Watch Foo Fighters & Zac Brown Cover Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ On ‘Letterman’

October 14, 2014

This week Foo Fighters kicked off their week-long residency on The Late Show With David Letterman, with a performance of Black Sabbath‘s 1970 classic War Pigs alongside Bluesfest 2015 artist Zac Brown.

Grohl and Brown, who appears on Foo Fighters’ upcoming album Sonic Highways, shared vocal duties for the cover of the opening track from Sabbath‘s 1970 album Paranoid, while the remaining Foos completely unleashed on the enduring antiwar classic. Despite Brown’s slight stumble on one of the early lines, the performance is blistering.

The Foo Fighters’ week-long residency will see the band perform a number of covers with artists who inspired their forthcoming eighth studio album, Sonic Highways. “You have Zac Brown, Black Sabbath, Foo Fighters, I don’t know, what do you kids want from me?” joked David Letterman following the performance.

Sonic Highways is also the name of a new HBO series that will precede the album and follows the band as they record in eight different US cities: Chicago, Austin, Nashville, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Washington DC, and New York.

“When I came up with this idea the first people I called were Dave [Letterman] and Rob Burnett and I said, ‘I have this idea, I’d really like to make it happen’, and if it weren’t for these guys and the Letterman show we would never have been able to pull this off,” Grohl said in an interview before the performance. “You’re right,” interjected David Letterman.

Grohl also explains the premise of the series. “In each episode the band goes to eight cities across America. We go to each city for one week. We load in our equipment to a local studio, we start recording the instruments and then at night I would go to interview a famous musician from that city.”

Grohl says he would then take transcripts from those interviews and use them to compose lyrics for a new song. “So in the episode you hear us interviewing these famous musicians, you’re getting the history of the city, the regional relevance of the music from that city but you also see us putting a song together.”

Sonic Highways, the series will get its premiere on HBO on Friday, 17th October US time. The series will premiere on Australia’s Go! at 4:30pm Saturday, 18th October, just one hour after it premieres in the US. The Butch Vig–produced Sonic Highways album is set for global release on 10th November.

The Foos will return to the show tomorrow to unveil another cover. This though, will be hard to top.

UPDATE 15/10/14: Foo Fighters have returned for another cover on Letterman, this time teaming up with Heart for a blistering rendition of Kick It Out.