Long Road To Ruin

About

For the "Long Road to Ruin" music video Taylor Hawkins developed a concept parodying melodramatic 1970s and ’80s American soap operas - particularly the medical drama General Hospital.

While the Foo Fighters had previously portrayed fictional characters in their videos, this marked the first time all four members were given named roles with individual backstories. Prior to this, only Dave Grohl's character "Lester" in the Low video had been explicitly named.

In the video, each band member plays an actor starring in a fictional soap opera titled Long Road to Ruin:

Dave Grohl appears as Davy Grolton, an actor-turned-musician who plays Dr. Hansom Davidoff. The character is loosely based on Rick Springfield who famously played a doctor on General Hospital before launching a successful music career with the hit “Jessie’s Girl.”

Nate Mendel plays Ned Bender, who portrays Saul Goode on the show. Goode was a previous pseudonym used in reality by Grohl, credited as the director of the ‘All My Life’ video.

Chris Shiflett becomes Christopher Mishomotohama, a satirical take on older actors cast in youthful roles. His character, Little Jimmy, is a young teenager who has suffered a head injury in the depicted “episode”.

Taylor Hawkins assumes the role of Ty Hawkstone, known to fans of the soap as character Dr. Les Groper.

The fictional cast also included Racinda Jones, played by actress Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation, The Office), whose soap opera character, Susan Belafonte, is both Christopher’s mother and a romantic interest for Grolton.

The video opens with a surgical scene in the show involving Davidoff and Groper treating Little Jimmy, which quickly descends into a physical altercation between the actors, highlighting their off-screen tension. The narrative then shifts to Grolton’s personal life, including his romantic pursuit of Racinda and aspirations to play music.

The latter portion features a live performance by The Davy Grolton Band (portrayed by the Foo Fighters in unnamed roles), filmed at the Valencia Town Center Mall in Santa Clarita, California. An alternate cut of the video, composed entirely of this concert footage, was also released.

The video concludes with Grolton driving away from the mall in a red Jaguar E-Type, filmed on a green screen with a static vehicle. For the very last shot, Grolton drives the car over the edge of a cliff. However, the car shown crashing is clearly a different model, a Porsche 911. This served as a humorous nod to budget constraints in older television and movie productions that often swapped out expensive vehicles with cheaper stand-ins for the stunt. The stock footage was sourced from the 1984 T.J. Hooker episode “Grand Theft Auto,” in which a stolen blue Porsche is driven off a cliff in a dramatic conclusion to the episode. To mimic continuity of the production method, the car's color was digitally altered to match the red E-Type.

This running gag continued in the Foo Fighters' 2011 video for “White Limo,” when footage of the namesake vehicle Lemmy is about to crash again switches into the same stock footage of the red Porsche.

Supplementary video shorts focusing on each fictional actor were also released alongside the main video.