Foo Fighters s/t

scum stats: this is the original US pressing baby, i bet they only did 5000 copies

Foo Fighters are in town tonight, reason enough to dig into the shelves and listen to this one on vinyl for the first time in probably 15 years.

Bought it NEW at Car City Records in 1995. Major labels and vinyl in the mid-Nineties…did they have any idea what in the hell they were doing? I don’t think so.

I’d be hard-pressed to name a record I’ve spent MORE time with than this album. Junior high through high school this was a consistent Disc-man resident and I was so on-board that I’d even listen to this to soundtrack while falling asleep. By no means a “sleep” record, but that’s just how ON BOARD I was at age thirteen.

So many memories here…that ’95 4th of July weekend of release and 89x radio just playing the shit out of it, catching the world premiere of the “I’ll Stick Around” video, knowing they were playing a show at St. Andrew’s Hall in August but not even understanding how I could even TRY to go to that show (one of my bigger regrets in life) video-taping their December performance on Saturday Night Live, properly waiting in line to buy tix at the Harmony House in Grosse Pointe the moment they went on sale (at the SAME time Bob Seger was selling tickets for something like 8 shows in a row at the Palace), the “Big Me” video forcing me to have an appreciation for Mentos and hand-making my own custom package of “Foo-Tos" and then going to my first concert ever when they played the State Theater in March of ’96 and on and on and on.

In my basement with my best friend Nick Orozco, we poorly “covered” no less than four songs off this album (and at that same time were threatening to cover Nirvana’s “Nevermind” in its entirety). At the time this felt like the biggest most wide-reaching record in the world and with hindsight I realized the band probably just barely sold out the 2k capacity State Theater. These guys weren’t THAT big. But doesn’t matter, it’s all still huge in my mind.

My favorites here are the deeper cuts. When I heard (fairly recently) that Dave Grohl once played Kurt Cobain a version of “Alone + Easy Target” and Kurt responded with “FINALLY! Now I don’t have to be the only songwriter in the band” it made my heart feel all kinds of warm. I love that song. There’s a slow, subdued version of “Floaty” that is glorious. “For All The Cows” is one of those songs we did in the basement and it’s still so powerful…saw FF play it in Nashville at the Ryman in 2014 and I was over the moon. And the rise and free fall of “Exhausted” is so un-improvable, this record is forever burned into every section of my brain, synapses connected in ways words fail and every last solo, chord, vocal tic, burst of feedback feel as if they’ve been etched into stone tablets and could not be conveyed in any better manner.

My copy is a little bit soot damaged from the ’08 fire, but that just means it’s been with me all along the way, like these songs, like Nirvana, like any music that cuts deeper than everything else.