This year, the Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut turns 30 years old. As a nearly obsessed fan of the band since 2011’s Wasting Light, I’ve developed an exceptionally strong attachment to the first album. By now, we all know the story: Following the tragic and sudden end of Nirvana, Dave Grohl found himself searching for the right way to start making music again. In October 1994, he booked a week at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle, Washington, with producer Barrett Jones, and they got to work recording what would become the debut Foo Fighters album. This release would serve as the foundation for the band’s tenure at the forefront of modern rock for decades to come. There is something uniquely nostalgic and spontaneous about the sound of Foo Fighters. The crunchy guitars and uptempo beats are straight off the heels of the grunge movement, with elements of punk and metal—staples of Grohl’s musical influences growing up—plus a sweet, melancholy shoegaze vibe, which permeates songs like “Floaty” and “X-Static.” These recordings are lo-fi, but still deliberate and precise, a testament to both Grohl’s skill as a musician as well as the limited session time allotted to complete the album.The gear used to record this album has always been an intriguing mystery to me, and one piece specifically kept popping up in my research: an amp known as the Can. Over the years, both Grohl and Jones have cryptically mentioned a mythical amplifier that provided the most glorious, disgustingly raunchy fuzz tones, heard most notably on closing track “Exhausted.” For a long time, fans online talked about a “gas-can amp,” an “oil-can amp,” or even some claiming the effect was achieved by placing a microphone into a metal can next to a guitar amp—nobody was quite sure what exactly the source of this sound was. In 2021, Jones hosted an “ask me anything” live stream on his YouTube channel. I was lucky enough to catch it, and the first question I asked was about this mystery amp. That’s when I first laid my eyes on the Can. It’s literally what it sounds like: a small, battery-powered practice amp built into a red plastic Jerry can. My mind was blown; I needed to know more.“I had to take a moment to step back from the situation and admire how silly it was to be so excited about this; objectively, this amp sounds terrible, like a swarm of bees rattling around in a plastic jug.” The story goes that SLM Electronics, an amp-manufacturing division of St. Louis Music, produced these amps in the mid ’80s as a battery-powered solution for buskers. As a novelty, they created a plastic enclosure that resembles a plastic gas can for the solid-state amplifier controls as well as the 5' speaker. Approximately 10,000 of these amps were manufactured and distributed out of the same factory where the original Crate amps were made in the U.S.Once I learned exactly what this amp was, my mission became clear: I needed one. I quickly discovered how difficult it is to find these amps. Even as a seasoned gear-hound, well-acquainted with the standard practice of scouring Reverb, eBay, Musician’s Friend, and every other source where used musical equipment can be found, I was coming up empty-handed. My searches resulted in a few expired Reverb listings from years earlier of people selling these amps for dirt cheap, which, while frustrating, yielded an encouraging sign that the lore behind “the Can” was not yet common knowledge. My worst fear was that word would get out about these amps and we’d end up with another instance of PDS: Peavey Decade Syndrome. (If you know, you know.)In a turn of miraculous serendipity, I stumbled across someone selling one on Facebook Marketplace and jumped on it. I’d managed to snag my very own Can amp. I had to take a moment to step back from the situation and admire how silly it was to be so excited about this; objectively, this amp sounds terrible, like a swarm of bees rattling around in a plastic jug. However, when I finally plugged in my guitar for the first time and strummed that first D minor chord from “Exhausted,” I knew immediately: That’s the sound.The simple truth I’ve come to terms with over the years as a guitarist is that “good tone” is purely subjective. Especially in a studio setting, some of the most iconic sounds can be uncovered in the most unconventional ways, and the Can is a true testament to that statement. While the early days of Foo Fighters were undoubtedly cast in the looming shadow of Nirvana’s massive success and catastrophic end, I think it’s finally time we recognize Grohl’s 1995 solo effort for what it is: a truly magical little slice of mid-’90s post-grunge that still packs a mighty wallop 30 years later. And in the middle of it all, this crunchy, fizzy, horrible little gas-can amp.
Read more at Premier Guitar
