#foo facts

Thanking you kindly! I had no real plans and frankly couldn't really get it up for any celebrations the way I used to, but it turned out to be a really nice long weekend of food and live music - two things I truly love.

So I had to do a clean install of my OS and thought i'd been thorough in saving files, but I can't find the Foo Facts notes that i'd saved when I started up again last time, boo-urns. Pardon me if I repeat some stuff.

The original name of the Coattail Riders was Casanova and the Sunshine Band. Then Taylor wanted them to simply be known as the Coattail Riders before the record company tacked his name to the front

After Sound City, Dave was obsessed with the idea of starting a new 24/7 music channel, until someone pointed out that this would make him a TV exec and he noped the fuck out of there

The red coat Pat wore in the ‘Everlong’ video is on display in Copenhagen

Dave donated funds for a young Warren man to restore a 1947 Piper P-12 three-seater plane. He put in the costs for an engine overhaul and the plane bears his signature

can we have some more foo facts or draft please and thank you

It's you! It's me! It's we!

How about a Dave Foo Facts list seeing as it's his birthday and all?

Dave wears Fidelity denim (black Torino Gotham or Rogue on tour)

Dave occasionally books solo studio time to record demos, and some songs remain in the vault while others get turned into FF tracks or songs for other projects - ‘If I Were Me’ (from the Sound City soundtrack) originated as one of these solo demos

He used his fake decapitated head from his Kimmel guest-hosting spot to scare his kids and his housekeeper

During a period between 2002 and 2003, Dave reached a milestone by replacing himself on the Billboard Modern Rock charts with himself - twice. Nirvana’s ‘You Know You’re Right’ was bested by ‘All My Life’, then it was knocked off by QOTSA’s ‘No One Knows’

by the way, i'm really curious about how you got these bizarre facts about the dudes when i can find barely any on the surface web... i'd love to hear your advices on doing research pleasee and thank you!!

Oh, buddy, I still have moments of feeling like I need adult supervision myself (before realising - aah shit, I am the responsible adult) but I appreciate your confidence.

But first, I take my duties as Foo Fact Provider with the utmost seriousness 🫡

There was almost a video for the song ‘Concrete and Gold’, based on a series of treatments that one of Dave’s daughters wrote

Ratt was part of the Sound City documentary film but did not make the final cut

Taylor’s cover of ‘The Shapes of Things’ on Get The Money is a leftover from Red Light Fever - specifically Gannin Arnold’s backing work

The cushions in 606 are made from old band t-shirts stitched by Virginia

Lemmy was banned from a concert in LA by The Darkness. After the show, when Dave heard about it, Dave persuaded Lemmy to meet him and Justin from The Darkness at the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where they learned the hassle was all due to a misunderstanding and they made up

Leading to this pic (I still can't work out whether or not that's Ashlee Simpson behind them)

On how I researched all this - well, about ten years ago, it was a lot easier to use Google's own tools because that was before it shot itself in the foot. You used to be able to search the contents of old magazine and newspaper issues, but they discontinued support for Google News and hobbled the most useful tools in Books. (That was how I found Nate's quote regretting Alive & Well, but I stupidly didn't bookmark or screenshot it and of course that source is gone now.) Even tricks like adding "before:(year)" to a search term, or the custom range, don't dive as deep as they used to. So when I started Foo Facts, I just read through a bunch of stuff I had bookmarked, plus other trivia i'd saved to memory, and built up from there.

Tuck in!

For a time, Taylor couldn’t make out a word of ‘Monkey Wrench’ and thought the words were, “Don’t want to be your Huggy Bear”. Meanwhile, Pat thought the next line was, “Want war and peace an accident”

Most of the first Coattail Riders album was recorded in a day

Dave and the band have shown their support for Girls Rock Boston, a music and mentorship program for girls, women, trans and gender non-conforming youth and adults

Although he’s all buddy-buddy with Paul McCartney now, Dave once said that he considered what the then-remaining Beatles did with ‘Free As A Bird’/’Real Love’ to be in poor taste (this was before the 2025 mix with AI audio restoration of Lennon's demo)

Shifty is a fan of the works of writer John Steinbeck - "I grew up in California and there’s something about it that strikes a chord with me. I guess it’s what strikes a note with you, what you connect with. There are the things that are regarded as classics and then there’s the things that actually touch you on an emotional level."

On books, he said he was at a drag queen bar in San Francisco and a local queen gave him a copy of his memoir that he'd written. He took it home and thought it was amazing. He wished more people gave him books as gifts over "bad pencil drawings" of himself

He bought a vintage Lambretta scooter off his friend Jake who worked at Studio 606, and sometime later Jake asked for it back. They agreed on a trade: Jake would get the scooter in exchange for an old Fender Tele, which is basically surgically attached to Shifty now

He started the Dead Peasants project because he felt stagnant as a guitarist with FF circa the ESPG tour - "I just felt like I hadn't learned something new in a long time"

He and his family moved into a $2m house in Santa Barbara in 2023 - and put it back on the market three months later

Mate, gotta tell you, it's been so long since I did Foo Facts that I pulled my study apart for hours in search of a drive with a 'facts' file on it - only to think, "But what if drafts?"

So, some stuff from drafts -

Dave could only count two occasions when he got reassurance from Kurt that he was doing a good job - and they never walked offstage saying, “That was great”. Perhaps as a result of this, fans notice how Dave always patted Taylor on the back or gave another gesture during a show

The red teddy boy drape jacket Pat wore in the ‘Everlong’ video is on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in Copenhagen

On the soundtrack for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, Alpha 5 had a whole song dedicated to him. One of the composers was Luke Tierney, who went on to work with Chris in the Dead Peasants. Another connection for those playing Six Degrees: Luke played on Joey Cape’s album Doesn’t Play Well With Others, and Joey and Chris were in one iteration of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes together. All roads lead to Shiflett

As fans camped outside the venue for Super Saturday Night in sub-zero temperatures, the band and DIRECTV sent out several boxes of pizza for them

Dave was inspired to do the pre-encore backstage video bit by Metallica, when they did it on their Black Album tour

When NASA lost contact with its Opportunity rover after a dust storm on Mars, they began sending it music hoping it’d wake up and send back a signal. One of the songs chosen was ‘Everlong’ (”hello, i’ve waited here for you”)

Order up

Chris contributed to the Obama Victory Fund in ‘08

Nate is in another band called Dolan, Mendel & Wong - and Joe Wong said recently that he has been working with Nate on a second Lieutenant album

Chris’s cousin Theo Ellis is a member of Wolf Alice

Nate's house was featured in Sunset magazine a few years ago and a video tour was posted on Open House TV. Through those, we can see that Nate displays a framed photo of Foo Fighters performing with Fred Schneider on Halloween 2002. He's also got a photo of the band onstage with their backs turned, waving at a crowd.

Shifty recorded a song with Sugarcult - ‘Bouncing Off The Walls’ - for the Van Wilder soundtrack

One of Nate's sisters is Marianne Mishima, former TV anchor in Spokane, WA

Chris interviewed Sam Palladio from the TV show Nashville for his Walking The Floor podcast after meeting him backstage at a FF show. Not only did he and Sam duet at a show in London shortly afterwards, Sam covered ‘Congregation’ at a Musicians Corner benefit in Nashville in 2017. It culminated in Chris appearing on Sam's song 'Tennessee' in 2024

Nate's father was a bit of a bloody genius - besides a Bachelor of Science (Chemistry), he held degrees in Nuclear Chemistry, Chemical Thermodynamics, Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, Crystallography, Electro-Chemistry and Advanced Chemical Analysis

John Mendel also dabbled in art and made this sculpture, "Nate, the Foo Fighter"

Dave used to don a wig and a professional-looking outfit when scouting for preschools and nannies

The idea for the ‘Monkey Wrench’ video with the band looking at themselves through a keyhole came to Dave in a dream: "I sat up one night and listened to the song ten times in a row, just trying to at least muster up some interesting imagery, or something. Then I went to sleep and had a dream, and the video is the dream I had"

7″ for Planned Parenthood wasn’t the first time Foo Fighters vocalized their support for the right to choose - they got behind Rock For Choice, a project put together to preserve Roe vs Wade and promote reproductive rights

‘Red Light Fever’ is a saying Taylor uses for a state experienced in the studio when the Recording light comes on and you freeze up - Taylor experienced this during the TINLTL sessions

Dave assisted Dr. Drew in a study on what types of people are drawn to becoming entertainers

William is a descendant of Irish laureate Oliver Goldsmith, author of such works as She Stoops To Conquer, who has a statue in his honour in Dublin

Chris’s mother was a probation officer so one of his earliest gigs was at Los Prietos Boys Camp, a youth correctional facility in Santa Barbara, bringing him one step closer to his dream of being Johnny Cash

Nate was missing from a block of European interviews in 2000 (and noticeably some photoshoots) because of some ongoing neurological problems that, when it was flaring up really badly, made it difficult for him to speak. He was on experimental drugs and seeing a specialist, and had cranial surgery just before ESPG was released