On the night of January 26, 1980, Dave Grohl sneaked out of his family home in Springfield, Virginia to hang out with his big sister, who was babysitting for a neighbouring family. Having packed the kids off to bed, Lisa Grohl was watching Saturday Night Live when her 11-year-old brother showed up, just in time to see host Terri Garr introduce the night’s musical guests. The four minutes that followed, would blow the future Foo Fighters leader's mind.
"I remember that moment like some people remember the Kennedy assassination," he told me in 2009. "When The B-52's played Rock Lobster, honestly, that moment changed my life. The importance and impact of that on my life was huge. That people that were so strange could play this music that sounded so foreign to me and for it to be so moving ... growing up in suburban Virginia, I had never even imagined something so bizarre was possible. It made me want to be weird."
For mainstream America, and the US music business, however, The B-52's remained a cult concern, "just too weird for the powers that be", as frontman Fred Schneider acknowledged in a 2025 interview with Vulture. To this day, the Athens, Georgia band have never even been nominated for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, for instance. Nevertheless, the quartet have become national treasures, and global icons, thanks largely to 1989 single that, ironically, some of the group members originally wanted to abandon.
