Foo Fighters
2021-09-05
Jam Cellars Stage
Bottlerock Festival
Napa CA

Taper: TJ (http://ratm.live)
Taping Location: 40-50 meters back dead center
Lineage: AT853s > SP-SPBP-10 > PCM-A10
Transfer: WAV > Audacity (channel splicing) > FLAC
Length: 2:02:24

Setlist:

1. Times Like These
2. The Pretender
3. Learn to Fly
4. No Son of Mine
5. The Sky Is a WNeighborhood
6. Shame Shame
7. Breakout
8. My Hero
9. These Days
10. Medicine at Midnight
11. Walk
12. You Should Be Dancing (Bee Gees cover)
(band intros + riffs)
13. Somebody to Love (Queen cover)
14. All My Life
15. This is a Call
16. Best of You
17. Monkey Wrench
18. Everlong

By the time that Cage the Elephant was wrapping up everyone in my group had ducked out due to the heat and general festival overload. This worked out in my favor for taping because originally I had told my SO that I wouldn’t tape that day since I had done a lot of taping the prior two days. I grabbed a beer (my only of the day and long overdue) and started working my way close to the stage in front of the soundboard. I sat down to get situated and get my mics set up when someone said, “I think we could be friends”. My first thought was that it was someone asking for rolling papers again. For whatever reason I seem to give off the appearance that I might have them on me and throughout the festival multiple people asked me for them. Anyway, it quickly became apparent that I ran into another taper, fried_morals who runs the amazing Coachella recordings site themojavetent.com ! I had a great time chatting with him - we had exchanged emails in the past but meeting in person was total luck. He runs an incredible resource and huge thanks to him for organizing all of the Coachella recordings throughout the years and taping many awesome bands.

I had a few goofs while recording this set. For whatever reason the battery box became slightly unhinged from the microphones so I lost a channel for about 13 minutes starting around “No Son of Mine”. To remediate I copied over one channel so it is mono for those 13 minutes. It came unhinged again later but I didn’t correct it since it’s only a few seconds. There is a nasty pop that could probably be removed: if someone wants the master files to adjust / edit / whatever please let me know! I did catch the channel dropout while taping and while I was able to fix it I became paranoid about it dropping out again so I spent a lot of the show with one hand holding the mic input and battery box together. I could have done a better job with more consistent levels as well, but oh well. I think it turned out great regardless!

In terms of the actual performance the Foo Fighters played an incredible set. Their energy brought the crowd back to life. Everyone around us was having a great time and was super into their performance. I felt like I could have watched them all night. They have the ability to make a two hour performance feel like 15 minutes; they're that good live. Definitely plan on catching them again in the future!

All in all a great set to close out my first three day festival back. It was great meeting fried_morals and hopefully I’ll run into him again at a future California show! We did get to take selfies with Guy Fieri at the end and that was a nice way to end the event.

I run a Rage Against the Machine live archive at http://ratm.live.
Please get in touch if you have any recordings of Rage Against the Machine!