The Foo Fighters recently performed “Times Like These” during Joe Biden’s Celebrating America inauguration concert and played during Barack Obama’s presidency, but in the ’80s Dave Grohl was attending an event in Washington D.C. for a much different reason. During a recent interview with the Independent, he recalled getting “beaten by police and rednecks” during a “Rock Against Reagan” concert that featured bands like Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys.
The rally took place “right on the mall, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, a quarter of a mile from where I would one day be invited to play at Obama’s first big ‘party’ on the South Lawn,” Grohl remembered. “They happened each Fourth of July. Hundreds of thousands of people from the suburbs would come to watch the national firework display. And right smack in the fucking middle of it was a punk concert with bands like the Dead Kennedys and the Bad Brains.”
“There were police on horses with fucking batons,” he noted. “It was nuts. I’d get beaten by police and rednecks. But it was the right place and the right time for that, under Reagan’s suffocating conservative administration.”
The Foos are gearing up to release their 10th studio album, Medicine at Midnight, on Feb. 5 and will celebrate the new tunes with a livestream and limited-engagement radio channel on SiriusXM.
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