The Big F did not come out of a scene so much as out of a state of mind.
They were born from frustration, the kind that only comes after you have already “made it.” Not the romantic broke-band frustration, but the deeper kind that creeps in when success starts to feel like confinement. Endless touring. The same set every night. Precision valued over impulse. Professionalism slowly replacing joy.
For John Crawford on bass and vocals and Rob Brill on drums, that pressure cooker was Berlin. Berlin were sleek, successful, and everywhere in the early eighties. Big songs, big tours, big expectations. From the outside, it looked like the dream. From the inside, it started to feel like being trapped inside someone else’s idea of what music was supposed to be.
When Berlin finally imploded in the late eighties, Crawford and Brill did not look for another polished pop project. They went in the opposite direction. Loud. They found guitarist Mark Christian and headed to the garage to get messy.
They created The Big F.
Less Synth, More Sweat
The Big F were not interested in subtlety.
Where Berlin relied on atmosphere and control, The Big F leaned into muscle and volume. Big guitars up front. A rhythm section that sounded like it wanted to push the speakers across the room. Vocals that were more bark than polish.
If you need a shorthand, they sat somewhere between AC/DC and The Cult. They had AC/DC’s sense of groove and weight, and they had The Cult’s swagger and confidence, that feeling that rock should just ROCK.
What they did not have was irony. There was no wink, no apology, no sense that they were above the form.
The First Album: An Angry Escape Pod
The Big F’s debut record sounds like it is trying to jump right off of the tape.
It is raw, overloaded, occasionally undisciplined, and buzzing with energy. You can hear a band rediscovering itself in real time. Songs stretch out because no one is telling them not to. Riffs repeat because they feel good. Tempos settle into grooves and just live there. And their label (Elektra) let them. Hell, they even got their own indie-looking band imprint (FFF Records), and looks like they had total control over the process.
Some tracks wander, an edit or two would have given them a bit more punch. But the excess feels earned. This is what happens when musicians who have been tightly managed suddenly find themselves with space.
Songs like Doctor Vine and Good God capture that sense of release perfectly. They are not delicate or clever. They are blunt, driving, and confident in their own weight. The band locks into a groove and trusts it.
And then there is Kill The Cowboy.
That is the moment where everything clicks. The riff is lean and sharp. The rhythm section is relentless. The song knows exactly what it wants to be and gets there without overthinking it. If the album is an escape pod, Kill The Cowboy is the moment it clears the blast radius.
Not every track hits that level, and that is fine. The record succeeds because of how alive it feels. It sounds like people in a room pushing air and reacting to each other. No polish. No safety net.
It is imperfect, and that is the point.
The Second Album and the Cooling of the Fire
The second album is where things start to drift. They called it “Is” and it has a sense of not being fully realized, incomplete.
There are still good songs here, flashes of the band’s chemistry and reminders of how strong they could be when everything lined up. Idiot Kid Heads Out pounds, and Patience Peregrine (the lone single) is fantastic overall.
Lube, an overlong, meandering jam kinda feels like it probably made sense on stage but didn’t quite translate to tape.
The record is not a disaster. It just does not burn the same way as the wild debut.
Soon enough, The Big F faded back into obscurity. Not with a dramatic collapse, just a quiet disappearance.
Before Grunge, Pointing at What Was Coming
Looking back, The Big F feels like a bellwether.
They arrived just before grunge blew the doors off mainstream rock. Before rawness and imperfection became virtues again. They were already pushing against the same things grunge would later tear down, the polish, the artifice, the sense that rock had become overly managed.
They did it with classic rock muscle rather than punk abrasion, but the instinct was the same.
They did not change the world, they were too early. But they were sincere.
Crossing Paths Again with Berlin
Time has a way of bending these stories back on themselves.
Years later, John Crawford would reconnect with Berlin during their reunion years. He returned not as an escape from rock and roll, but hopefully as someone who had already burned off the frustration that led to The Big F in the first place.
Rob Brill did not become a regular part of those reunion tours. His place in the story sits more firmly at the rupture point, the moment where The Big F came into being.
Why The Big F Still Matter
While The Big F were not household names, these two albums represent the soon-to-shift trends of the music industry. If this had come out in September 1991 instead of 1989, things may have been different. But then again,with alt-rock snobbery the way it was at the time, they may have been banned because “you guys used to be in a pop band.” Alas, them’s the breaks.
