From a consumerist standpoint, there’s no conceivable reason to grumble about Foo Fighters’ epic, nearly three-hour performance Thursday night at the Forum, their first of two sold-out shows this week at the former Lakers home in Inglewood.
They rocked as tightly and mightily as they ever have, arguably more so than when they left off in 2008. Plenty of faces were melted and thousands of fans were surely left hoarse from screaming along. Only at U2 shows, maybe, do you hear such ardent wailing, and Foo tunes pack a seething energy Bono’s never will.
As you’d expect from a no-BS man-in-black like Dave Grohl, his shirt so sweat-soaked after a half-hour it resembled satiny silk, gimmicks weren’t tolerated. This tour’s array of lights and lasers and video screens – at times a throwback to the heyday of prog-rock, fittingly so during a bombastic cover of Pink Floyd’s “In the Flesh?” – was much less artsy and omnipresent than what most of today’s arena-filling attractions offer.
“This is probably one of the few shows you’re gonna see where people don’t use computers,” Grohl boasted. He meant that he and his faithful crew (with Pat Smear still on guitar and now Rami Jaffee on keys) play actual instruments, but he might as well have referred to the production as a whole. AC/DC still packs more literal laptop-triggered firepower, not to mention props. By comparison, a Foo show, even one with a wildly illuminated stage like this one had, can still be as frills-free as a Dave Matthews Band jam.
“It’s gonna be a long f***ing night, you know that’s right,” Grohl declared (along with a few cries of “allllll riiiiight” like a possessed Paul Stanley) once the band had finished tearing through the opening four songs without pause: “Bridge Burning” and “Rope” to get fired up, a cyclonic handling of “The Pretender” and a roar through “My Hero” to fully unleash the hollering.
Already the frontman had indulged some Skynyrd-y riffing and a bit of duck-walking à la Chuck Berry during the third track, and by the fourth the 42-year-old had raced into the barrier-protected lane extending away from the stage to a platform at the other end of the arena, stopping halfway down the path to head-bang and hair-flail directly into the astonished faces of some overcome young girls.
“We don’t play those two hour shows that your favorite band plays, no, no, no. Sometimes we go to 2:15 … 2:20 … 2:25 …” Then he became an auctioneer: “Can I get a 2:30? Can I get a 2:35? Who wants 2:40? 2:45? Who wants to try to get to f***ing three tonight?!?”
He only needed to include another song or two to reach that goal. As it was, Grohl and the band – powered by Taylor Hawkins’ expert drumming and Nate Mendel’s nimble bass work (not entirely loud enough in this mix) and bolstered by Chris Shiflett’s crystalline leads – packed in virtually every track from their 2009 best-of while leaving room enough for 8 of 11 cuts from their April release Wasting Light, which ranks alongside The Colour and the Shape (1997) and One by One (2002) as their strongest work ever.
We’ve come to expect high performance consistency from Foo Fighters, but after spending the better part of a year on tour – leading from surprise attacks at tiny places like Fingerprints and the Echo to all-out assaults at Sasquatch! and Lollapalooza – Grohl & Co. have returned for these homecoming shows a well-oiled machine so far ahead of their particular pack, no one can touch ’em. I doubt Incubus’ set Saturday night in Irvine will be half as invigorating, and I’ve rarely seen Red Hot Chili Peppers maintain such intensity, never mind put across anything with as much soulful maturity as “Walk” or “These Days.”
There were highlights aplenty: the creeping build of “Let It Die,” the explosiveness of “Arlandria,” the transition from the yearning and empathy of “These Days” (introduced as Grohl’s all-time favorite) into a dynamic reading of “Skin and Bones,” complete with accordion filigree from Jaffee. (“Wouldn’t be a Foo Fighters show if it didn’t have a f***ing accordion solo,” Grohl insisted.) I don’t suspect many people were wowed by the guest appearance of the Tubes’ Fee Waybill on “Miss the Misery”; I bet the majority on hand hadn’t a clue who he was. On the other hand, lots of fans must have been highly delighted by the lengthy acoustic portion that opened the encore.
Not me. Grohl admittedly bangs at his six strings like a drummer (“I beat the f***ing sh*t out of it”), so his pacing gets erratic, making it harder to feel the urgency of his melodies. I much preferred the grimy Sabbath-esque intro into a skull-pounding “Stacked Actors” that concluded with a prolonged guitar duel, with Shiflett seeming as fluidly masterful as Muse’s Matt Bellamy compared to the chunky approximations of Jimmy Page licks his counterpart tossed out.
But, then, that’s kinda what Grohl goes for: Big Fat Rock, classically derived yet spiked with a hard dose of punkish metal. From someone else, covering “In the Flesh?” as a lead-in for “All My Life” would seem absurd and utilizing a straight-ahead revival of Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” to segue out of “Dear Rosemary” might seem a cop-out. When Grohl and his gang do it, you sense a torch is being passed.
What troubles me is the complacency that can sneak in when a band becomes as dependably popular as the Heartbreakers. Surprise and significance often slips away and meat-and-potatoes predictability takes over.
Foo Fighters are more filet-and-couscous level, to be sure, yet for as powerful as this Forum performance was, it also felt rote. No matter how many times Grohl pointed out what a “big f***ing deal” it is to play here, little about the show (particularly his surface-level comments) provided anything uniquely special for the hometown crowd. Tremendous or not, they could have been playing anywhere Thursday night: Madison Square Garden, Candlestick Park, Glastonbury.
That’s a mark of exceedingly high professionalism, to be that strong, though I still wish Grohl would take more care in finishing his phrases and finding the nuance in his howl as he does on record – so that a killer cut like “White Limo” might keep from devolving into droning noise. The challenge they rose to on Wasting Light hasn’t fully translated to the stage, where they’ve grown overly comfortable since becoming modern rock gods. Grohl knows full well that loud and heavy doesn’t always signify something profound – sometimes it’s just loud and heavy, and for no good reason. His show is so programmed, however, it’s as if he’s forgotten.
Be careful, Foos, to avoid becoming that despicable thing for which you once seemed a potent antidote: bloated corporate obviousness. You always give all, but you don’t always push. Doesn’t the view from the mountaintop get boring if you stop daring yourself to bungee-jump off its cliffs?
As for the openers: Traffic caused me to miss Mariachi El Bronx, who I’ve enjoyed elsewhere, and I wish more of it had caused me sit in the car during Cage the Elephant, whose Pixies-meets-White-Stripes ripoffs I find generic, though props to singer Matt Schultz for bravely stage-diving into the crowd. Also, contrary to Spin.com’s advance report, Dave Grohl did not sit in with Cage as he had in Salt Lake City.
Setlist: Foo Fighters at the Forum, Inglewood, Oct. 13, 2011
Main set: Bridge Burning > Rope / The Pretender > My Hero / Learn to Fly > White Limo > Arlandria / Breakout / Band introductions / Cold Day in the Sun / Stacked Actors > Walk / Monkey Wrench / Let It Die / These Days > Skin and Bones / This Is a Call > In the Flesh? (Pink Floyd cover) > All My Life
Encore: Long Road to Ruin (Grohl solo acoustic) / Best of You (same) / Times Like These (half-acoustic, half-electric) / Miss the Misery (with Fee Waybill of the Tubes) / Dear Rosemary > Breakdown (Tom Petty cover) / Everlong
Photo by Kevin Sullivan, The Orange County Register.
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Foo Fighters get epic (and obvious) at the Forum is a post from: Soundcheck