Foo Fighters Play Terrific Acoustic Set at L.A.'s Iconic Troubadour to Help Save Our Stages

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by Julian Spivey
All weekend long artists have been streaming shows live from independent venues across this great nation that have been struggling to survive amidst the COVID-19 pandemic that has essentially shut down live music since mid-March.
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The benefit known as Save Our Stages has featured artists like Foo Fighters, Reba McEntire, Miley Cyrus, Macklemore, Kelsea Ballerini, Phoebe Bridgers, Brittany Howard,  The Roots, Little Big Town, Dave Matthews, The Lumineers and many more have been performing from great and truly historical venues from around the country like the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and the Troubadour and Whisky A Go-Go in Los Angeles. The sets have been streamed at both saveourstages.com and YouTube and links to donate to the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) in an effort to keep many of these venues from disappearing have been up throughout the sets.

I watched the Foo Fighters set from the iconic Troubadour in Los Angeles on Saturday night (Oct. 17) and it was a ton of fun – which is something you can always expect from a Foo Fighters show.

The band members all reminisced about their first time seeing shows at the Troubadours like frontman Dave Grohl meeting Poison’s Brett Michaels (the first rock star he claims to have ever met) and an absolute riotous story of guitarist Pat Smear’s first time at the Troubadour at a Go Gos show ending up with him fighting legendary singer-songwriter Tom Waits.

Guitarist Chris Shiflett, a L.A. native, recalled his very first show with the Foo Fighters actually coming at the Troubadour in 1999.

The band played a terrific five-song acoustic set that began with “Skin and Bones,” from the group’s 2006 live acoustic album (and a damn good title for an acoustic song).

The rest of the set was pretty much a greatest hits showing from the band that featured some of the best performance of “My Hero,” which Grohl dedicated to Smear, “These Days” and “Times Like These” that I’ve ever heard.

Like many of y’all I’ve been missing live music so damn much this year (my wife and I typically see 10 or more shows a year) and seeing Grohl and the band play so brilliantly just made that itch a bit worse. But it was also incredibly enjoyable to see.
The set ended with Grohl playing alone my all-time favorite Foo Fighters song “Everlong,” off the group’s 1997 album The Colour and the Shape.

There’s something special about seeing music in a small independent venue. It’s just different from large stadium and arena shows. It’s more intimate, more communal, and often the overall enjoyability factor of these venues is higher. It’s terribly sad that many of these venues around the country might not survive this pandemic. Please do what you can to help out your local independent venues so that one day when this world is better we can all enjoy live music again the way it was intended to be seen – in person and not via YouTube.

And if you’re wanting to see it the only way you can these days – via streaming – check out day three of the Save Our Stages show today featuring Little Big Town (1 p.m. central time), Brothers Osborne (1:35 p.m.), Dave Matthews (2:05 p.m.), Monica (2:40 p.m.), Black Pumas (2:55 p.m.), Nathaniel Rateliff (3:10 p.m.), Reba McEntire (3:50 p.m.), The Revivalists (4:30 p.m.) and The Lumineers (5:05 p.m.).