“Dave, is this about Courtney?”: The worst shot Foo Fighters ever took at Courtney Love
Even as little as merely mentioning the name of Courtney Love is often enough to whip up a firestorm in some quarters, such has the viciousness of the conspiracy mill been so steadfastly set in her direction over the past 30 years. Of course, in many ways she is better known for her breakneck relationship with Kurt Cobain than most of her own musical efforts with the band Hole, meaning that following his untimely death in 1994, she famously gained a fair few enemies.
Naturally one of the most prominent among them was Cobain’s Nirvana compatriot Dave Grohl, who over the ensuing years in his subsequent Foo Fighters outfit, never kept love far from view. Between personal emotional animosities and seemingly never-ending legal battles over the contents of Cobain’s estate and its relationship to Nirvana, the broiling feud between the pair has never seemed to reach a cooling off period – especially after the Foo Fighters instantly likened Love to a deadly virus back in the days of their mid-‘90s inception.
The revelation of this scathing swipe comes from Devo’s Gerald Casale, who worked with a slew of artists from David Bowie to Soundgarden over the years. But one of the more memorable incidents came when he turned his hand to the video for the Foo Fighters’ sophomore single ‘I’ll Stick Around’ in 1995, where a featured “germy ball” took on a sinister precedence in more ways than one.
“I worked with an outfit out of Chicago that were experimenting with early CGI editing in laptops, at a time when everybody was just using very expensive editing facilities,” said Casale. “They created this thing that looks like a germy ball floating around chasing Dave and everybody. It was the AIDS virus. That’s what the AIDS virus looked like, but what nobody knows is that what that viral ball represented… Courtney Love.”
In the song, Grohl expresses overtly raging sentiments like: “I’ve been around all the pawns you’ve gagged and bound/ They’ll come back and knock you down and I’ll be free,” “I don’t owe you anything,” and, “I should have known we were better off alone.” However, even still, it goes without saying that their chosen visual manifestation of this was a decidedly risky move – and one that even Casale seemed nervous about approaching.
He added: “Yep. I’m here to tell you for the first time. When I heard the song, I immediately assumed that what Dave was talking about when he said, ‘I don’t owe you anything’, and knowing the problems they were going through with Courtney, I made the assumption it was about Courtney. And I have the naive temerity, being the kind of guy I am… I asked ‘Hey, Dave, is this about Courtney?’ and he goes, ‘my lips are sealed,’ so I just rolled with it.”
The rock and roll canon is no stranger to a fiery spat or two, but undeniably this one comes in at the more extreme end of cutting digs that anyone could ever lay claim to. Of course, it’s not as if Grohl would ever admit to such shocking insults – but at the very least, his choice of image in the ‘I’ll Stick Around’ video left no illusions that his new venture in the Foo Fighters was messing around.
