“That was bullshit”: the artist Dave Grohl were terrible touring with
Being an opening act is never known to be a walk in the park. Even though artists can try their best to leave everything on the stage, there are going to be occasions when things either don’t go as planned or they aren’t given the same treatment as the top band on the bill. Dave Grohl understood that he needed to pay his dues, but there were times when it got to him as well.
Granted, Grohl has made it a habit to treat every one of his shows like it’s one massive party. The whole show is meant to make every member of the crowd feel special in some way, and that means making the opening act feel like they are as much of a rockstar as the people in the rafters singing along to every word.
No one gets there without some humble beginnings, though, and Grohl was more than happy to work out some of his first shows in clubs around the country. He had been through the whirlwind of Nirvana before, so having to go back to the standard club dates and play for 20 people must have been refreshing coming off of the stadiums of the world.
Then again, he did have some famous friends to help get him over the line. A lot of what Grohl was doing on the first Foo Fighters tour had to do with healing, but having someone like Eddie Vedder working in the co-headlining band Hovercraft gave them a strange sense of camaraderie as artists recovering from the dark shadow of grunge. But in the context of the big leagues, Grohl was starting at less than zero when working with The Rolling Stones on his first stadium tour with the band.
For anyone working with The Stones, they had developed a science to all of their massive gigs. Most of their best work at that point had been riding off the coattails of the hits that they had in their prime, and even though records like Bridges to Babylon may have been fine, they were now promoting a tour by releasing an album rather than the other way around. But that didn’t mean they had become softhearted old men either.
According to Grohl, he thought that the group treated them like second-class citizens when on that first tour, saying, “They didn’t give us a guest list, they reserved a hundred tickets that we could buy for $64 a piece. So if I wanted my sister or my girlfriend to come, I had to buy a fucking ticket. And they didn’t give us a dressing room in the venue, we had to sit in the trailer out in the parking lot. That was fucked up, that was bullshit.”
But you have to wonder how much of that was The Stones themselves and how much was the machine behind everything. Even James Hetfield has told stories about the band’s people telling them not to eat anything from their service table because Ronnie Wood had to eat from it first, only for the rest of the band not to have cared all that much once they actually bothered to notice.
And since Grohl has had the luxury of playing alongside Mick Jagger on a handful of occasions, he at least has been able to see the version of the frontman that was much more relaxed than usual. But when any band is first starting out, they start to find out really quickly that the higher someone’s star rises, the more the people around them start to get all the more pretentious.
