A Missouri boy got to live out his guitar hero dreams on stage with the Foo Fighters in Kansas City, Missouri, Friday night, blowing the fans away with his rocking rendition of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl invited 10-year-old Collier Cash Rule onstage during their concert when he saw the young fan in the front row playing air guitar.
A fan-filmed video on YouTube shows Grohl asking Collier if he knows how to play guitar, to which he enthusiastically replies, “Yes!”
“What songs do you know?” Grohl asked.
“I know a lot of Metallica songs,” Collier answered, prompting cheers from the crowd.
“Do I know a lot of Metallica songs?” Grohl asked rhetorically with a laugh. “Me and Taylor know a lot of Metallica songs!” he added with a nod toward Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. The crowd waited in anticipation as the rocker handed Collier a guitar.
The kid rose to the occasion, launching flawlessly into the opening riff of “Enter Sandman” alongside the Foo Fighters. Stunned, Grohl turned toward the cheering audience and raised his hands in the air, the video shows. The rocker wailed out a verse while Collier crushed it on the lead guitar — like he’d been doing it all his life.
Grohl was forced to interrupt the band mid-song because he had performed as much of it as he knew. “Oh sh*t!!!” he cried. “That’s all we know! He knows more than we do!”
Grohl asked Collier if he knew any other songs and the boy responded with the riff to Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium).”
Grohl went on to joke about Ed Sheeran, who was performing in Kansas City that same evening. Sheeran “ain’t got nothing on Collier,” he quipped.
The frontman was so impressed he gifted Collier with one of his own guitars, prompting the boy to give him a big hug.
“If I see that sh*t on eBay next week, I’m gonna find you, Collier,” Grohl warned.
The boy, who is named after Johnny Cash, went to the concert at the Sprint Center with his mother and a friend, Fox4 reported. At one point, his mother let the boys get close to the stage so they could take some pictures. They returned to their spot until the end of the concert.
“Then we came back up,” Collier, who is from Shawnee, Missouri, told Fox4. “Towards the last song, she’s like, you guys can go down there, and we wanted to stay down there so bad. And I’m like, ‘Mom, can we stay down here? We’re not in anyone’s way, we’re being polite.'”
Grohl noticed the excited boy playing air guitar and invited him onto the stage.
“And he’s like, ‘What?’ I said ‘I can play the guitar!’ and Dave’s like, ‘Oh, you can play the guitar! Sure. Get this kid up here.’ And then the crew comes and picks me up and I go up the stairs and I’m on the stage,” Collier explained.
Collier said he opted to play Metallica songs because he assumed the audience had heard enough Foo Fighter music already at the show.
“That’s why I chose to play ‘Enter Sandman,’” he said in the interview. “And I love Metallica.”
Collier told Fox4 that his bucket list is now complete.
Collier’s mother said the 10-year-old has played guitar for two years and practices every day, according to KMBC.
He started playing on “a cheap ToysRUs Darth Vader guitar” that he got for Christmas, Collier told KC talk station KMBZ Thursday.
His mother told hosts Jayme and Wickett that she knew her son wouldn’t be nervous because he had played in front of an audience at “Knuckleheads,” a Kansas City bar where lots of bands perform. The Foo Fighters aren’t the first band Collier has met, either. His mother told the hosts he recently got to meet Alice in Chains and Alice Cooper.
His newfound fame does not seem to be going to Collier’s head, his mother told the hosts. When she saw that Rolling Stone had done an article about him she said she cried, but Collier was less than impressed. He was more interested in getting new socks, and that it was time for his allowance, she said.
“I want to be the next generation of Metalica, Tom Morello, Alice in Chains, ACDC, and I want to make America rage again,” the boy told the hosts.
KC rock station X1051 has invited Collier to open a concert for Blue October later this month:
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