Tyler Anderson
Foo Fighters headlined DIRECTV Super Saturday Night with special guests Run The Jewels. Capping off a legendary night, rock icons Roger Taylor (Queen), Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addiction), Zac Brown, Tom Morello and Dave Koz took the stage for memorable collaborations and covers.
This ain’t no half-time show, this is a good time show!”, exclaimed Dave Grohl in the middle of the monstrous two hour Foo Fighters set in Atlanta on Saturday night.
It certainly wasn’t a normal show for the Foo Fighters. When Dave Grohl and company stepped foot on the stage of the temporarily constructed, elegant venue at Atlantic Station, they knew they would be live on DirecTV and Twitter for fans to view across the world as a part of the Super Bowl’s “Super Saturday Night.” Sure enough, the show had over 6.6 million streams online within 36 hours.
The last time in town, Foo christened the monstrous Georgia State Stadium with its first concert ever. That night, they headlined a show that broke the three hour mark to around 30,000 fans. This time, they performed in a much more intimate setting. Constructed in just forty five days next to the Atlantic Station parking deck, the temporary venue was built to hold just 8,500 fans, celebrities, and party goers.
The airplane hangar-shaped structure was constructed with three floors, the top two being for VIP guests ranging from Tim Tebow to Aaron Rodgers and more, but the true highlight was the mini-museum of timeless Foo Fighters gear, artifacts, awards, and more set up by the entrance for fans. Even Dave Grohl’s massive throne from the Broken Leg Tour in 2015 was set up for photo opportunities. Foo had sold around 1,000 tickets to the show to their fan email list, allowing those fans in early to experience the memorabilia and to get the closest spots to the stage.
Tyler Anderson
Bursting onto the stage around 11:00pm, the band launched into “All My Life”, complete with a mid-song jam of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.” The fans who had been waiting for almost four hours on the floor by that point were in it from the very start, roaring the songs with the band and dancing along. During “The Pretender”, Dave exclaimed that he was dedicating the “Train Kept A Rolling” jam on the bridge to Steven Tyler as Dave had guested with Aerosmith the night before and knew for a fact that Tyler “really loved rock and roll music.”
The setlist was full of the biggest Foo Fighters songs from across all of their albums, complete with songs like “Learn To Fly”, “Times Like These”, and “Walk.” Dave threw it back to the earlier days with songs like “My Hero”, where he told newer fans who may not know the words to look for “the drunk guy with the minivan keys in his back pocket.”
The Foo Fighters came with a few tricks as well – they had already emailed their fan base on Friday, saying, “you never know what we’ve got up our sleeve.” Masters of the element of surprise during their shows, they delivered about an hour into the show. First up, saxophonist Dave Koz joined forces with the Foos on “La Dee Da” from their latest album Concrete & Gold.
Then, drummer Taylor Hawkins came to center stage to grab a microphone as he was replaced by the one and only Roger Taylor from Queen on the drums. Stating that “Vanilla Ice stole this song from Queen… we’re stealing it back”, the band rocked “Under Pressure.” Before the song, Taylor told a story about how seeing Queen at a young age is what made him want to become a drummer in the first place.
As if that wasn’t enough, Dave introduced both Zac Brown and Tom Morello for an impromptu, not-on-the-setlist surprise of the Black Sabbath hit “War Pigs”. At this point, the crowd was going wild with the array of guests and the stadium-like production in the intimate concert hall. Next up, Perry Farrell ran onto the stage, tackled Dave and joined forces with Zac, Tom, and the Foos for the 1988 Jane’s Addiction hit “Mountain Song.”
The band rounded out the show at nearly 1:30am with the anthem-esque “Best of You” and rocking “Everlong.” Dave made sure to point out that despite being a band for twenty five years, “no one has ever been crazy enough to build a venue just for us to play for two hours and then tear it all down.”
It was already a weekend of surprises, with local superstars Zac Brown Band inviting Grohl up to jam Metallica’s iconic “Enter Sandman” at the packed Tabernacle Thursday night and Aerosmith doing the same with “Livin’ on the Edge” the next night, but the Foo Fighters capped it all off with a legendary performance on Saturday.
With pop-up shows and private concerts being held across the city for Super Bowl weekend, the exclusive Foo Fighters event was a show that rock fans in Atlanta will remember for a very long time.
