Foo Fighters seemed like a curious musical guest for David Letterman’s final show Wednesday night. Not to say that the 68-year-old talk show host can’t like a modern act, but you might have figured an older group — perhaps one that endured and was a recurring guest over Letterman’s 33-year run on TV — would be the choice. That’s probably a silly presumption.
Before Letterman closed out his finale, he explained why Foo Fighters was the band he wanted on his last program. Letterman wanted them on his first show after returning from heart surgery, as he was a fan of their song “Everlong,” and the group ended up canceling a tour in South America to make that performance. Obviously, that meant a great deal to him.
So Foo Fighters ended up playing “Everlong” over a montage of clips from Letterman’s late-night career to close out that final The Late Show with David Letterman. Enjoy the song, enjoy the ride through 33 years of the man’s career.
https://youtu.be/yrVjOUIoo6Q
Maybe it was the mellow, yet driving guitar riff of the song that eventually builds toward a bombastic cresendo. (The melody fit the montage perfectly, as if the stills and clips were riding a musical current.) Maybe it was lyrics such as “If everything could ever feel this real forever… If anything could ever be this good again,” thoughts a man would surely during and after facing his mortality and recovering from a life-altering procedure like a quintuple bypass.
Or maybe that’s just thinking about it too much, and Letterman just likes the song. But it can’t be that simple, right? Not for his final show. Not for the final moments of the broadcast, when “Everlong” is one of the last things the audience would hear, along with a fireworks display from the marquee and roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater as Letterman signed off.
There’s another line in “Everlong” that may have some resonance for Letterman: “The only thing I’ll ever ask of you… You’ve got to promise not to stop when I say when…”
Again, this could be reading far too much into the choice of song and musical act, but you can almost imagine Letterman saying something similar to his audience, to his friends and peers as he settles into retirement or does whatever it is he plans to do next. Letterman has “said when” in terms of ending the show, but we don’t have to stop appreciating him and his contributions to comedy and television over the past 33 years. Maybe he’s asking us not to forget him as he leaves our television screens and the cultural landscape.
Letterman doesn’t have to worry, of course. His influence on late-night TV and comedy is seminal. Successors like Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert certainly won’t let us forget that, nor will the generations that grew up watching him.
