The Foo Fighters will open for AC/DC at a sold-out stadium show in St. Louis on September 8, stepping in for The Pretty Reckless, who had been the scheduled opener for the Australian rock legends on their current North American tour.
The band made the announcement on Thursday. The show takes place at The Dome at America's Center, which holds 67,000 people. At press time, a spokesperson for The Pretty Reckless had not returned Billboard's request for information on why the band would not be performing in their previously announced slot.
For Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, the gig carries personal weight that goes back more than four decades. In a lengthy Instagram post, Grohl described the exact moment he said rock and roll changed him. "I remember it like it was yesterday…. It was AC/DC's 1980 concert film Let There Be Rock that truly introduced me to the raw, primal power of rock and roll performance for the first time," he wrote. "Sure, I had Beatles records, I had Kiss posters, I had an old, broken acoustic guitar with a few strings that I would pretend to play in front of the hallway closet mirror when no one was home, but it wasn't until that fateful night at the tender age of eleven years old that my best friend, Larry Hinkle and I went downtown to the Uptown theater in Washington D.C. and actually witnessed it on full display."
Grohl described the experience of watching that film as unlike anything he had encountered before. "Watching from the edge of my seat the entire time, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. How could five human beings conjure and possess such intensity onstage with just their instruments, and do so with such swagger, such groove….and such danger? My mind was blown. Melted. Changed forever. And my heart felt like it might explode with passion and inspiration."
He connected that childhood moment directly to how he has played music ever since. "From that night on, the bar was set exceptionally high. If you were a drummer and you didn't have to change your snare drum between songs from pummeling it to splinters, you weren't hitting it hard enough. If you were a guitarist and you didn't need oxygen on the side of the stage between solos, you weren't playing hard enough. If you were a frontman in a band and you weren't drenched in sweat by the end of the show, you weren't giving the audience what they deserve."
The Foo Fighters had just finished a run of North American stadium dates on their Take Cover tour before agreeing to join the AC/DC show. The September 8 date in St. Louis is a one-night-only appearance.
