Foo Fighters keep rock ‘n’ roll ALIVE in Edmonton
Dave Grohl is more than the leader of one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll acts on the circuit today. He’s a soldier who’s gone to great lengths to demonstrate that the swagger and fury that goes into breastbone-palpitating four-chord anthems isn’t going away anytime soon.
As he and his loyal crew of ear-bleeders best known as Foo Fighters demonstrated for a sell-out crowd at Rogers Place on Monday night, if rock ‘n’ roll finally meets its metallic maker, you can bet the battlefield will be anything but quiet.
Grohl validated himself as one who puts his heart, soul and body into the effort to ensure that rock will escape a flat-lining fate, with the scars to prove it. Last time the group was here in 2015, he played on a throne while nursing a broken leg. On this tour, Grohl’s bout with laryngitis only delayed the junket, which lesser acts would have scrapped. If Purple Hearts were doled out to rockers, he’d have a chest full of medals by now.
“I’m only human,” he said at one point in the show. “But my body just can’t keep up with my mind. That being said, I came back for a reason. It’s my personal and professional obligation to bring all you motherfuckers together for one night!”
More effective than a Trump rally, Grohl kept the crowd unified and on its feet during most of the two-and-a half-hour set. True to form, the rest of the Foo Fighters were just as cohesive, jumping from song to song without the need for drummer Taylor Hawkins to count them in each time. So confident is the chemistry in the outfit, with guitarists Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett, bassist Nate Mendell and keyboardist Rami Jaffee (whose ivory riffing would be at home in any rocker unit from Deep Purple to Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band), the Foos are among those rare arena headliners unafraid to change their set lists at each whistle stop.
The onslaught started from the first chord, as the sextet unleashed three songs from the recent album Concrete and Gold, starting with Run, segueing into The Sky is a Neighborhood, then double-barreling into La Dee Da, which matched the groove and chord progression of Ike and Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits. Grohl is obviously taken in by the rock star mythology that ruled the pop culture roost since the 1960s before fading three decades later, but he’s a keen scholar of musicology, especially in figuring out what riffs and hooks can reel in an audience.
He’s more than willing to play up the Rock God schtick to stratospheric heights, bobbing away onstage with his shaggy mane, whiplashing the air while burning up his fretboard. A Hawkins drum solo, and extended Shiflett leads might be pretentious to hipsters these days, but to the band, they’re formulaic showstoppers that still deliver. The Foos don’t balk at drawing out the hits into marathon executions, especially with the standout These Days. That experience was akin to revisiting Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird, except with the crowd illuminating the premises with smartphones instead of the traditional Bic lighters.
Blasts from the past continued with homages to high-decibel heroes like Queen (Under Pressure and Another One Bites The Dust), Alice Cooper (Under My Wheels), The Ramones (Blitzkrieg Bop) and a mashup of John Lennon’s Imagine with Van Halen’s Jump.
None of those diversions prevented Foo Fighters from rolling out their own catalogue of hits like The Pretender, All My Life, My Hero, Monkey Wrench and the set-ending Everlong, all of them rocking Rogers Place with an eager audience to lap it up, along with the copious ales they kept downing all night. No wine-sipping millennials among a tough-assed, blue collar crowd that would have crucified the likes of Arcade Fire if given the chance.
The encore, which ended with Best of You, wasn’t all skin-and-string-bashing mayhem. Grohl let the twang contingent represent itself with some special guests: the country duo Brothers Osborne, who just finished a set a few blocks away at the Shaw Conference Centre. They struck a few chords in a tribute to Tom Petty as they played the late rocker’s first-ever hit Breakdown.
The bell-bottoms, backstage excesses, and the conspicuous pampering of the Rock Gods may have wafted into yesteryear, but Foo Fighters’ mission to ensure their choice genre remains intact is still on message, given that Concrete and Gold enjoyed a debut on the top of the Billboard all-genre chart in 2017. The frenetic approval of the masses on Monday just might validate the notion that the cultural defibrillators on hand to keep that rock ‘n’ roll heart beating will continue to gather dust.
Photo by Andy Devlin, Oilers Entertainment Group
