Erika Goldring/Getty Images for Pilgrimage Music & Cultural FestivalFew people can attest to the power of a live audience quite like Dave Grohl can, and the Foo Fightersfrontman does just that in a new essay published by The Atlantic.
In the piece, Grohl laments how the COVID-19 pandemic has “reduced today’s live music to unflattering little windows that look like doorbell security footage and sound like Neil Armstrong‘s distorted transmissions from the moon, so stuttered and compressed.”
“I’m hungry for a big old plate of sweaty, ear-shredding, live rock and roll, ASAP,” Grohl writes. “The kind that makes your heart race, your body move, and your soul stir with passion.”
Grohl goes on to share some of his favorite live music moments as a concertgoer, such as when U2started their show with the house lights still up during their 2001 Elevation Tour. As a performer, he recalls once when Bruce Springsteen came to a Foo Fighters show in Vancouver, and told Grohl how he appreciated “the rapport we seem to have with our audience.”
“When asked where he watched the show from, he said that he’d stood in the crowd, just like everyone else,” Grohl writes. “Of course he did. He was searching for that connection too.”
Returning to the present, Grohl admits that “it’s hard to imagine” concerts being quite the same while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic.
“I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life,” he writes. “But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to.”
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