Tag Archives: artists

Our Bigger Than the Sound columnist is taking credit for that and five other moments in rock history. By James Montgomery James Montgomery interviews the Foo Fighters Photo: Jonathan Mussman / MTV News Honestly, I don’t know if I should be flattered or outraged right now. On Tuesday, the Foo Fighters released their (genuinely excellent) Wasting Light album, a snarling, knotty thing that, as anyone who bought a copy can attest to, also comes packaged with a snippet of the master tapes it was recorded on. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a rather brilliant little marketing ploy, especially since I may have been the one who thought it up in the first place. See, last month, when I sat down with the Foos for the premiere of their “Rope” video , we spent a fair amount of time discussing Light ‘s recording process &#8212 and the band’s much-covered decision to make the album in Dave Grohl’s garage, directly to analog tape. At one point, Grohl told me that, after final mastering, he cut the master tapes up “into a million pieces,” which led me to suggest &#8212 half-jokingly, I will admit &#8212 that he should include the fragments of tape with the actual album. “What a great idea!” Grohl laughed. No kidding. And while the outrage I felt upon learning the Foos had, uh, appropriated my concept has subsided some (I’d still like a platinum plaque, though), the whole incident got me thinking. Because whether I meant for it to happen or not, over the years, I have been responsible for creating a lot of ancillary rock bullsh– just like the Wasting Light marketing scheme. I suppose I have a knack for inspiring footnotes in the ever-expanding book of rock and roll (as Musical March Madness has proven). So here’s a look back at some of my Greatest Hits: The Great Killers/Bravery Beef of 2005 Yes, I am the guy responsible for this petty feud, which was a very big deal back when folks mentioned the Killers and the Bravery in the same sentence (or, really, mentioned them at all). It all started when I interviewed Brandon Flowers in March 2005, just as the Killers’ Hot Fuss was gaining traction here in the States, and, flush with confidence, he took the opportunity to lay the verbal smackdown on the Bravery, whom he saw as pretenders to the Killers’ sparkly throne. “They’re signed because we’re a band,” he told me. “I’ve heard rumors about [members of] that band being in a different kind of band, and how do you defend that? If you say, ‘My heart really belongs to what I’m doing now,’ but you used to be in a ska band? I think people will see through them.” Oh, snap. The two sides would continue to spar for most of the year (my favorite part was when Bravery frontman Sam Endicott said Killers’ bassist Mark Stoermer looked like “a 9-foot-tall, Dutch-girl mutant”) before the beef eventually got too lean for anyone to care about. Though, in a semi-related note, a year later, Flowers told me that the Killers’ upcoming Sam’s Town would be “one of the best albums in the past 20 years,” a quote that would haunt him for the majority of the album’s cycle and, in a lot of ways, doom it completely. Needless to say, we haven’t spoken a whole lot since. The Fall Out Boy Song “West Coast Smoker” This is the final tune on their 2008 album Folie