Monday, February 8, 2010

Fist Fight In The Parking Lot!

I haven't been a loyal Saturday Night Live viewer since....well, ever really, but in recent years I certainly never go out of my way to watch it. I stayed home this past Saturday night and my girlfriend and I decided to give it a shot. Ashton Kutcher was hosting which was already one strike against this episode in my book, but I didn't mind the prospect of seeing Them Crooked Vultures perform even though I find their album pretty lackluster.

There were a couple funny skits, but the best one by far was towards the end of the episode and featured Dave Grohl of Them Crooked Vultures (and of course Foo Fighters and Nirvana fame) doing a bit of "acting". Anyone who has ever seen the Foo Fighters live know that Dave Grohl's between song banter has some genuinely entertaining stand-up comedy elements to it and there is more than one pretty funny Foo Fighters video out there ("Big Me", "Long Road To Ruin", "Learn To Fly" and "Low" come to mind with the latter two both featuring cameos from comedian Jack Black), so it isn't terribly surprising to see him show up in a SNL skit. The clip is below and absolutely worth the 3 minutes it will take you to watch it. To sum it up briefly, the skit is set at a wedding where the father of the bride asks to bring up his old bandmates to play a song for his daughter and her new husband. The band turns out be a bunch of raucous punk rockers from the early 80's and proceeds to tear the room apart. Grohl plays the drummer, has a few lines and I have no doubt that he actually wrote the song they play. Grohl has made no secret of being a fan of 80's hardcore and metal and the song unabashedly pays tribute to Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies (the song is mostly a rip off of the ST classic "Institutionalized" to my ears) and early Corrosion Of Conformity (the ficitional band is probably not coincidentally named Crisis Of Conformity).

Enjoy:

2 comments:

Brother Howe said...

Yes, this was a great skit. I've gone back and watched it three or four times. The song is a lot of fun too. I wonder if they were all playing their instruments? It sounds live, but they could have gotten help from the SNL band.

Found this searching for Dave Grohl. Nice post!

DICK TUDOR said...

I think Dave was playing drums, but the guitar and bass were being done by the SNL band. You notice that when Ashton Kutcher takes the mic over to Grohl so he can sing because the mic behind the drum kit is out that the guitar is still going, but Ashton isn't strumming. And I'd definitely guess that Dave wrote the song because it rips off bands he is known of being a fan of. Love the lyrics too...exactly what a punk/hardcore band from the early 80's would have sung.

And thanks for checking out my post...checked out your website and really dig it!