Is it true that the Foo Fighters’ original name was the Food Fighters, but at an early show the venue didn’t have a D to use on the sign?
Sadly, no; Dave Grohl chose the band’s name and recorded their first album before playing any live shows. “Foo fighters” is actually an old term for UFOs; World War II pilots reported seeing odd balls of light that circled around their planes and borrowed a catchphrase from the comic-strip character Smokey Stover (whose creator, Bill Holman, littered his strip with the nonsense word “foo,” in phrases like “A man’s foo is his castle” and “Foo-losophy”). Although Grohl has warned “that UFO stuff is all overblown,” he is sufficiently interested in flying-saucer conspiracies to have named his label Roswell Records (after the site where the aliens allegedly landed) and to take a walk-on role on “The X-Files.” If Grohl had chosen another term for the same aerial phenomena, his band would have been called the Kraut Fireballs.
