On June 12, 2015, Dave Grohl made history when he pushed through a serious injury to finish a Foo Fighters show. The band was playing a show in Gothenburg when the frontman tripped and fell off the stage. While at first he thought he could get up and keep going, it quickly became clear that the accident was serious. The band stopped playing and Grohl announced to the audience that he had broken his leg, but promised that he would go to the hospital and come back to play the show.
He made good on his promise and gave his fans a show they will never forget, but even the boldest rock star can push himself too far. Grohl did everything he could to miss as few concerts as possible, including performing just days after having surgery on his broken leg. But soon enough, it caught up to him, and after a particularly taxing show, he collapsed.
The Time Dave Grohl Played a Show With a Broken Leg
When Grohl passed the microphone to drummer Taylor Hawkins and asked him to keep the show going until he came back from the hospital, everyone thought he wouldn’t be able to fulfill his promise. However, it was only a couple of minutes after being carried off the stage by paramedics that he was brought back on a stretcher. As if nothing had happened, Grohl picked up his guitar and rejoined the band, who were playing a cover of Under Pressure by Queen. The frontman sang from a chair while one of his doctors held his foot in place. He never made it to the hospital, just got it precariously fixed enough for him to keep his promise to the audience. Dave Grohl described it as the best show the Foo Fighters had ever played.
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After the show, Grohl had to have surgery, and he was convinced he would be able to play right after it, but, of course, without the adrenaline, it wasn’t so easy to ignore the pain. “I thought I could just get up and do a show a week later after surgery, but I literally could not get out of bed for about six or seven days,” he revealed. “I had never experienced anything like that in my life.” Still, he wasn’t held up for long. Less than a month after the accident, he had found a way to work around his injury.
Grohl wanted to play a show the Foo Fighters had scheduled on the Fourth of July, and decided to test-run his idea of playing from a custom-made throne instead of running around the stage as he was used to. “I might not be able to get onstage next week, but I’m not missing that Fourth of July show, and if that goes OK then we’re just going to keep going (with the tour),” he explained. “And at the Fourth of July show, when the screen dropped and I was sitting on that f****** throne and 50,000 people’s jaws dropped, I thought, OK, we’re going to stay on tour, this is going to work.“
The Consequences No One Saw Coming
While the bold move of finishing a show with a broken leg and going on tour on a custom-made throne seems epic on paper, Grohl quickly realized that pushing his body so much had serious consequences. After a show from that tour, he revealed in an interview with 60 Minutes, he had a “breakdown” that shocked both him and his bandmates. He got off the stage, and the minute he got to the dressing room, he broke down in tears and realized that the trauma of the accident and the stress of pushing himself physically had been too much. After the tour on the throne, he told the band he needed a break.
It was the first time the band had fully stopped working, and their hiatus lasted almost a year. The break and Dave Grohl’s solo performance at the 2016 Academy Awards had fans worried that the band was splitting up. As the rumors of a split started circulating, the band got together and decided to have some fun with that. Their first project together after taking a break was an “Official Band Announcement”, which was actually a prank video. It showed Dave Grohl’s new “solo career” and the Foo Fighters’ quest to replace their frontman, and ended with a message that said, “For the millionth time, we’re not breaking up. And nobody’s going f****** solo!”
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The next year, the band released a new record, Concrete and Gold, and resumed their usually busy schedule. Grohl explained that the process of writing after such an intense period was not easy, but he was glad to get back to it. He wrote in solitude before bringing the new material to the band, and that record marked a change in the sound of the band.
Ten years later, the Foo Fighters have gone through huge changes. In 2022, their drummer and Grohl’s best friend, Taylor Hawkins, passed away right before a show, which led the band to completely reinvent themselves. They put out their latest record a year after Hawkins’ death, and then embarked on a tour with drummer Josh Freese. However, it seems they haven’t yet completely found themselves after such a heavy loss, as Freese was unexpectedly fired recently. Only time will tell how the band will transform as time goes on, but since their origins, the Foo Fighters have been the icon of resilience, so fans can be assured that they will come out of these tough times even stronger.