The radio show host that shaped Foo Fighters: “I don’t know where we’d be”
Although the success and style of a band is largely driven by its members, there are a number of external figures who might also have an influence on their trajectory. A reliable producer can shape a band’s sound as much as its members, while a great manager might push them to greater heights behind the scenes. Take The Beatles, for example. Brian Epstein and George Martin weren’t members of the Fab Four, but they were key to their development as a band.
Dave Grohl’s rock outfit Foo Fighters were also subject to the influence of external figures, but it wasn’t necessarily a manager or a producer that had a particularly potent impact on the band. Instead, it was a well-known radio show host called Howard Stern. Although Stern didn’t work closely with Foo Fighters in the studio or backstage, he had a huge impact on the band when they played his show in the late 1990s, even influencing the trajectory of their sound and career.
In 1998, Grohl appeared on The Howard Stern Show, where he was prompted to play the Foo Fighters’ signature track from the year prior, ‘Everlong’. The original track featured raucous electric guitars and thudding drums, but Grohl only had an acoustic guitar with him. “I used it for writing, not really for performing,” he explained during an appearance on Sirius XM, “We got into the studio and he asked if I’d play a song. I was kind of nervous.”
Despite his nerves, Grohl delivered a stunning version of ‘Everlong’, maintaining and even enhancing the emotion and intensity of the track with each acoustic strum. The frontman admitted that the live performance “turned out really well,” but he didn’t know how much bearing it would have on the direction of Foo Fighters until later.
“I hadn’t realised what I’d done until later when he started playing it on his show and people at our record company were really into it,” Grohl remembered, “They wanted to kind of start working it as a single.” But it wasn’t just the label that was into the acoustic version of ‘Everlong’; it was Grohl, too. The performance had made him realise that Foo Fighters were capable of more than huge rock hits, admitting that it even “changed the direction of our band.”
“That song blew up all over again because of that version,” he remembered, “And it was purely because of Howard. It sounds crazy, but I don’t know where we’d be right now if it hadn’t been for that morning in his studio. Or what we would’ve done if we hadn’t opened up that door to doing acoustic stuff. So you know, we owe that guy a drink for sure.”
Stern hadn’t set out to change the direction of Foo Fighters’ sound or career; he had simply asked Grohl to play a live, acoustic version of one of their biggest tracks. And yet, that request was instrumental in the frontman’s understanding of Foo Fighters, proving to him that they could work on tracks that were softer, too.
Although they didn’t release an acoustic version of ‘Everlong’ as a single as the label had hoped, the band did start pushing into new directions sonically. Grohl’s track performance on Stern’s show remains a truly powerful moment for both the frontman and his audiences. He even revisited it for Stern’s birthday in 2014.
