Over the weekend, Foo Fighters played Madison Square Garden, the first full-capacity concert in a New York arena since March of 2020.
The house lights inside Madison Square Garden went down Sunday night, and the thousands of fans, packed like sardines in their seats, stood as if on cue. As they roared their approval, bouncing in place on the balls of their feet, the ground began to tremble. Cellphone flash lights illuminated the darkness. The sound of a keyboard echoed through the rafters. Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters’ frontman, appeared on the stage. “It’s times like these, you learn to live again,” Grohl sang. The lyrics had seldom felt so on point. After many difficult months of illness, death, hardship and pain, and shifting limits on how many people could gather, especially indoors, arena rock returned to New York City just over a year after the city was the center of the outbreak. It was the Garden’s first concert in more than 460 days, and it drew a full-capacity crowd that was asked to show proof of vaccination to enter. Inside, people grooved, tightly packed, with few masks visible. “This is a book end to what we have gone through for a year and a half,” said Heather Morris,47, of Chicago. “We’ve survived it. We’re going forward.” The return of concerts to the garden comes at an in-between moment when it comes to the pandemic in the United States. As more and more Americans have become vaccinated against the coronavirus, deaths from Covid have fallen off considerably. But only about two-thirds of adults in the United States have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, and there are still parts of the country where vaccinations lag. But after a year of being stuck inside, people have been eager to restart their hobbies and routines and to connect with one another again.
