Song of the Day 5/13: Foo Fighters, “Big Me”
Yes, you are getting old. The Foo Fighters were among those selected for the 2021 class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which means the band, which started as a solo project by Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, has been around for 25 years.
Grohl, now 52 years old, has been the only consistent member of the group, though legendary punk guitarist Pat Smear has usually been by his side. This song isn’t representative of his ouevre — Pitchfork once called Grohl the Tom Petty of his generation, churning out mainstream-rock hits — but it made a strong impression back in the day thanks to its video, a spoof of the commercials for Mentos candies that the director pitched and Grohl liked. “We had some difficulty finding a treatment that would suit the song, which is this short, tongue-in-cheek, ridiculously candy-coated pop tune,” he said. “We didn’t want to make this big, pretentious portrait video. We wanted to make fun of ourselves and the song.” The video helped the single, the fourth drawn from the first eponymous Foo Fighters LP, reach No. 3 on the alternative rock chart.
Like many songs on that album, “Big Me” was written while Grohl was in Nirvana and was intended for the band. Except for the production, it sounds just like the eventual FF single, and makes you wonder how it would have sounded with Cobain singing and playing jangle-pop.
It wasn’t long before Foo Fighters stopped performing the song in concert. “Every time we played it, it would just start raining Mentos,” Grohl said, “and them motherfuckers hurt.” During their joint tour with Weezer in 2005, Weezer covered it frequently.
That prompted Grohl to restore it to the set list. In 2006 he played a slower, acoustic version with Petra Haden, then of the Decembrists, singing harmony.
Grohl, whose sense of humor is a big part of his likability, always considered the song a joke, something he made explicit in 1997, when he began directing the band’s videos himself. Among the first was “Monkey Wrench,” in which he’s coming home with a bag of groceries. When he gets in his building’s elevator, he hears a 20-second snippet of a cheesy muzak version of “Big Me.” Grohl had commissioned it from a duo known as Moog Cookbook, which included the entire song on its rarities collection.
