(Credits: Far Out / Kenny Stoff / Foo Fighters / The Cubby Bear)
Sat 28 February 2026 7:30, UK
Whether you’re Dave Grohl or Joe Bloggs, nobody forgets the concert that put them on the path of a lifelong obsession with live music.
From that moment on, there will always be a fondness for the band that took to the stage and lit the fuse, as well as a warm place in your heart for the venue, which is now a treasure trove full of memories from an unforgettable, life-affirming evening.
For Dave Grohl, this concert took place over 40 years ago, when he was already determined to make his existence revolve around music. However, he was yet to see anybody perform in the flesh, which would ramp his infatuation up to 11.
At this point, he’d been raised on a diet of The Beatles, but seeing them perform, of course, wasn’t a possibility. Like most people, it was small, independent venues, which are the heartbeat of the live music scene, that were Grohl’s gateway to concertgoing, re-shaping his view of the world thanks to the DIY movement.
Grohl grew up in a small town in Virginia, which wasn’t on the touring agenda for bands, and it took until 1982 for him to first witness live music. He spent the summer with his extended family in Illinois, and the bustling Chicago music scene being on his doorstep was extraordinarily eye-opening.
The first show he attended was Naked Raygun at The Cubby Bear, which is a sports bar meets live music venue, situated near the iconic Wrigley Field stadium. In addition to ensuring that Cubs fans are well fuelled and hydrated ahead of matches, it also deserves some credit for putting Grohl on the path to being a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee.
Grohl once recalled of the evening while on Q104.3 New York: “The first artist I ever saw in concert was a band called Naked Raygun, which was a punk-rock band from Chicago. I saw them at this tiny little hole in the wall across the street from Wrigley Field, this place called The Cubby Bear. This is, like, 1982 or 1983.”
He gratefully added: “I’d never seen a band before and my cousin took me to see a punk-rock band, and it totally changed my life.”
Beautifully, in a full-circle moment, when Foo Fighters headlined Wrigley Field in 2015, he invited Naked Raygun to support them. Naked Raygun’s Jeff Pezatti late told Spin it “was pretty gratifying” to step on stage at the Wrigley Field, just a stone’s throw away from where it all began at the Cubby Bear.
A few days prior to the announcement of the Wrigley Field concert, Foo Fighters’ first headline stadium show in the US, they returned to the Cubby Bear for a raucously intimate concert, which saw Pezatti join them to perform Naked Raygun’s ‘Surf Combat’.
Pezatti recalled, “Then the next day they asked us to play Wrigley, which is really nice of him. He didn’t have to do that, but he did, and we appreciate it. He seems to be very genuine. His band is all very nice people too. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got the world by the ass.”
Grohl’s two visits to the Cubby Bear were separated by more than 30 years, but each has been incredibly consequential and involved Naked Raygun. The first marked the beginning of his journey, while the second was a celebration of Foo Fighters’ reaching the summit and climbing their way to be a stadium-sized band.
Without the first visit to the Cubby, Grohl living out his dream with Foo Fighters may have never materialised, which is why he made sure to return to his roots.