Source: CBS News
“Learn To Fly” has been a hit Summer Song for the Foo Fighters for almost 20 years now … not that their long run has always been easy going, as Anthony Mason can tell us:
Under the San Bernardino sun last fall, 30,000 fans came out for an old-school rock festival. If rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be dead, then Cal Jam was a resurrection.
The headliners were America’s biggest rock band, the Foo Fighters, whose 49-year-old frontman, Dave Grohl, will go to any extreme to keep rock’s flame burning.Case in point: during a gig in Sweden two years ago, he fell from the stage, broke his leg and dislocated his ankle.
When Mason asked the other band members what they thought when that happened, keyboardist Rami Jaffi replied, “That there was gonna be a lotta time off!”
But Jaffi, drummer Taylor Hawkins, and rest of the band kept going while Grohl was treated backstage, until he was carried back out on a stretcher.
For two hours, Grohl played on from a chair while a medic tended to his leg.
Mason asked, “Did they give you painkillers? How did you do that?”
“No, I mean, the adrenaline of the stadium, and also the obligation,” he replied. “I broke it in the second song. And I felt like all those people had come all that way.”
The tour was interrupted for Grohl’s surgery, but he returned in a custom-built throne of his own design, which was the star attraction last fall at the Cal Jam Museum, a tent filled with memorabilia from the Foos’ nearly 25-year history, including their Grammy collection.
They’ve won Best Rock Album four times and won this year for Best Rock Song off their latest record, “Concrete & Gold.
”“Run,” from the Foo Fighters album “Concrete & Gold”:
“Yeah, it’s weird,” Grohl said.
What’s weird about it? “Ages ago, when I was a kid, my Dad said, ‘You know, this isn’t gonna last, right? Savor every check like it’s the last one you’re ever gonna make.’ And every time we make a Foo Fighters record, I think, ‘Well, if this were the last one, then we had a good run,’ it would have been great.”
Grohl came up through the punk scene in Washington, D.C., and its sleepy Virginia suburbs.
At 17, he dropped out of the high school where his mom, Virginia, taught English.
She assured Mason she was okay with that: “I was. He just didn’t like it. And he was a really great writer and such a great spirit. He said, ‘I’m going to Europe to tour with Scream.’ ‘Go, great. Can I go, too?'”
A few years later, Grohl was invited to join an up-and-coming Seattle grunge band, after its frontman, Kurt Cobain, caught his act.
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