl taunts them and spits on the peephole. He holds the door shut against the band's efforts for a while, but they eventually break in only to find the apartment suddenly empty. They look out the window and see the duplicates fleeing on foot through a courtyard, then close the door and finish the song using the abandoned instruments. As the video ends, a third set of bandmates is listening at the door outside, creating a recursive situation.
When Grohl is in the elevator heading up to his apartment, a muzak version of the Foo Fighters song "Big Me," performed by The Moog Cookbook, can be heard”.
It has been just over a month since Taylor Hawkins died (he died on 25th March whilst Foo Fighters were on tour in Colombia). It is bittersweet celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of a song that introduced many people to him. He would soon come into the band and blow the world away! Monkey Wrench is an anthemic song that remains a fan favourite and has touched so many people. A happy twenty-fifth anniversary to Monkey Wrench. It is a mighty jam from…
AN iconic band.