Credit: Brantley GutierrezThis summer, Foo Fighters will play giant venues like RFK Stadium and Citi Field on their Sonic Highways tour. The first Foo Fighters show, however, was decidedly less high profile.
"It's a funny thing when your new band decides to play in front of people," Dave Grohl tells Rolling Stone of his decision to bring Foo Fighters to the stage. "At first, it's terrifying, and we thought the most comfortable way of easing into being the Foo Fighters would be to have a keg party and wait until everyone was wicked f**king drunk and then start playing these songs that no one's ever heard."
Grohl remembers there being a lot of pressure around the first Foo Fighters gig, since the band's lineup, which then included Grohl's Nirvana band mate Pat Smear, plus Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith from Sunny Day Real Estate, was gathering a lot of buzz.
"There was a lot of interest right off the bat, and that scared us because we hadn't done anything yet," Grohl says. "We started getting interview requests the minute people found out we were a band. We didn't even have anything to talk about yet, except for the past, and we didn't want that. We wanted to do something new and we wanted to feel new again. So, the loft party seemed like the perfect place to start."
At first, Grohl was pleased with the band's live debut, but then he heard a recording from the show.
"I remember it being such a huge relief that we just made it to the end and then it was maybe a month later that I heard the recording of it -- and I was f**king mortified," Grohl laughs. "I thought we sounded great and I heard the recording like, 'Ohhh...that's the Foo Fighters? We've got to practice.'"
That practice appears to have paid off, as evidenced by the aforementioned giant venues the Foos will be playing this summer. That hasn't changed Grohl's idea of his band, though.
"It might be a stadium now and we might have a f**king HBO series or whatever, but we're still us," Grohl says.
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