No rock and roll star is safe from a bout of stage fright every now and then. Even though they may have played shows worldwide to millions of people, there are always those essential gigs that they feel like they have to get right, or else everything will come crumbling down around them. While Dave Grohl has proven himself to be resilient every time he takes to the stage, he admitted that one run of Foo Fighters shows scared him to death when he was first asked.
By the time Grohl had graduated to the stadium-rock circuit, he had already become a huge rock and roll star twice over. After being known as the mild-mannered drummer who bashed the life out of the skins with Nirvana, Grohl reinvented himself as a star frontman, putting the first Foo Fighters record together at his home.
While Grohl didn’t envision it as a huge band, he started gaining interest from different major labels, convinced that they had found the logical next step from where Nirvana had gone. As he started putting a group together and playing show after show, he remembered feeling that same nervous energy whenever he played, knowing that the outfit was bound for bigger things as long as they stayed together.
Although the late 1990s would see the band start to crumble with various lineup changes, Grohl kept the engine running in the studio, creating one song after the next with the same broad scope of musicality. After trying their hand at playing electric and acoustic music on In Your Honour, Grohl’s combination of the two on Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace led to one of the biggest calls of his career.
In the documentary Back and Forth, Grohl remembered getting a call from his manager talking about a future line of dates in the UK, saying, “I get a call from [manager] John Silva, and he just says, ‘You guys want to play Wembley Stadium?’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, but wait…how big is that place?’”.
While Grohl was convinced that the band weren’t nearly big enough to fill the same stadiums that Queen had dominated decades ago, the public was ready to see them rise to the big leagues. After putting a handful of dates on sale, Grohl was shocked to see them clear out while also being scared out of his mind at the thought of actually pulling it off.
Compared to the different club gigs and modest stadium tours they had undergone, Grohl remembered being stressed out of his mind, recalling, “I remember for months I would go to bed, and the last thing I would think was, ‘Oh my god, we gotta play fucking Wembley Stadium’, and when I’d wake up, I’d get up and think, ‘Fuck, we’re playing Wembley.’”
Even though the show may have had a few hangups, including Chris Shiflett getting hot sauce in his eye an hour before showtime, the band would turn a landmark performance at the stadium, later inviting fellow rock giants Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones to come onstage to tear through a version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’.
While the group may have had cold feet about taking the stage, the crowd was far warmer than ever. After overcoming the biggest adversities that any outfit had to deal with, the Wembley performances seemed to be a celebration of the band’s survival over a decade into the business
