Thirty-Five Miles Up I-24, the Biggest Room in the Region Played Its Last Show
Rutherford County has a good live-music life of its own. There is a brewery campus off John Bragg Highway that books real touring acts, a downtown that fills the Square for a festival several times a year, a performing arts center, and a university that puts on more free music than most people take advantage of.
What the county does not have — has never had — is a room that holds sixty thousand people. For that, you get on I-24 and drive about thirty-five miles northwest.
On Saturday night, that drive had a last time attached to it. Foo Fighters played Nissan Stadium as part of the TAKE COVER TOUR 2026, with Queens of the Stone Age and Mannequin Pussy opening, in what is scheduled to be the final concert in the building's history. Doors at 5:30, headliners at 7, and a set that ran past three hours.
The building comes down after the season
Nissan Stadium opened in 1999. It comes down in phases immediately following the 2026 NFL season, replaced by the new stadium already rising beside it — close enough that its construction cranes were visible over the north end all night.
Saturday was the second farewell the place hosted this summer. On June 27, Alan Jackson closed out his touring career there with Last Call: One More for the Road — The Finale, more than 50,000 people on hand and a stage full of friends. Country's goodbye in June, rock's in August, seven weeks apart in the same concrete bowl.
Why Murfreesboro has more skin in this than the mileage suggests
Here is the part that gets overlooked when a Nashville venue changes hands. A stadium show is an enormous temporary employer — audio, lighting, rigging, staging, load-in and load-out, box office, security, merch. Those crews are not conjured from nowhere, and a meaningful share of the people who build that career in Middle Tennessee learn how in Murfreesboro.
MTSU runs the largest recording industry program of its kind in the world, housed in the Scott Borchetta College of Media and Entertainment inside the 80,000-square-foot John Bragg Media and Entertainment Building. Its concentrations run through audio production, music business and commercial songwriting, and admission to the department is competitive because the seats are limited.
That is a real industrial fact about this county, not a brochure line. Rutherford County is not merely a place that drives to concerts. It is one of the places that staffs them.
Thirty-two years, and a tour built to reach further back
Foo Fighters have been playing since 1994 — thirty-two years of catalog before you count anything else. The TAKE COVER framing pushes past their own records, which is what turns a night like Saturday into something closer to a survey of the music that produced the band than a promotional stop for an album. The run is also the first with Ilan Rubin on drums, following Josh Freese's departure.
The crowd got the version of an August night in Middle Tennessee that nobody plans for and everybody hopes for: clear, mild, and comfortable enough that a floor full of people stayed on its feet for three hours instead of hunting for shade.
What is next, and what stays here
The new stadium inherits the regional-scale shows, and Rutherford County's drive up I-24 does not change — only the destination does. In the meantime the county's own rooms keep working: MTSU's fall calendar is underway with football back at Floyd Stadium in September, and Hop Springs keeps stacking events through the fall, including the Pickle Festival on September 5.
Some of the people working the next stadium's first show are, right now, sitting in a classroom on Greenland Drive. That is the part of Saturday night that actually belongs to Murfreesboro.
Photos by J3 Media, shot from the stands at Nissan Stadium on August 15, 2026.
