There are few things I appreciate as much as a well executed cover, and last night on The Late Show with David Letterman the Foo Fighters & Zaz Brown collaborated on Black Sabbath’s masterpiece ‘War Pigs’.
Not only is ‘War Pigs’ one of the greatest songs ever produced, the musical forces of Grohl & Co + Zac Brown are somehow the perfect combination to cover it. Brown’s vocals mixing with Grohl’s energy are nothing like the original track, but that’s not the point: the point is that they rub their own brand of stank all over this track and his rock perfection.
I’d be lying if I said I came to love this song via Ozzy and Sabbath, in fact I couldn’t have fell for this song in any weirder fashion. Though I’d heard the song many times growing up, it wasn’t until I heard it covered on a Phish album being covered in between their song ‘Harpua‘ (which might be their weirdest of songs) that I really came to pay attention to it.
Then, the first time I got to see this song played live came at the hands of guitar legend Warren Haynes a few weeks later (at Bonnaroo back in ’07)…this isn’t that exact cover, but it does it justice:
To do the original justice it requires that x-factor, that making it your own that only the Grohl’s or the Haynes of the world are capable of. I can’t even begin to tell you how stoked I was to hear this cover today…./end rant