‘Stacked Actors’: Dave Grohl’s lambast of everything plastic and phoney
A rock star’s life is something that many of us find alluring. The idea of living in Hollywood, surrounded by palm trees, only experiencing sunny days, with access to all of life’s temptations, what’s not to love? When they get famous, many people move there almost immediately to soak up the high life, but it’s not for everyone, as Dave Grohl made quite clear.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that Grohl was reluctant to embrace the glamour that came with life in Los Angeles. He got his start in Nirvana, a band that was famous for rejecting the status quo and not feeling the need to suck up to people or act like anything they weren’t. When people interviewed the band, they only ever got an authentic version of them.
This attitude continued even after Cobain, unfortunately, took his own life and Nirvana disbanded. When Grohl started the band Foo Fighters, though the sound veered slightly from the grungy one that Nirvana went for, his attitude towards the music industry and many people who occupied it was the same.
His mindset is evident in the song ‘Stacked Actors’, which was released in 2000. It details Grohl’s gripe with Los Angeles and a lot of the people who live there. “’Stacked Actors’ is a response to living in Hollywood for about a year and a half, and my disdain and disgust of everything plastic and phoney,” he said, “Which is the foundation of that city. And I just hated it. I had a lot of fun, but I had a lot of fun hating it.”
Grohl admitted that he was like many other rockstar wannabes at first and always thought it was his aim to move to Hollywood, but then he quickly realised how much he despised it once he achieved his goals. “Living in Hollywood always seemed transitional to me,” he said, “Truth be told, I fucking hated Hollywood, hated the whole life, hated most of the people we met. That’s what I’m saying in ‘Stacked Actors’.”
Grohl isn’t the only person who has written a song about how much he hates Los Angeles. Decades earlier, The Eagles wrote ‘Life In The Fast Lane’, which spoke about similar themes. It touches less on the fact that people are fake and more on the fact that people prioritise the wrong things.
“’Life In The Fast Lane’ kind of expressed the stereotyped LA ‘run around in your Porsche’ 24-hour boogie mode that unfortunately is too true for a lot of people…” said Glenn Frey when discussing the track, “It’s kind of disturbing to see the extremes that the bourgeois jet set will involve themselves in. For instance, disco almost turned into the lifestyle, and it’s such a non-meaningful thing on which to base one’s life.”
It goes to show that while many people might be excited by the prospect of living in LA, it isn’t always what you think it is. It’s an acquired taste that seems to divide opinion when people go to visit.
