‘Weenie Beenie’: Dave Grohl’s second life as a metal god
No one comes to Foo Fighters’ music to sulk. Sure, there are songs that are more downtempo than the others, but the minute that the opening riff of ‘Everlong’ starts or the whole band kicks into ‘The Pretender’, that’s usually the common instruction for every rock to throw their fists in the air and start bouncing up and down in the middle of a roaring stadium. But Dave Grohl does have a musical dark side, and he had already hinted at some of his metallic tendencies on the track ‘Weenie Beenie’.
Throughout the 1980s, though, Grohl was never afraid to get more than a little bit intense behind the drumkit. He may have played hardcore punk in the band Scream, but he was just as drawn to heavy bands like Slayer and Venom alongside his Rush and Beatles records whenever he was bored.
Even when accepting his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame awards, Grohl was proud to be able to listen to something heavy, saying, “I listened to some really fucked up shit, but my parents never told me not to.” So if all he was doing was playing drums in Nirvana for the past few years, Foo Fighters was his chance to let all his inspiration loose.
Yes, there were still a lot of punk-adjacent songs that fit in there, like ‘I’ll Stick Around’ and ‘Watershed’, but no one could have predicted that he had ‘Weenie Beenie’ in him. Nirvana had hinted at covering heavier material on In Utero, like ‘Scentless Apprentice’, but while that song still had a coherent melody, this is Grohl sounding like he’s trying to split his throat apart underneath a cloud of distortion.
While the idea of giving this tune the most juvenile name on the record is funny in its own weird way, that might have just been a way for Grohl to hide things a little bit. After all, this was him trying his hand at what his favourite stoner rock bands were doing like Kyuss was doing, only if it were filtered through the intensity of someone like JR from Bad Brains.
As such, the tune fits somewhere between hardcore punk and alternative rock, which sounds strange coming out of the same record with something as breezy as ‘Big Me’ on it. If anything, this could be considered Grohl dabbling in post-hardcore territory, but it was far from the first time that he would make something that heavy.
Just a few years after Foo Fighters got underway, Probot became the ideal project for Grohl to let out his aggressive tendencies. Instead of shaping Foo Fighters into the kind of act that could join the ranks of Slipknot and Korn, Probot became the greatest metal album that 1986 never spat out, complete with Lemmy contributing to a handful of tunes along with everyone from Cronos of Venom to Max Cavalera of Sepultura.
And it’s not like Grohl has ever forgotten his metal credentials, either. Outside of playing for acts like Nine Inch Nails and dabbling in heavier fare with Queens of the Stone Age, his involvement on the production end with Ghost shows that he’s just as interested in seeing where metal is going as the next generation of fans.
But, really, does Grohl need to prove himself as a legend of metal? He might not look the part or dress in leather whenever he takes to the stage, but the minute that you hear him scream on anything from ‘White Limo’ or ‘Feast and the Famine’, you can tell that he’s at least knowledgable of the kind of music that speaks to the reptilian side of people’s brains.
