"Play that violin, Jessy Greene!"
Foo Fighters were midway through a two-hour show last month, and Dave Grohl had called out Minneapolis' best-known rock violinist twice.
Later, during the encore at Dallas' American Airlines Arena, Greene got her third and biggest call: She and Grohl sang the band's first megahit, "Big Me," as a boy/girl duet. "Me and Jessy Greene sing this one together real nice," Grohl told the 15,000 fans, who seemed to agree.
Not bad for a working Twin Cities musician who, a year earlier, made a deflated return to Minneapolis after trying to make it in Los Angeles.
"I love Minneapolis, even if I'm behind on the bills a little and working at the Gasthof," the northeast Minneapolis German restaurant where she worked as recently as last spring. Just as she settled into a life-is-good mentality last summer, life got so much better. That's when she got the call.
The invite came last June from Rami Jaffee, who joined the Foo Fighters on tour as a keyboardist in 2006. "Rami called and was like, 'Is there any possible chance you'd be interested in touring with the Foo Fighters?' " Greene recalled, her mouth agape to mimic her reaction.
According to Foo bassist Nate Mendel, "Jessy proved to be really a bad-ass. She's an excellent musician, she knows how to tour, how to be around seven guys who treat her like another guy. We should maybe be better gentlemen and acknowledge that there's a woman around, but she just rolls with it. She's probably used to self-centered male musicians."
Greene's first few gigs with the band last August in England amounted to a crash course. "My first show was performing on the BBC to millions of viewers -- live, at 8 in the morning," she recalled. "The next was the V Festival playing on stage to 50,000 people, and a couple more festivals like that. It was unbelievable and intense."