One Perfect Song: "Exhausted"
Twelve footnotes is at least eleven too many for an article of this length.
One Perfect Song is an ongoing series in which I highlight a song that always grabs my attention when I hear it.
Today’s Song: Exhausted by Foo Fighters, from their 1995 debut album Foo Fighters
Ah, Foo Fighters1. I could write a couple thousand words and only talk about what it means to be a band that definitively has something when they start out, achieve a level of mainstream success based on that same something, only to subsequently either lose it and never find it again, or to purposefully move away from it, often to the point of parody. (See also: Weezer, Kings of Leon, other bands I’ll remember later and wish I added.)
Instead, let’s save that topic for another time, and today just note that Foo Fighters have definitely lost whatever something they once had and have become a parody of their former selves. (For real though, did you see them last year2 on SNL? HOOO BOY, I was embarrassed for them. Pat Smear founded the Germs, ya know? And now he is involved with that crap? Yikes! GenX Punk really is dead.)
When a band exists in a shitty present-day form, so long as we can look at it the context of its original place-and-time, that shitty-ness doesn’t have to cancel out what that original something once was, right?
Or in sports-parlance: form is temporary; class is permanent.
Even though this is One Perfect Song and not Album Stories, I do think some background is relevant here, so let’s take a sojourn to Summer ‘95.
Your narrator is 14 years old and is about two years into being into “rock music”. In a pre-internet age, with the limited field of vision that offered, without an older sibling and with a limited budget, this mostly consists of being into the very mainstream American rock acts of the early 90s that might be played on the radio, but especially Nirvana.
I really felt like I was just getting going on my full Nirvana fandom3 in April ‘944, when the news about Cobain’s death came through. Outside of being bummed, and waaaaay to young to understand suicide, heroin, depression and/or addiction, I also somehow knew I was behind the curve on the music world.
Which, of course, I was - I lived in a farmers village outside of a medium-sized town in the North of England. All culture found its way there slowly, but especially anything “alternative”. (Later, when I read the Nirvana book Come As You Are5, I felt like I could relate to Aberdeen, WA the town that Kurt and Kris Novoselic grew up in.)
So, in ‘95, when word eventually trickled down that Dave Grohl had a new band, I was all in. Here was a thing that felt like I could get in at the ground floor on. And I did, becoming a happy owner of Foo Fighters on cassette tape6 within weeks of its release.
I also vividly remember bicycling home-and-back from the usual football game/mess around/hangout one Saturday evening that summer so that I could bootleg record-to-cassette a Foo’s concert performance that was airing live on BBC Radio 1. Pretty sure everyone thought that was kinda weird - a fun, new twist in the existing “Whitehead is a weirdo” narrative.
All of which is to say, I felt7 a very strong attachment to that debut Foo Fighters record. I already thought of Dave as ‘my guy’ because as a 14 year old wannabe drummer, I thought that he was to me as John Bonham was to him. And here he was taking center stage, stepping out of the Cobain-sized shadows. To this day, I think its the best Foo Fighters album (but who doesn’t?)
Maybe Dave should have made all of them by himself…
Back to the song, which is the topic here after all. Most of this record is variations on the alt-rock playbook of the age, with the verse-chorus-verse / loud-quiet-loud thing wrapped in fuzzed out guitars and double-tracked vocals. (It’s a good playbook, no shade intended.)
Exhausted, though, doesn’t fit that formula. It’s really all about the riff that runs though it and the guitar tone. Everything else is window dressing, really. Very good dressing, but mostly just there to provide structure around the riff. In that sense, Exhausted may be the most Wipers-esque song in the Foo-oeuvre.
I’ve mentioned this before here, but it stands to be restated, I know almost nothing about how guitars, amps, pedals, etc. work - both separately or in combination8. But I sure as hell know a good guitar tone when I hear one - and this song has it. There’s a video of Dave and producer Barret Jones talking about this song 20+ years after they recorded it and they are still blown away by the tone. As it turns out, part of that is that the amp they were using was on its way to blowing out. Come for that story, stay for the “battery powered, petrol-can amp” story. (The blown out drums also sound great, but that’s a Grohl-given and not discussed in this clip.)
I guess the other main thing about the way this song - and the whole album - sounds is the distortion and other effects on the vocals. Which is a very early/mid ‘90s gimmick that often didn’t add that much. In this case, I think the “foggy” effect on the vocals really does tie into the theme which the song name and the lyrics are presenting. I remember reading somewhere9 that this song is about getting divorced. Which I would imagine is probably pretty exhausting, yes. It can imagine it’s just as easily about the entire Nirvana experience. And if it were to be a newly released song, it could be about 2020?
I credit this song, and Nirvana’s In Utero (especially the B side), as being part of my intro to “noise” elements in rock music and to non-standard dynamics. Just little entry level classes for a dumb teen, which later led to more advanced classes in these subjects, e.g. Drive Like Jehu. There are two key moments in this song where the dynamics get me every time:
The feedback based guitar bridge starting at 2:14
The drums kicking back in at 4:20
In doing some research on this song/album, I stumbled on a quote10 from Dave that really sums up this song better than I ever could: "Exhausted is kind of a melancholy thing. It's sad but it makes you feel good, and it fades out in the end, so in a way it continues in your head."
I think he nailed it with that assessment. It really does always continue in my head. It has such a long and slow fade out that I used to always, always slowly turn the volume up over the last 45 seconds or so of the song because I wanted the riff to keep going.
In combat sports and pro-wrestling, there’s an understanding that the main event of a show is what people usually pay for and what they remember afterwards. If you present a show where the under-card is great but the main event stinks, people will probably remember the show as a dud. I strongly believe this is true of album tracking11 too. You have to stick the ending. I could write a whole piece just on how to end an album, but again, for today, let’s just say that Exhausted is a masterclass in how to end a record.12
Until next time, play this one loud, and may your memories of 1995 be only the most pleasant and positive kind of nostalgia.
P.S. - As noted, my Foo-Fandom dates back to an age of cassette tapes and CDs. The 12” single of this song (their first ever release, I think) is the only Foo Fighters vinyl I own. I over-paid for it in December 2020 on Discogs, as an “I Survived 2020” gift to myself. The sleeve art sucks, but it sounds fucking great.
It’s just Foo Fighters. No “the” in front. There’s already so many “the” bands. Let’s not add to the list if we don’t need to?
I was also embarrassed for Dave Chapelle and all of the SNL team. It was a very bad show. I also get it, election week was very tough for everyone, so maybe take that week off next time?
As much as I wanted the “Satan Worshipping Motherfuckers” t-shirt, I had to settle for the “Corporate Rock Whores” t-shirt which was more than enough of a boundary pusher at home.
How has it been 27 years already? Kurt’s now been dead longer than he was alive. I still maintain that if he’d lived and made it outta the 90s, he’d be holed up, living as a painter in one of the tiny, artsy towns that one can find across the American Southwest. (Let’s say…Madrid, New Mexico?)
I read this book again a couple of years ago. It’s interesting that Cobain was decades ahead of the current social culture in many ways. But he also clearly lied his ass off to Azerrad, which goes mostly unchallenged. It’s a weird one, because Azerrad is a good writer and doesn’t seem like an easy mark. But he let Kurt get away with some real BS. His other published book Our Band Could Be Your Life is an essential document of American rock music and is designated MUST READ. Have someone gift it to you next time someone asks you what you want for your birthday and you don’t know.
Fun fact: the second Foo Fighters record The Color And The Shape was the first CD I ever bought, in summer ‘97. I really was behind the curve on CDs.
I still do feel very attached to this album, tbh.
I do know that John Reis says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that no matter what you do with the guitar, string, pickups amps, pedals, etc. that ultimately the player themselves is the key differentiator in the sound and tone. His point being that someone could be as talented as him and play his setup but it won’t sound like him.
What do they say on Wikipedia, citation not found?
http://www.fooarchive.com/headwires/selftitled.htm
Album tracking is dying/dead art. A musician friend explained to me once why this is, and the short version is “Blame the streaming services.” Cancel your Spotify account, it’s not too late…
They also used it as the closer to live shows for a long time, which it is also perfect for:
Yeah, this is a good one. Whenever I see this album cover, "Exhausted" is what starts playing in my brain. Instead of the long fade out, we could have all taken another 2 minutes of that riff and never noticed.