32 Songs - Track 7

Monkey Wrench - Foo Fighters

Don't want to be your Monkey Wrench.
One more indecent accident.
I'd rather leave than suffer this.
I'll never be your Monkey Wrench.

I'm glad that Dave Grohl had the opportunity to go solo when he did because The Colour and The Shape is, quite possibly, the best rock album ever released. It's seems that quite a few people may agree with me because I am currently on my fifth copy of the album. An ex-girlfriend has copy number two and my Brumbies training jersey when they were sponsored by Canberra Milk, my most prized possessions at the time, a person from the dorm has another, a copy was taken from the school i was teaching at in Adelaide and another vanished in the great CD disappearance when i moved back to Canberra. Which is kind of freaky don't you agree?

It was this album that caused my drumming illusions to start again. I had flirted with the skins while in High School and listening to Def Leppard (He's only got one arm, how hard can it be?). My inability to keep a beat and a dragon of a teacher saw me go to the clarinet instead (which really pissed me off but more on that later). As an ex-drummer (Nirvana for the two people who don't know) Dave made sure the drums were front and center in the recording of this album. He played them on most of the album and wrote, played guitar and sung on all of it. Which is pretty fucking amazing.

Monkey Wrench told me to say "Well that was the past, where do I go now". No, really it did. I'd not banged (in all senses of the word) anything for a long time and so I started again. It's a terrific song but the bit towards the end where he delivers all those lines in one breath is phenomenal. The bastard is all mouth and trousers though because I've never seen him do it all in one breath live.