Watch the Throne: Dave Grohl on How the Foos Saved Their Summer
How did you do without the pills?
Within like 18 hours, I went into full-on fucking opium withdrawal. I think because I just don’t fuck with that stuff, seven days of that kind of drug in my body, going cold turkey, just stopping — oh, my God, dude. Don’t fuck with that shit. For real, again, don‘t fuck with that shit. I couldn’t even believe what it did to my body. I’m glad that I had them when I needed them, but the second I stopped fucking needing them, I didn’t want them. It was terrible. So anyway, I knew that there was no way we were going to miss that Fourth of July show.
So how did you get it together for that show?
I knew the only way I could do it was to sit down with my leg up in the air, and I drew this throne in an altered state of OxyContin. I reached over and grabbed the hotel stationery, drew this really ridiculous, primitive drawing, took a picture of it on my phone, and sent it to my lighting guy and said, “Build this.”
“I drew this really ridiculous, primitive drawing, took a picture of it on my phone, and sent it to my lighting guy and said, ‘Build this.'”
So what was your reaction when you first saw the throne?
I doubled over laughing. It was exactly what I had imagined it to be. The idea was just ridiculous [laughs].
Your fans at the Washington, D.C., show must have had a similar reaction.
Someday I hope that you have the opportunity to sit in that throne when the scrim is off at a stadium, and look at 50,000 faces smiling, jaws dropped, cracking up, like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” We’ve never had production, never had any sort of pyrotechnics, ever. We’ve never had any kind of big, crazy fucking mechanical set pieces. We are milking that shit for sure.
How worried were you about getting back onstage? Was there ever a moment where you didn‘t think you would?
Nope. I mean, there was before that show. An hour before a show, all of us warm up by getting in one room and just hanging out with each other. I always feel that our best shows are the ones where we walk onstage laughing. So we were all sitting there getting dressed, and I’m like, “Wait a minute, I have to wear pants. How am I going to wear pants?” I’m sitting there cutting my favorite pair of pants with scissors so I can stuff my fucking leg through it. And we all looked at each other and felt kind of nervous, and that’s what I like about it. This changes the game for the band.
When I got our touring schedule a year ago, I was scared to look at it because there were so many shows. I thought, “Fuck. How are we just gonna go up there and do what we’ve been doing for 20 years, 80 times this year?” And when this happened, I was kind of happy. Like, OK, this is gonna make things interesting. This is gonna throw a wrench in the works and make it a challenge for everybody. Everything from the throne to the configuration onstage to how we communicate together onstage, it’s different now.
