Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl drinks what most people would consider a huge amount of alcohol before hitting the stage with his band. The singer opened up about his pre-performance ritual during a recent interview with KLOS-FM.
When asked what he does before a concert, Grohl’s drummer, Taylor Hawkins, urged the singer to talk about his hour-long drinking sessions. After advising kids to “stay in school, don’t do drugs,” Grohl revealed that first, he pops three Advil 90 minutes before a concert. Then the drinking begins.
“An hour before the gig, I have a Coors Light,” he said. “About 50 minutes before the gig, I hit my first Jag [Jagermeister], finish the Coors Light, get another Coors Light going. Now there’s a bunch of people around, so I’m throwing shots at everybody and I’m taking shots with everyone in the room. The next Coors Light is down, I got a cold one. Now it’s about maybe 20 minutes before going on. I’ve had three or four shots of Jager and three Coors Lights. Then they sort of clear the room and we get 15 minutes to ourselves.”
Grohl then realized his ritual may not be the healthiest way to spend the hour before a performance. “This is bad! This is how I’ve spent every night of the last year and a half. That’s why I’m not scared of the Lord. I’ve seen worse,” he noted.
He then continued: “So then like 15 minutes before, we’re like, ‘We need our privacy,’ which is such bullshit. We totally don’t. So then, it’s all of us and I feel guilty because I’m the only one who’s been doing the shots of the Jag, so I start feeding shots of Jag to the rest of the band, who are all drinking white wine and champagne and whatever. So, I’m pounding them with Jag but I have to take them with them, so now I’m five or six shots in. And it’s like, it’s time to walk to the stage, so I crack another beer just to have a cold one as I walk up and I pick up the bottle and drink the last inch of the Jag!”
While Grohl obviously enjoys his alcohol, he has been known to avoid drugs. In a 2008 interview with the BBC, he said he had never done cocaine, heroin or speed and quit using cannabis and LSD when he was 20 years old. His reason? “I’ve seen people die. It ain’t easy being young, but that stuff doesn’t make it any easier,” he explained.
Grohl was previously a member of Nirvana, and frontman Kurt Cobain struggled with a heroin addiction prior to his death at age 27 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1994.
During the interview with KLOS-FM, Grohl recalled imbibing in some homemade whiskey by Jimmy Eat World bassist Rick Burch that was dangerously strong. After some experimenting, Burch gave him a bottle at a music festival.
“We drank the whole bottle, had the best show ever, and then I went to him, ‘Dude, I need a case of this,’” Grohl recalled. “We actually built a rolling road case full of this dude’s bootleg hooch that he made in his garage with a biodiesel machine. … The drummer started puking blood, it got kinda weird, someone went blind. It was totally unsanctioned.”
