mari's Scratchpad

Rediscovering: The Foo Fighters Enhanced DVDs

• Posted by mariteaux on August 22nd, 2020 filed in Rediscovering
• 2 Comments »

This one almost shouldn’t have been in the Rediscovering pile, seeing as it’s a DVD of promo content rather than an album to listen to (and the album it pertains to, I already own and know well). Still, it came in a jewel case, and when the hell else would I get to talk about this? So, indeed, while I’ll still be talking about the content–I already know I’m keeping this.

Let’s talk about Foo Fighters’ DVD/EP, a 2003 batch of promos and music videos for One by One, the album that came out the previous year.

My previous experience, if any

I mean, it’s the Foo Fighters. In a way, they’ve become the token American rock band, very open to award ceremonies and photo ops, by no means a bad band, far from it–but they definitely play it safe. I fucking adore their debut (which I reviewed a few years back), and The Colour and the Shape and There is Nothing Left to Lose are pretty damn great 90s rock records too. Past that, I feel stuff gets oddly recognizably faceless. I found this one in my local record shop, having never heard of it but recognizing it as being something to go with One by One, one of the last albums from them I really like.

The history lesson

After There is Nothing Left to Lose proved they wouldn’t be a flash in the pan, One by One almost proved they would be. The early sessions were unsatisfactory, the “million dollar demos” as they came to be known, and Dave ended up splitting to play drums for Queens of the Stone Age for a bit instead. Eventually, they redid the entire thing in Dave’s basement in two weeks, and One by One came out in 2002 to the now-usual fanfare of huge singles and otherwise satisfactory album reviews. I like it, personally. DVD/EP came out the following year to collect the three(!) videos for “Times Like These” and the…rather infamous one for “Low”, plus some miscellaneous extra content.

Well?

Things got a little interesting as I opened up the case:

Yes, there was a surprise second disc in the case, just loosely rattling around! Now, this confused me, given that DVD/EP is very clearly only meant to be a one-disc set. So with a bit of digging, I found out that this “bonus DVD” is actually for the original CD+DVD release of One by One–my copy was the CD-only release. That was nice of the person who owned this before me, putting the disc in the wrong case so I could have a lovely little freebie like this.

Since it’s not what we’re here to discuss, let’s get the bonus DVD out of the way first. This bonus disc comes with three tracks, “All My Life”, “Walking a Line”, and “The One”, each in stereo and 5.1 surround mixes, photos, and some behind the scenes clips of the band fucking around and the “All My Life” video getting edited. When relevant, the videos are also there, and in pretty damn good quality. In fact, both discs are in top quality–LPCM audio, nothing compressed, and video that, dare I say, looks better than the streaming YouTube copies, outside of the occasional interlacing issue.

Both the DVD and my copy of the original CD are “enhanced”. Enhanced discs are something of a lost art–the merging of a music CD and computer data, the “Blue Book” as it’s known. These are the albums that pop up with a bit made in Macromedia Flash when you put them into your computer. I quite like them–in the age of ephemeral internet content disappearing in the span of about five years, these are little relics worth remembering. They’re not just showcases for material that’d get lost on someone’s taping of some special on VH1 otherwise, but for the state of multimedia at the time, taking full advantage of QuickTime and the ever-faster drive speeds of turn of the millennium home computers.

The DVD is definitely the better of the enhanced discs, seeing as the CD only features “exclusive” web content that no longer exists. This is often the pitfall of enhanced discs–even back then, they were trying to offload stuff to the internet, and as a result, whatever was on that site is probably lost to time.

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For me, the real curiosity was definitely the behind-the-scenes footage of the “All My Life” shoot, if only to see what they were editing stuff down on in 2002. I don’t quite recognize the program, but I’d guess an older version of Premiere? What was surprising is that it seems to be either a Windows 9x or pre-XP NT machine. I would’ve guessed that they’d be editing on a Classic Mac OS setup, but I guess not.

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Now, the bonus DVD proper is both less interesting and more interesting. As said, it features multiple videos for “Times Like These”–the “UK version” (the one on YouTube), the “US version” (which isn’t on YouTube, and indeed, the copyright bots prevented me from uploading it for posterity), and an acoustic rendition which I probably prefer to the studio version. Honestly not a particular favorite of mine (was the start of Dave’s string of writing the exact hit single you expect him to), but it is nice to see them all on a physical disc someone could pick up and take home.

Now, the “Low” video is a favorite of mine. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do: it’s Dave and Jack Black–excuse me, “Lester” and “Cole”–getting absolutely shitfaced, crossdressing, and having implied sex in a motel room. All shot on Video8! It’s a total 180 to the wholesome top 40 crossoverness of “Times Like These”, a video which perfectly embodies the art of two truckers engaged in debauched homosex. Oh, and the song kicks ass too. I present the unedited middle finger Jack Black gives right in the middle of it, seeing as it’s blurred out on the YouTube copy:

This disc is pure promo abandon, something that tends to get forgotten after an album comes out. In fact, I’m kinda surprised it even exists. Including music videos with albums isn’t that unheard of, hell, I own a few other enhanced titles exactly like it–but a totally separate, dedicated release for the videos usually only comes about years later, in a big compilation set spanning multiple albums, not a year after the album’s out, and not even for all the videos from that album (“All My Life” is absent). In fact, the only other things of note on the disc are a few bios for members of the band at that point, stylized like baseball cards (check Dave’s prior experience >w>), and a promo reel which I did have luck uploading to YouTube.

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Are you keeping it?

Absolutely.