Watch Foo Fighters perform ‘My Hero’ at Glastonbury Festival 2017
During the first few years of Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl did not want to take over the world. Since most of the debut album was made with him and his production buddy Barrett Jones in just four days, Grohl’s first songs were nothing but messing around in the studio before things started to take off. Suddenly, Foo Fighters became a band, and it was about time that the rest of the group got together.
Granted, the beginnings weren’t going to be easy, with Grohl going through a revolving door of lineups in the first few years. After co-opting the rhythm section from Sunny Day Real Estate, the band felt like a bunch of hired guns at first glance, with the former Nirvana drummer standing out front with a guitar across his chest, droning on with borderline nonsense lyrics on ‘Alone + Easy Target’.
Though bassist Nate Mendel had his concerns about the band’s future in these early days, he remembered being reassured when Grohl brought a new song to soundcheck, recalling in the documentary Back and Forth, “I was like, ‘Can Dave even write any more songs? Will we suck?’ I had no idea how it was going to happen. And then, I knew we were going to be okay when I heard the song ‘My Hero’ because it was great.”
While some speculated that Grohl’s song was about Kurt Cobain, he always maintained that it was about everyday people around him. Having grown up in the blue-collar community in the DC area, he always respected the average man on the street, seeing the beauty of someone living an ordinary life.
The life of Foo Fighters would continue to get even more extraordinary, though, with Grohl taking control for their next album, The Colour and the Shape, and having to let go of original drummer William Goldsmith in favour of the drumming powerhouse Taylor Hawkins. As the band went on, however, ‘My Hero’ would continue to get even more poignant.
As the band pulled into Glastonbury in 2017 to perform the song, Grohl had started to settle down in his personal life, having already built a studio in his home and started to bring his family on tour with him whenever possible. Commanding the main stage, he approached the frontman role like a seasoned veteran, as if all of the pent-up energy left over from his years playing the drums in Nirvana had never burned out for a second.
While Hawkins originally said that they were nervous about playing Glastonbury for the first time, he got the pep talk of a lifetime when he was approached by Liam Gallagher. When talking to Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, Grohl recalls the Oasis frontman singing the praises of Hawkins’s solo track, ‘Range Rover Bitch’, which gave him all of the confidence he needed to tear the venue apart.
For all of the hardships that started and the ones to come with the death of Hawkins a few years later, ‘My Hero’ has never lost its sincerity, as Grohl sings it out to all of the everyday heroes that have inspired him in the crowd. While this take on the song is certainly great for what it is, it’s also a reminder of what it took for the band to get there in the first place. The journey might have been long, but going from a dingy recording studio to the Glastonbury stage isn’t lost on him.
