Act Two

Last weekend my son and I were driving up the highway, listening to the radio. We heard a song by the Foo Fighters. We stopped and did a few errands, then as we drove home, we heard a song by Nirvana. I made an offhand comment about how we were hearing the band that Dave Grohl played with before he became a Fighter of Foo. This was a pretty snarky riff on a bit I used to do about how The Beatles were the group Paul McCartney played with before he got together with Wings. It was only later that evening that I began to reflect on my own snarkacity.
The Beatles recorded a dozen albums in the ten years they were together, which have since been repackaged and dispersed in at least another dozen permutations. Wings produced seven albums from 1971 to 1979. Paul's latter group had twelve top-ten singles. The Beatles did a little better than that, but did that make it okay for me to toss around my snotty remarks? I don't think that Sir Paul is concerned primarily with my point of view, but I did find myself feeling a little ashamed of making fun of the guy who wrote "Live and Let Die" as well as "Yesterday." After all, my personal total of hit singles totals exactly zero.
Which brings us back to the Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl has had enormous commercial success with his second group. He's got eleven Grammys with "Foo" all over them. That's ten more than Nirvana won. Were the four years Dave spent the drum kit with Kurt and Krist ultimately more artistically impressive than the nearly twenty years he has been out in front of the Foo Fighters? Is it fair to compare "Hey Jude" with "Silly Love Songs?" Of course it's not, but it does make me wonder about F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that "There are no second acts in American lives."
It makes me wonder what Fitzgerald's band was like after Gatsby.