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Nate Mendel is tired. The Foo Fighters bassist and his band have been on a whirlwind, globetrotting festival tour since June, when the grunge-pop group released its fifth album, the two-disc In Your Honor. The toll all this travel has taken on Mendel is evident in his voice during a phone call from Munich, Germany, where the Foos have just completed a set at the 72-hour Muffathalle festival.

"There's practically hundreds of bands and massive, 60,000-plus crowds," Mendel says. "So people have been there for three days sometimes, and they've camped there and they're haggard."

Before going to Germany, the band went from playing a free concert in Roswell, N.M., to performing at Scotland's T in the Park festival to closing Ireland's Oxegen Festival. The next stop on the itinerary is Erfurt, Germany, where Mendel and his bandmates are scheduled to headline the Highfield Festival. But first, the Foo Fighters have a breakfast appointment with the members of Weezer to discuss their upcoming joint U.S. tour, which will arrive Saturday at the Office Depot Center in Sunrise.

If any band can handle the stress of waking up every morning trying to remember what country it's in, it's the Foo Fighters, a group that was founded in the wake of a very public tragedy -- the suicide of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain -- by one of the most amiable cutups in popular music, Dave Grohl. In a decadelong career plagued with overdoses, label changes and assorted personnel problems, the Foo Fighters have persevered. This is in no small part due to their ability to not take serious setbacks too seriously. It's a strategy that has paid off, resulting in multiple Grammy and MTV Video Music Awards, legions of fans and platinum sales for each of the Foo Fighters' first four albums.

At the core of it all, of course, is Grohl. One year after Cobain's suicide in 1994, Grohl spent five days recording songs he had written between tours with Nirvana. But rather then capitalize on his Nirvana fame, he secretly recorded an album under the moniker Foo Fighters, the code name Allied airmen used to refer to the unidentified glowing orbs they reported seeing in German skies at night during World War II.

When word leaked out that the Foo Fighters were Grohl's project -- aside from a guest guitar part by The Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli, Grohl had recorded every note on the album -- record companies came calling. Grohl, an admitted UFO nut, got a pressing and distribution deal with Capitol Records but released the self-titled debut on his own Roswell Records. As the album began to climb the charts -- it has sold 1.3 million copies to date -- Grohl decided he was ready to form a band around the project. Mendel and William Goldsmith, who had been bandmates in the indie-pop band Sunny Day Real Estate before it broke up in 1995 after singer Jeremy Enigk reportedly found God, were the first musicians to sign on.

"Dave had come to see a couple of Sunny Day Real Estate shows and came backstage to say 'Hi'," Mendel recalls. "We had a mutual friend, so I ended up hanging out with him a couple of times and went over to his house for Thanksgiving."

Goldsmith was also there, and the three musicians discussed performing together. Grohl later recruited Pat Smear, a legendary punk-rock guitarist who had played with both The Germs and Nirvana, to round out the lineup.

Within six months, Mendel remembers, their faces were on the cover of Rolling Stone. While Grohl may have been accustomed to such attention, Mendel was not. Sunny Day Real Estate was known for its refusal to give interviews, pose for pictures or even play in the state of California. "It was like, 'Oh shit,' " Mendel explains. "It's just surreal is what it is."

It was the first of many surreal moments for him. Mendel says one of those moments occurred four years ago at Brazil's Rock in Rio festival. "There were 200,000 people at this thing, and we're staying on the beach in this hotel room and see a helicopter pull up to the hotel's helipad," Mendel recalls. "And, of course, it's Axl Rose. Guns N' Roses had gotten back together for the show. It was just really incredible. And I went hang-gliding there, over the beach in Rio, with a hangover, the day after the show."

This is the kind of larger-than-life experience that helps bands rise above such pedestrian rock 'n' roll issues as lineup changes, of which the Foo Fighters had many in their early days. During a preshow performance for the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, Smear announced onstage that he was leaving the band. Goldsmith, reportedly upset that Grohl had re-recorded some of his drum tracks, had already departed.

Mendel, the band's self-described peacemaker, likens the Foo Fighters' revolving-door lineup to a romantic relationship. "As much as you may like one another, it may not work out on another level," he told The Daily Oklahoman. "So, you know, people have to come and go."

That said, the band's current lineup -- Grohl, Mendel, Hawkins and guitarist Chris Shiflett -- has been intact for more than five years. One reason for this stability could be that the members of the Foo Fighters now keep busy with other projects. In 2002, Grohl played drums on nearly every track of Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf. Last year, on the self-titled CD for his side project Probot, he played all the instruments on original songs sung by 11 heavy-metal singers, including Motörhead's Lemmy Kilminster and Napalm Death's Lee Dorrian. In between, Grohl has drummed for Nine Inch Nails, Killing Joke and Garbage.

Meanwhile, Shiflett leads the pop-punk outfit Jackson United, Mendel plays with his old Sunny Day Real Estate bandmates in The Fire Theft, and the Foos drummer leads Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders. Mendel also co-starred in and provided music for the film Our Burden Is Light. Recently released on DVD, the movie tells the story of several tortured artists, one of whom is struggling with her mother's suicide and another whose day job is draining his creative impulses.

"It's a film that a friend of my longtime girlfriend's wrote and directed," Mendel says. "It was a project that involved a lot of friends and was done with heart and no money. It reminded me of the old do-it-yourself rock spirit I grew up with in punk bands. I'd like to do more of that."

For now, it's all he can do to keep up with the Foo Fighters. "Christ, we've been so busy with it lately there's hardly any time," he says. Mendel certainly won't have much free time in the foreseeable future, as the Foo Fighters heavily promote In Your Honor, which includes one CD of the hard, heavy rock songs for which the band is best-known and another that features 10 acoustic songs recorded with guests such as Norah Jones and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

"I feel like we've had a nice evolution while keeping a particular style," Mendel says. "Like, you hear a Foo Fighters song, and it could be a quiet ballad or it could be trying to kick your ass. [Yet] the fact that it's Dave's voice will tell you that it's a Foo Fighters song."

Foo Fighters and Weezer will perform 7 p.m. Saturday at Office Depot Center, 2555 N.W. 136th Ave., in Sunrise. Tickets cost $29.50-$39.50. Call 954/523-3309 or visit www.officedepotcenter.com.