The 1997 song Dave Grohl called a huge step backwards: “Screaming, fast, hardcore”
It didn’t take long for Dave Grohl to realise changes had to be made.
Not that you’d know it when listening to the last 20-odd years of his second most famous band’s output. Even the most committed Foo Fighters fan would be hard-pressed to pick out any major deviation from angsty, corporate radio rock that couldn’t have been plucked from any of the last eight albums, at best, the odd acoustic number.
Grohl’s destiny in the classic rock realm was already being settled before the 21st century arrived. In late 1996, the Foo Fighters frontman was still the Nirvana drummer in the eyes of most, having lent his powerhouse percussion to their classic tenure after dwelling in the hardcore underground with his Scream predecessor. Kurt Cobain died, symbolically closing the chapter on grunge and prompting Grohl to keep creatively busy with his Foo Fighters one-man band hustle.
And it was a solo venture during Foo Fighters’ 1995 eponymous debut, Grohl handling all instruments save a little extra guitar courtesy of Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli on one track. Perhaps he didn’t realise just how pivotal those sessions would be. Dropped in June 1995, Foo Fighters would peak at 23 on the US albums chart and a whopping three over in the UK. Now was the time to see just what kinds of legs his new venture really had.
Hopping around three different studios amid marriage failures, a departing drummer, and a scrapping of material during production, 1997’s The Colour and the Shape would prove a dramatic but essential reorientation of the Foo Fighters’ creative trajectory, chiefly the raw, base power of rock.
They had old Pixies producer Gil Norton to thank, who pushed the band to boil down their songs to their potent basics, as well as shake off numbers tethered to already trodden territory. One such piece found itself on the cutting room floor precisely in the midst of such editing zeal.
“There is a song called ‘The Colour and the Shape’ we were going to put on the record, Grohl revealed to Metal Hammer at the time. “It was almost like another ‘Weenie Beenie’ sort of song, just another screaming, fast, hardcore song, but we decided not to put it on, because it was a step backwards, we’ve done that already!”
He’s not wrong. ‘The Colour and the Shape’ indeed hurtles toward a garage frenzy of throat-shredding vocal howl and furious punk pummel that nonetheless still wanders ‘Weenie Beenie’s smoking crater. But Grohl was eyeing up the new rock hinterland ahead. He knew he needed to head toward a road that accommodated his emerging pop songcraft, with numbers like ‘Everlong’ and ‘Monkey Wrench’ truly establishing Foo Fighters’ explosion to their eventual Billboard rock behemoth.
‘The Colour and the Shape’ eventually would sit as ‘Monkey Wrench’s B-side, but the merits of its omission feel less certain nearly 30 years later. On the one hand, such hardcore rightly stood as ballast to their mainstream take-off; however, perhaps it was just the red-blooded attack they needed to deter their total succumbing to rock formulas they just cannot seem to shake off, even decades later.
