Foo Fighters Bring Live Rock Back To New York At Madison Square Garden

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Photo: AFP

The Foo Fighters on Sunday became the first musical act to perform a live concert at Madison Square Garden in over 15 months.

The historic show was performed for a full-capacity, fully-vaccinated audience more than 460 days after the Garden and every other large-scale NYC venue closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Having only announced the concert on June 9, the Foos found an eager audience when they took the stage Sunday, June 20, just before 8:20 p.m., performing a marathon set, stacked with hits, deep album tracks, special moments and frontman Dave Grohl's hysterical stage banter.

The band took the stage with a trio of heavy hits, "Times Like These," "The Pretender" and "Learn to Fly," before weaving through a setlist of the band's latter material, "No Son of Mine," "The Sky Is a Neighborhood," "Shame Shame" and other beloved tracks like "Rope," "My Hero," "Walk" and "Monkey Wrench."

Grohl made few direct references to the pandemic, except to note how good it felt for everyone to be together and that we can keep doing "things like this if we keep our s--t together." He also joked about desperately needing attention and that he had come back from the layoff a bit rusty, forgetting a few lyrics along the way.

Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins took the mic at one point to sing lead on Queen's "Somebody to Love." Then about 17 songs in, the band welcomed special guest comedian Dave Chappelle to the stage to sing a rendition of Radiohead's "Creep" to a delighted if not surprised audience of over 20,000.

After closing out with "Best of You," the band returned for an encore, including the Bee Gees "You Should Be Dancing" (Hawkins' bass drum featured a photo of Barry Gibb) and "Everlong."

Foo Fighters dedicated the performance to their late-stage manager Andy Pollard, who passed away on June 18.

Photo: Getty Images