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The band opened with \u201cAll My Life,\u201d immediately setting the tone for a night that favored volume over finesse. \u201cTimes Like These,\u201d \u201cThese Days\u201d and \u201cWalk\u201d followed, giving the crowd a run of songs built for exactly this kind of setting: tens of thousands of fans, a mild Napa night and a frontman who still performs with his entire being.<\/p>\n
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Dave Grohl performs with his band the Foo Fighters as the headliner on the second day of Bottlerock in Napa on Saturday, May 23, 2026.<\/p>\n
Manuel Orbegozo\/For the S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
By the time the band reached \u201cMy Hero,\u201d the show had settled into its rhythm \u2014 Grohl leading from the front, grinning through the chaos, while the rest of the band turned the stage into a wall of guitars and drums.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis is for the old-school fans,\u201d Grohl said before \u201cThis Is a Call,\u201d the first single from Foo Fighters\u2019 1995 debut album. At a festival where many people were likely seeing the band for the first time, the song served as a reminder that Foo Fighters began not as an arena institution, but as a scrappy project built from grief, noise and instinct.<\/p>\n
That early spirit kept resurfacing throughout the set. Foo Fighters are now one of rock\u2019s most reliable big-field bands, but Saturday\u2019s performance was strongest when it let the seams show. Grohl was drenched in sweat, dumped a cup of water over his head and at one point got his hair stuck in gum before putting it back in his mouth.<\/p>\n
\u201cWelcome to my world, motherf\u2014rs,\u201d he cracked.<\/p>\n
It was gross. It was ridiculous. It was also very much the point.<\/p>\n
Foo Fighters are polished enough to headline anywhere, but their best shows still run on the illusion that the whole thing could fly off the rails. BottleRock got that version of the band: part stadium-rock machine, part garage-band dare, part hair-metal fever dream.<\/p>\n
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Grohl leaned into the excess, pushing the crowd during \u201cMonkey Wrench\u201d with the air of a coach trying to wring one more scream out of a team that had already been standing in the sun all day.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve been here all day, can you still scream?\u201d he shouted. \u201cI\u2019m going to test you.<\/p>\n
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Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters enters the Culinary Stage for a cooking demonstration at Bottlerock in Napa on Saturday, May 23, 2026.<\/p>\n
Manuel Orbegozo\/For the S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll give you a screaming lesson,\u201d he said, before leading the crowd into one of the night\u2019s loudest shout-alongs.<\/p>\n
The band also nodded to its heavier influences, ripping through a blast of Mot\u00f6rhead\u2019s \u201cAce of Spades\u201d during the set. It was less a full detour than a reminder of the engine under many Foo Fighters songs: speed, distortion, sweat and a refusal to overthink the obvious pleasure of being loud.<\/p>\n
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Still, the night was not all volume.<\/p>\n
Grohl slowed the set for \u201cBig Me,\u201d dedicating the song to his wife, Jordyn Blum, for her 50th birthday. After a night full of screaming, riffing and comic chaos, the moment came off sweetly unvarnished.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s my version of a happy birthday song,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The emotional center of the set arrived later, when Grohl thanked the fans who had stuck with Foo Fighters across 30 years, as well as the people seeing them for the first time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He seemed aware of the strange generational spread in front of him: longtime devotees who grew up with the band, casual festivalgoers waiting for the hits, younger fans discovering the catalog through parents, playlists or sheer rock-radio osmosis.<\/p>\n
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Foo Fighters have history at BottleRock. The band headlined in 2021 and previously in 2017, when its set ran past Napa\u2019s 10 p.m. curfew and the sound was cut during \u201cEverlong.\u201d On Saturday, Grohl and company stayed on schedule, but not exactly on their best behavior.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got another 30 years left,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll be 87 years old screaming this song.\u201d<\/p>\n
The late stretch of the set underlined that point. \u201cBest of You\u201d became the expected mass catharsis, with the crowd throwing the chorus back at the band. But rather than close with only the most obvious moves, Foo Fighters reached all the way back to \u201cExhausted,\u201d the final track from their debut album.<\/p>\n
The choice gave the end of the set a strange, welcome darkness. \u201cExhausted\u201d is not one of the band\u2019s tidy festival anthems. It is sludgier, heavier, more frayed \u2014 a loud, twisted-metal reminder of where the whole thing started.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, of course, came \u201cEverlong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Foo Fighters may have spent the night acting like a band happily making a mess, but the closing song reminded everyone how precise their emotional aim can be.<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s set was not elegant. It was not subtle. It was not trying to be either.<\/p>\n
It was Foo Fighters at their loudest and most gloriously unvarnished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dave Grohl performs with his band the Foo Fighters as the headliner on the second day of Bottlerock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[5580,179,156,592,157,111,139,69,226367],"class_list":["post-443209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-california","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-wine-country"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}