I'll Stick Around

About

The very first Foo Fighters music video was for the second track from their self-titled debut album, I'll Stick Around. The band had declined to make a video for the first single, 'This Is a Call', owing to a desire not to jump straight into the typical cycle associated with established acts. "We were a new band, and we didn’t want to just dive headfirst into videos, and interviews, and playing the whole game" Grohl said of the choice.

The band hired Gerald Casale to direct the video, co-founder of new-wave pioneers Devo and creative mind behind several of their surrealistic music videos. Grohl was keen on emulating many of the elements from those videos for his first video but rather than hiring someone else and risk having a product that felt like a rip-off, he felt hiring the man himself was the only way to go.

Casale, like most people at the time, was not overly familiar with the newly formed band and only had the one song to go on and decide if he was the man for the job. Whilst he wasn’t familiar with Dave’s new band, he was naturally very aware of his previous one. "When I heard the song, I immediately assumed what Dave was talking about when he said, 'I Don’t Owe You Anything'"

Casale recalled in a 2021 interview. "Knowing the problems they were going through, I made the assumption that it was about Courtney. I asked him. I said 'Hey Dave, you can tell me, is this about Courtney?'". Dave’s response was reportedly "My Lips are sealed" but nevertheless, Casale based his initial treatment on the assumption.

The video was set to see the band performing and fighting off what Casale described as "A bloated, charred inflated girl representing Courtney Love" but unsurprisingly Capitol Records and band management were not keen on the overly antagonistic manifestation, also fearing legal repercussions from Love. A compromise needed to be reached and a more subtle approach was taken with Love represented as a 3D rendering of an HIV virus that the band would be fighting off. The task of making that a reality was Running Gun, a small video production company at the time based in Chicago, Illinois.

The video shoot lasted for just one day on a Seattle soundstage in the summer of 1995, taking around 8 hours on a budget of $60,000. Most of the footage featured the band performing the song against a 360-degree greenscreen backdrop with a few other interspersed scenes including stop-motion of Dave swallowing chess pieces. Running Gun were then given the raw footage in which they could insert their 3D model animations.

The final video was released in September of 1995.