Foo Fighters at Madison Square Garden

Dave Grohl

Dave Grohl joined the grunge band Nirvana as its drummer in 1990. Following the dissolution of Nirvana after the 1994 suicide death of leader Kurt Cobain, Grohl formed Foo Fighters as a one-person project in Seattle, Washington. The name came from the UFOs and various aerial phenomena that were reported by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II, which were known collectively as "foo fighters." Prior to the release of Foo Fighters' 1995 debut album, which featured Grohl as the only official member, Grohl recruited musicians and Foo Fighters began performing as a band, with Grohl on vocals and guitar. Foo Fighters has sold more than 12 million units in the United States alone and four albums have won Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album. The band released its ninth studio album, Concrete and Gold, on September 15, 2017. Foo Fighters presently consists of Grohl on vocals and guitar, Chris Shiflett on lead guitar, Pat Smear on guitar, Rami Jaffee on keyboards, Nate Mendel on bass, and Taylor Hawkins on drums.

On the first of two headlining nights at Madison Square Garden, Foo Fighters started a few minutes late but played into overtime at the unionized venue. Performing for nearly three hours, the band played many of its hits but also included extended solos and cover songs. The opening song, "All My Life," set a tone of levity for the evening by including the guitar riff from Ted Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever." Throughout the night, the band married hummable melodies with raucous hard rock arrangements to create high-energy anthems with a powerful sense of presence and immediacy. Guests included Grammy-winning smooth jazz saxophonist Dave Koz on two songs and a quartet of backing vocalists on several songs; these vocalists included Grohl's 12-year-old daughter, Violet Krohl. Grohl's gruff singing (and stage antics) were the centerpiece of each song, but his musicians also were given time to stretch. Hawkins' drums rose 30 feet during his solo. Jaffee performed a complex, multi-layered solo on his synthesizer that Grohl afterwards joked sounded "pretty cool" but likely would not be included on the next Foo Fighters album. At one point, Grohl and Hawkins changed positions and Hawkins and the Struts' vocalist Luke Spiller sang a duet covering Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure." The band performed a mashup of classic rock tunes, concluding with Smear leading the others in the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop." Compared to the bombastic renderings of more familiar material, the solos and cover songs were somewhat anti-climatic, but supported the relaxed structure of the evening.

Visit Foo Fighters at www.foofighters.com.

Setlist:

1. All My Life
2. Learn to Fly
3. The Pretender
4. The Sky Is a Neighborhood
5. Rope
6. Drum Solo (by Taylor Hawkins)
7. Sunday Rain
8. My Hero
9. These Day
10. Walk (followed by Chris Shiflett on solo guitar)
11. Another One Bites the Dust (Queen cover)
12. La Dee Da (with Dave Koz on saxophone)
13. Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin cover)/ Imagine (John Lennon cover)/ Jump (Van Halen cover)/ Blitzkrieg Bop (The Ramones cover)
14. Under Pressure (Queen cover, sung by Taylor Hawkins and the Struts' Luke Spiller)
15. Monkey Wrench
16. Run
17. Breakout
18. Dirty Water
19. Best of You

Encore:

1. Big Me
2. Times Like These
3. This Is a Call
4. Everlong