I Watched The Foo Fighters Become America’s Biggest Band
Last night, I went to see the Foo Fighters at New York’s Citi Field as they kicked off the U.S. leg of their summer tour. As you may have heard, the show ended early due to a major lightning storm. It was, of course, a major bummer. But as we waited and stayed dry in the hallways of the ballpark, my mind wandered back through all the Foo Fighters shows that I’ve been to. It struck me that while I’ve been with my wife for over half my life, I’ve been going to Foo Fighters shows for even longer.
The first time I saw the Foo Fighters was in April of 1995 at a club in New York City called Tramps; they were opening for punk rock legend Mike Watt (formerly of the Minutemen and fIREHOSE). His solo debut, Ball-Hog Or Tugboat? had been out for about two months. It was notable for the guest list on the album. The first two songs, “Big Train” and “Against The ’70s,” featured Eddie Vedder singing and Dave Grohl on drums (Krist Novoselic played organ on “Against The ’70s” as well). Rumors circulated that some of these guests would be at the show. The truth turned out to be even cooler than that. The ticket price was $12. I still have it and the Foo Fighters t-shirt that I bought, which was probably $20.
The opening band was an instrumental combo called Hovercraft, which turned out to be led by Eddie Vedder’s wife at the time, Beth Liebling. Vedder was the drummer. Respectfully, it felt very “side-projecty.” It was Sonic Youthy noise-rock. Interesting and cool, but it didn’t blow anyone’s mind. And then the Foo Fighters hit the stage. Their name was on the ticket stub, but no one really knew who they were; it was rumored that Dave Grohl or touring Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear was in the band.
When Grohl walked up to the mic with a guitar, people held their breath as drummer jokes ran through their minds. Everyone loved Grohl from his days in Nirvana, but could the drummer be a frontman? The band — Grohl, Smear, and Sunny Day Real Estate members Nate Mendel on bass and William Goldsmith on drums — opened with a cover of Gary Numan’s “Down In The Park.” But the songs that stuck out to me were the originals: “This Is A Call,” “I’ll Stick Around,” “For All The Cows,” and the country-tinged “Big Me.” People looked increasingly stunned with each song in the band’s ten-song set. It turned out that Grohl was a great songwriter, too. (By the way, Watt’s set was amazing: Eddie Vedder was his guitarist, and Grohl played drums; you can hear for yourself how cool it was on the “Ring Spiel” Tour ’95 live album.)
A few weeks later, on July 4, 1995, I went to Tower Records and picked up Foo Fighters and was amazed: the songs were even better than I had remembered. This did not feel like a side project. Even though Grohl played nearly everything himself, Smear, Mendel, and Goldsmith were pictured in the CD booklet. The Foo Fighters were a band.
I saw them in a considerably larger venue about a year later when they played the Beastie Boys’ Tibetan Freedom Concert at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. They just had one album under their belts but they held their own next to heavy hitters on the bill like Smashing Pumpkins, Bjork, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against The Machine.
In 1997, I saw them at a similarly massive venue in a very different context. The band, which now featured Grohl, Mendel, guitarist Franz Stahl (Grohl’s bandmate from his pre-Nirvana band Scream), and new drummer Taylor Hawkins, were playing Giants Stadium, opening for the Rolling Stones. It may be hard to imagine today, but in ’97, much of the audience didn’t care about the Foo Fighters. But they played with a lot of heart and won a lot of people over. I remember thinking that there was one guy in the group who looked like he belonged on a stadium stage, and that was Taylor Hawkins. He didn’t have the indie/punk hangups of the other guys: he came to the Foo Fighters after doing a stint in Alanis Morissette’s band. This dude grew up listening to Queen, not Black Flag, and he was born to play to massive crowds. Eventually, I realized that it was both his playing and his attitude that pushed Grohl and the Foo Fighters to be a bona fide stadium headliner.
In the summer of ’99, they opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on an amphitheater tour. Something seemed different about Dave Grohl. It was as if he decided that he was going to play arenas, and he would become the great frontman that the band needed. He may have admired Sonic Youth and Husker Du and Fugazi and a hundred other bands that would never be caught near an arena. But he also loved Led Zeppelin and the Who and Queen and he was playing the venues that those bands played. And that’s what he had to live up to. The rules of the clubs — rightfully — didn’t apply anymore.
I interviewed Grohl and Hawkins in 2002 for the Foo Fighters’ One By One album. They’d already planned to headline their first arena tour. Grohl said, “I can’t believe that we’re going to be headlining arenas.” Hawkins responded, “I can.” And when I saw them on that tour, Grohl was really becoming a capital-F Frontman. He was like this funny combination of Bruce Springsteen and Jack Black: a guy who believed to his bones in rock and roll, but he also saw the humor in it.
Interestingly, despite his newfound superpowers as a guy who could not just melt faces, but entertain crowdds of tens of thousands, he still liked to hang back and just be a musician. In 2010, I saw him with his other band, Them Crooked Vultures. Josh Homme from Queens Of The Stone Age was the frontman; Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones played bass. Dave was the drummer and added some backing vocals. It was a reminder of what an incredible drummer the guy is.
In 2013, Grohl flexed another one of his superpowers: he’s not just a great musician, but by all accounts, a great guy. Everyone wants to play with him. So he used the Foo Fighters to be the house band for the Sound City Players tour, promoting his Sound City documentary film. When I saw them in New York City, they were accompanied by Krist Novoselic, Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick and Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. They backed a cast of singers that included Lee Ving of punk rock band Fear, Rick Springfield, John Fogerty and Stevie Nicks. Grohl switched between guitar, bass and drums throughout the night and only sang once: on a duet with Nicks, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.”
On July 4, 2015 — twenty years to the day after the release of the first Foo Fighters album — they played Washington D.C.’s RFK Stadium, not far from where Dave grew up. There had been a lot of speculation about the show, since the band had just cancelled a string of dates. Grohl had suffered an on-stage accident, resulting in a fractured leg. Everyone wondered: could he play, and could the Foo Fighters rock a massive stadium with a injured frontman? We had our answer the moment that Dave Grohl appeared on stage in a ridiculously funny throne that (as he explained) he designed while on painkillers in his hospital bed. Even seated, Grohl was amazing and hilarious.
Photo by Maria Ives
On June 20, 2021, I was fortunate enough to attend the historic Foo Fighters show at Madison Square Garden: it was the first arena concert, post-COVID. I will never forget the first few moments, as Grohl, accompanied by keyboardist Rami Jaffe, sang “Times Like These.” He wept and many of us did, too. Just a few dark months earlier, we didn’t know if, or when, we’d be able to go to concerts again. Many of us lost loved ones to COVID. The show mourned their loss and celebrated their memory. Grohl and the Foo Fighters had grown into themselves: they had the gravitas to meet the moment. Towards the end of the show, they covered the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing,” from their Dee Gees/Hail Satin EP. It was obviously a bit tongue in cheek, but it also felt transcendent. I’ll always remember that. I’ll always remember Dave Chappelle joining them for a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” And I’ll always remember Grohl getting behind the drums, as Taylor Hawkins came out to sing Queen’s “Somebody To Love.”
It was the last Foo Fighters show that I saw with Taylor Hawkins. Less than a year later, he died at the age of 50. The next time I saw them, they were headlining New Jersey’s Sea Hear Now festival on September 17, 2023 with new drummer Josh Freese, the perfect choice. It was a transcendent night and showed that the Foo Fighters have a decade or more left in front of them.
And I just kept that in mind last night, after we heard the disappointing announcement that the band wouldn’t return to the stage after an hour delay, since it was still too dangerous to do so. It was a bummer, no doubt about it. But even in that shortened set we still got “All My Life,” “Learn To Fly,” “Breakout” and “The Pretender.” We got the deep cuts, “La Dee Da” and “Generator.” We got the anthems: “My Hero,” “Walk” and, thankfully, “Times Like These.” And – importantly – we got one song from 2023’s But Here We Are, “Rescued.” It’s a song about outrunning depression and darkness: “I fell in a trap/My heart’s getting colder/It’s coming on fast/It’s over my shoulder.” The Foo Fighters could cruise off of their hits for years, but one of the things that we love about them is that they still have things to tell us about their lives, and about ours.
So, speaking for myself — but probably also a few thousand people who were at the show last night — I’ll pre-order the next Foo Fighters album, because I know it will speak to me. And I know I’ll be there next time they tour, to scream the lyrics back at the guys. Hopefully, it’ll be an indoor show! But even if it’s outside, we’ll chance it.
