I was 18 when I first attended a rock concert, and I was also a tacky AF Californian from one of our many valleys. You’d most often find me on a tanning bed, at Abercrombie and Fitch, or listening to Britney Spears and Kelly Clarkson — she had just won the first season of “American Idol,” so “Miss Independent” played on repeat in my topless Jeep Wrangler during Taco Bell runs.
I knew little of Kurt Cobain and nothing of Dave Grohl, and therefore an equal nothing of the Foo Fighters. But as a still-closeted gay teen, I spent copious time staring at men on the internet pre-smartphone adoption, which in this era meant gay.com, MySpace, Downelink, an AOL chat room, and Adam4Adam. It was in the latter that I met the tour bus driver for Foo Fighters, an older gay man who obviously wanted to get in my pants. Nothing like that happened, much as I wouldn’t have minded. Instead I immediately rushed to Macy’s for a new outfit and enlisted a college friend in case I was kidnapped and murdered, I guess.
The 2003 concert at Sacramento Memorial Auditorium did not even feel well-attended, but Dave Grohl would forever change how I experienced and criticized live performance. At first, all I could focus on was how different he sang from the recordings I’d downloaded on LimeWire.
In-person Foo Fighters felt a lot more screamy and maybe in an abrasive way, but it grew on me throughout the night. Grohl embodied the moment, he didn’t phone it in. None of it was pre-recorded, and it quickly became obvious that this performance would be distinctive from the next, and the next by this band. I remember soon after attending bubblegum artists like Avril Levigne, Hillary Duff and Gwen Stefani, and I still love these women today, but their performances played more like carbon copies of their radio singles.
Now it’s 20 years later and I found myself at Outside Lands, a festival I admit to have only occasionally attended because of the dubious porta-potty situation.
Foo Fighters drew me back alongside a professional obligation as editor-in-chief of The Bold Italic, our online magazine that has celebrated this festival for about as long as OSL has been a thing. I did most of my peeing at home this time and applied copious sunscreen despite a very evident Karl the Fog.
Two decades had obviously taken its toll on Grohl — he looked like a sarcastic dad who still felt pumped to perform at the show.
And if anything, his screaming has only grown over time. Foo Fighters opened the show with a raucous rendition of “All My Life,” leading my date to lament: “I’d love it if Foo Fighters paid me to watch this.”
Grohl mellowed a bit as he settled into a long set, with sweeter versions of “Times Like These” and “My Hero” — “We have to fit 28 years into two hours!” he said. Surprise guest Violet, his 17-year-old daughter, joined onstage for “Shame Shame” and “Show Me How.”
The funniest moment was of course when Grohl invited a Michael Bublé super-fan onstage who turned out to actually be Michael Bublé. At first I casually commented, “Alright, this guy’s pretty good at karaoke I guess,” and my date replied, “You know, he actually looks like Michael Bublé.”
The stunt capped off a long-running gag of inviting Bublé fans onstage at Foo Fighters concerts.
“We’ve been doing that thing where people from the audience come up and say ‘I know that fucking song,’ and they walk up and they know the first verse. They don’t know it,” Grohl said. “So this bad-ass motherfucker — and I’m not even kidding — flew in today from Argentina to fucking sing that song to you guys. Because there’s no such thing as taking a joke too far.”
Maybe it’s his crassness and conversations with the audience, the unpredictability of his shows, or watching him dance haphazardly to Bublé while holding a huge wine bottle. Grohl two decades later felt even more fun and real, and still just as talented a performer. Outside Lands often represents just a brief experience for me in any given year, but Foo Fighters made it a great one for me in 2023.
Saul Sugarman is editor in chief of The Bold Italic.
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