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Dave Grohl Dedicates Song to Cobain and Novoselic at Reading

Dave Grohl

Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters closed out England’s Reading Festival last night with a 26-song set. “You guys realize we’ve got a lot of songs to play,” Grohl said of the marathon performance. “It’s the last show of the tour, and it’s the last show for a long time.” Then they spent the next couple hours playing hits like “All My Life,” “Everlong,” and “Walk,” as well as “Exhausted,” which they hadn’t played live since 2003, and a cover of Pink Floyd’s “In the Flesh?” But he had a few other surprises for the crowd, too.

Before playing their recent single “These Days,” though, Grohl took a moment to remember some musicians he played a very memorable Reading set with almost 20 years ago to the day. “I’d like to dedicate it to a couple of people that couldn’t be here tonight,” Grohl told the audience. “This one’s for Krist and this one’s for Kurt.” And with that, the audience roared in approval. Watch the band perform the song below, complete with Grohl’s triumphant arm raising and the emotional moment where he slows it down to say, “One of these days, your heart will stop and play its final beat, but it’s all right.”

The only other reference to Nirvana’s Reading show was when, according to the NME, Grohl told the audience, “In 1992 when Nirvana played here, the last show we ever played in England, you sang happy birthday to my mom. Here’s your chance.” The crowd recreated that moment last night.

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Another surprise came when the band broke out “Winnebago,” a song off a cassette tape that Grohl had created in 1992 under the name Late! “Now we’re about to do something we haven’t done in a long fucking time,” he told the audience, partway into their encore. “The first time the Foo Fighters played the Reading festival, we played in that fucking tent right over there, that little tent.” He went on to say how the promoters tried to convince him to play the main stage after Björk. “We said, no way, we’re not headlining the fucking festival the first time we played England, so we played in that tent and it was the hottest, craziest fucking show we’ve ever played as the Foo Fighters,” Grohl told the audience. “And this was the first song we played that night.” In addition to the Foos’ performance of the song a few nights earlier in the Czech Republic, it was the first time the band played the song since 1996.

Dave Grohl on Nirvana’s “Disastrous” Reading Gig

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_emIdr6o1UA%3Fversion%3D3

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