“Monkey Wrench” by Foo Fighters

song info

    “Monkey Wrench” by Foo Fighters (official video) is an alternative rock song.

    
    Modern Rock: peak #9 (nine), 15 weeks on chart, 1997
     Billboard chart listings courtesy of Billboard Magazine

link to the static song information page for this song:
http://www.thissideofsanity.com/music/songs/mo/monkeywrench.php

    Summary quotation from Wikipedia:

    “Monkey Wrench” is the first single released from the second Foo Fighters album, The Colour and the Shape. Blistering lyrics chronicled the 1997 disintegration of singer/song writer Dave Grohl’s four year marriage to Jennifer Youngblood. The song spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart (now the Alternative Songs chart), topping out at number 9.

Musical analysis

    Monkey Wrench is an up-tempo rock song, written in the key of B and performed with distorted guitars in Drop-D tuning. The song opens with a descending guitar line over a chordal riff of B5/F#5/E5 for two bars. After a gap, the main verse enters with vocals and a choppier, palm-muted version of the intro riff. A pre-chorus using an E5 power chord then gives way to a chord-based chorus of B5/G#5/F#5/E5/F#5/E5/C5/B5.

Music video

    The music video was directed by the band’s lead singer/songwriter Dave Grohl. In the video, Grohl arrives at his apartment with groceries in hand. He walks into an elevator, as he tries to walk into the door he is stopped by the chain latch and peers in through the peephole. There a doppelganger set of the whole band is shown playing. The rest of the bandmates (save guitarist Pat Smear) walk out of their apartments and join Grohl as he views the band in his room. Smear then peers out of his apartment and is beckoned to join in the view. As the doppelganger band continues with the song Dave and his bandmates try to force their way into Grohl’s apartment. As the lyrics go on, the doppel-Dave taunts the band, spitting onto the peephole lens and holding the door shut as he screams “free”. When the door is finally opened, the musicians have left, and the first iteration of the band picks up their instruments to finish playing the song. Out in the hall, a third set of bandmates is listening, creating a recursive situation.

    When Grohl is in the elevator heading up to his apartment, a muzak version of the Foo Fighters song “Big Me” can be heard.

    The music video for the song was the first to feature Taylor Hawkins on drums, although the actual drum track is performed by Grohl.

—from Wikipedia (the Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License applies to Wikipedia’s block of text and possible accompanying picture, along with any alterations, transformations, and/or building upon Wikipedia’s original text that ThisSideofSanity.com applied to this block of text)

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