Monkey Wrench

About

For the first single from Foo Fighters second studio album the band put the call out to directors for video treatments but after a few weeks of submissions none of the ideas were what they were looking for. As the search continued Dave also began thinking up ideas himself and had gone on a business trip to the East coast. “I was in New York City, staying at this hotel that had these peephole doors” said Grohl, setting the scene. “I went to sleep trying to come up with an idea and I had this dream that I was outside of the door looking in on the band performing. And so, I woke up and thought that’s kind of a cool idea”.

The next day Dave began storyboarding his idea and presented it to the band. With no other viable options on the table, it was decided to go with Grohl’s dream, which would see him directing his very first music video. “You know, video directing is kind of a scam” joked Grohl. “It seems ridiculous because all you have to do is come up with an idea because you've got a director of photography, your DP, who basically lines up all the shots”.

Initial filming took place at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California in March 1997. Once famed for lavish after show Hollywood parties full of celebrities and radio broadcasts featuring the likes of Frank Sinatra, Big Crosby and Nat King Cole the hotel was also the scene of the assassination of senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. In the years that followed the hotel and entire surrounding area declined in popularity and the hotel closed for business in 1989 but remained available for media usage.

VOX Magazine were on scene during the first part of the video shoot, interviewing the band for an upcoming feature on their new album. One member of the team briefly strayed from the shoot location and was stopped by a security guard, telling them they should not be in that section of the hotel. The security guard claimed to have been at the hotel back in 1968 but reassured the crew that the assassination took place in a kitchen several floors below and was locked away by the FBI. On returning to the set somewhat spooked by the location they put the story to Grohl who confirmed it was all true.

The hotel would serve as the backdrop for exterior shots and some of the corridors, but filming of the main performance section was not shot in a real hotel room, instead a replica was created in Stage #6 at GMT Studios in Culver City, California. This was the very same stage where five years earlier Dave Grohl had filmed the famous video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.

The story of the video largely stuck to the original dream with Dave returning from a shopping trip to find a duplicate of the band dressed entirely in black playing the song in the hotel room with a chain on the door preventing their entry. The rest of the band soon joined as they try to evict the clones from the room. The ‘evil’ version of the band is eventually chased away, and the ‘real’ band continue the performance only for the twist at the end of the video to reveal there is a third version of the band now looking through the peephole. Whether that version of the band are also clones and there is a never-ending loop of band clones in this spooky hotel, or they are the real band is left to the imagination of the viewer.

The video would mark the first appearance of Taylor Hawkins in Foo Fighters media, having just joined the band earlier in the month. Another first in this video began a theme throughout several Foo Fighters music videos. Whilst Dave Grohl is riding in an elevator of the hotel at the start of the video a muzak-inspired version of previous single ‘Big Me’ is playing through a speaker. This version of the song was created by Moog Cookbook, an electronic duo who were known in the mid-90s for creating parody versions of modern songs in the style of late 1960s and early 1970s songs, featuring the then-new Moog synthesiser.  Another of their muzak style renditions, ‘Everlong’, was used at the start of the Learn to Fly video. Another example of this theme came in the video for ‘Breakout’, with the characters in that video listening to ‘Generator’ in their car at the start of the video.