Foo Fighters recently sat down with EW for a career-spanning oral history, and a section of the piece was dedicated to perhaps the most memorable Foo Fighters moment of the past decade: the 2015 show where Dave Grohl broke his leg. It turns out that gig is Grohl’s favorite one he ever played.
Grohl said, “When someone asks me, ‘What’s your favorite show you’ve ever played,’ I’ll say, ‘The one where I broke my f*cking leg.’” He went on to give his account of how he reacted in the immediate aftermath of the break:
“I put weight on my right ankle, and it’s just not there. It was dislocated, I’d torn all the tendons. I snapped the bone in my leg. Immediately I thought, there’s no way we’re not finishing this show. There are 50,000 people here who paid a lot of money to see this band, and we’re two songs into a three-hour set. Like, there’s no way. So, they picked me up, and they put me on a gurney to the side of the stage as I’m looking at Taylor like, ‘Just keep playing, just keep playing.’ […]
This guy looks at me and he goes, ‘Your ankle’s dislocated. We have to put it back in right now.’ I looked at my tour manager of 25 years, and I go, ‘Dude, get me a case of Crown Royal.’ And I f—ing took a hit of the Crown Royal, put my wife’s leather jacket in my mouth, took a bite as they put it back in. That was it. […] We play another two-and-a-half hours, I go get surgery, and we decide to stay on the road for another 60 shows. That to me was the best thing that had ever happened to the band.”
Check out the full feature here.