Last night Will and I went to see the Foo Fighters at the Rose Garden here in Portland.  For those of you who don’t know and couldn’t guess, I’m a pretty big fan of Nirvana.  I came late to their party (which is a long long story) but once I managed to get my hands on their music, it was over. I was a Nirvana-head.  I still kind of am, but I have to admit that (until last night) I hadn’t heard much non-top-40 Foo Fighters.  I know, I know, Dave Grohl is a rock god among men and has talent oozing from his pores.  I get it, but I didn’t get it until last night when we went to the concert.

First, unlike the other concerts I’ve been to (the most recent being Etta James when she played the Halfshell in Roseburg a couple of years ago) these guys played. And played and played.  They played for more than two and a half hours and only had a couple of “talk” breaks.  I was really glad for this because this was Will’s very first concert ever and I wanted it to be a good one.  By some miracle we ended up with perfect seats too, so I think that as far as first concerts go, this one was pret-ty awesome.

I also feel very proud of my Nirvana nerdiness because I had been hoping they would play at least one or two Nirvana songs and while they didn’t play anything that I recognized immediately as a Nirvana song, they did play a song called Marigold.  During the performance I leaned over to Will and said “I think this is a Nirvana song!” because it just sounded…like Nirvana (how many times can I use the band name in one paragraph? Let’s find out!)!  Then today, I was looking up Dave Grohl on Wikipedia and sure enough, Marigold was the B-Side to one of Nirvana’s singles.  (*sigh* remember when there were such things as B Sides?) It didn’t start out as a Nirvana song–it was written by Grohl for another group, but then he and Kurt Cobain played around with it and ended up re-recording it.    I feel very proud that I was able to recognize the band’s ness.

The concert also serves as proof that, especially in the case of Will and I, opposites really do attract.  After the concert, while we were waiting for the train home, Will said “Wow–Dave Grohl must have to get wasted to be able to go out on stage every night!  There’s no way I could ever even think about doing something like that!” at the exact same time that I said “Dave Grohl looked like he was really enjoying himself! That looked like so much fun; I want to be a rock star!”