(Foster the People)
Here’s something that will make you feel old: “Pumped Up Kicks” is approaching its ten-year anniversary! I figured we needed some input from an act that wasn’t active in the ’90s, so here’s band leader Mark Foster on the terror that any serious, young band must face: the “big break” show.
When thinking about this book and what I would share, my mind immediately went back to the first time Foster the People played Coachella. It was in 2011, before our first record, Torches, had even come out. The public had only heard three songs of ours at that point, with “Pumped Up Kicks” being the one that took off. We were on our first US tour, and Coachella was the final show. We were only playing to three hundred or five hundred capacity rooms, so Coachella looming at the end was already daunting. We had no crew, only a monitor guy who ran front-of-house sound, and a tour manager, who would help us load gear.
I had been going to Coachella since 2003 so, for me, it was a really big deal personally. It was gonna be a hometown crowd, with my friends and family in the audience. It’s an incredible rite of passage to play Coachella, especially if you’re from the West Coast. It was also our first time playing any festival. When we showed up and I looked out into the tent, it was completely packed, with people flooding out into the fairgrounds. There must have been 15,000 people there. The most people I’d ever been on stage in front of might have been 700 tops. The whole band had experience being on stage but not at that level. It was terror, exhilaration, and a million other feelings coming out at once.
The main thing that freaked me out, apart from the crowd, was the simple fact that we weren’t ready. When we started and I put “Pumped Up Kicks” online for free, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, even though I had been playing music my whole life. While I had been building toward this Coachella moment, I couldn’t have felt more unprepared.
I was pacing backstage, and before we went on, I looked out at the crowd and saw Clint Eastwood, David Hasselhoff, and Usher all talking to each other. I thought, “What kind of fucking weird movie am I in?” David Hasselhoff and Usher walk into a bar…it’s like the setup to a joke. Management, our label, and my girlfriend at the time were all there, and I told them all to get away from me. I walked out the back of the tent and sat with my back against the fence. I meditated, and went into a full visualization of how the show would go down.
There was only a twenty-minute changeover between bands, so without a proper crew, we were gonna have to hustle because we had a lot of gear. YouTube was live-streaming our show, and the band before us went long, which cut into our changeover time. We ended up going on about twenty minutes late, but the YouTube stream had been going the whole time, and it was this mad clusterfuck of us trying to set up our gear. The Coachella house guys were helping, but I couldn’t go out yet—I was still sitting with my back against the fence, trying to find my happy place so I wouldn’t have a full-on panic attack.
People were shouting at me that we had to go on, and I remember thinking, “What would Michael Jordan do?” I sat up and called my bandmates over. I said, “Look guys, don’t let the crowd see you sweat. Let’s walk out there, smile, and have a blast. We don’t have to kill it, and even if everything goes to shit, we just have to survive.” That was my thinking, because nobody had really seen us live at that point. Nobody knew what we were made of, and this was the first time that music journalists and the world would be seeing us live.
First impressions—for any artist—are so important. Walking out onto the stage, all I kept thinking was, “We’re not ready…we’re not ready…we’re not ready.” The crowd roared, but it was like an out-of-body experience. We opened with the song “Warrant,” which is the last song on Torches. Before every band started using toms, I’d like to emphasize that we were doing it. Me and our drummer Mark Pontius would both play this tribal drum beat intro before I would throw my sticks and jump behind the piano, hitting the first chord of the song.
We were pounding the drums, and everything was going fine. But when I hit my first chord on the piano, I couldn’t hear a thing. The piano was not in my monitors at all, and the people running the festival monitors had no idea what our record sounded like. They didn’t know which parts needed to be loud, or have any idea what the proper balance should be. My piano was super low, and Pontius’s snare sounded like somebody flicking a piece of cardboard twenty feet away. It was just nothing, and the piano is the instrument that grounds where my vocals rest.
Our first fucking song, in front of all these people, and this was just about the worst thing that could have possibly happened. I played the entire song just by watching the note patterns of my hands. I could hear the bass guitar, so I did my best to sing along to that. I didn’t freak out, and I don’t really remember what happened after the first song, but I remember closing with “Pumped Up Kicks” and the whole crowd singing along and clapping.
Walking off that stage, with everyone giving us love, was the first time I had ever felt that validation. It was the sensation of surviving trial by fire and living to tell about it. We didn’t kill it, that’s for sure. But we survived, and that’s all I really wanted. If we had fucked that show up, we might have been done. Career over. As a band, we might have been done before anything had really started. The blogosphere was maturing in 2011, and I can’t imagine what artists have to go through now. Even back then, Twitter had just started. Instagram was something I had only been hearing about in whispers. The days of doing something embarrassing and having it plastered all over the internet in ten minutes, weren’t there yet. Thank God.
I feel really lucky that we still have a career and that things are still working. When “Pumped Up Kicks” got so big, and because we had no foundation at the time, we did every interview, every in-store, and every radio morning show. I felt we needed to work three times as hard to show the world that we weren’t just this one song. It was really stressful because I moved to LA when I was eighteen and had been a starving artist up to that point. “Pumped Up Kicks” started to happen when I was twenty-six, so it was eight years of sleeping in my car and delivering pizzas.
I was over being a barista and never having any savings in the bank. My mom gave me a 1993 Toyota Camry that I drove from Ohio to LA. It was so beat up by the end, and I had logged over 350,000 miles on it. I drove that thing around LA for four years with no A/C and two broken windows that were duct taped. In the middle of summer, my driver-side window wouldn’t roll down. Then the muffler broke, so the car became insanely loud. The California emissions are so strict that I had to bribe an emissions guy to pass my car.
If I had lost my car, I would have had no way to make money. My car was loud as fuck after the muffler kicked. You could hear me coming six blocks away, and it was so embarrassing. When all my dreams were coming true, it was exciting, but it was also “don’t fuck this up!” Coachella was our shot, and it didn’t come when I wanted it to, but I had to take it. I would have loved six months with the band playing shows and getting really comfortable. We just had to put our heads down and make it happen.
Here’s a quick, fun one. We were in Minneapolis at the 7th St Entry, the smaller room of First Ave. It was the weekend, and playing Minneapolis on a weekend is pretty nuts. It gets lit, and our keyboardist Isom Innis was set up on the edge of the stage. He suddenly felt this thing in his butt, in the middle of a song. I saw him jump, and he turned around to see two women giggling. It looked like a mother and daughter. The older woman was somewhere around fifty-five, and the daughter was around twenty. He started playing again and felt the same butt sensation again a couple minutes later.
He kept scooting in closer to the stage, as he began to realize that the cougar was fingering his butt. The third time it happened, she stuck her hand all the way down his pants and fingered his butthole. At that point, he yelled, “Whoa! Are you fucking kidding me?” All the guy wanted to do was play music and not screw it up, and he was suddenly forced to do battle with a butthole-obsessed cougar. We finished the show, and as I got off the stage dripping sweat, I grabbed a cold tall boy. I was drinking the beer, cooling down, and this sixty-year-old guy with gray hair grabbed my beer and started chugging it in front of my face.
The guy was pretty big and ex-military looking and wore a white shirt with a sheriff’s badge logo on it. After he finished, he slammed the can down and wandered onto the stage. We were in the process of loading up our gear, and the fucking guy fell into our drum kit, knocking the whole thing over. This was a few shows before Coachella, and our tour manager, who is an ex-rugby player, grabbed the guy. “Alright mate, you’ve had enough,” he said, as he dragged the dude away. We were dying laughing the whole time because I cycled from being scared, to confused, to amusement. I think Isom was just happy to get out of there quickly after being violated.