Foo-tastic

Partook in the Foo Fighters concert at Nationwide Arena last night. I am not a music critic, so don't expect a breakdown of the melodies and Grohl's strenious vocals over interweaving whatevers. I will keep it short and sweet.

Awesome.

Okay, maybe a little more than that. Rise Against opened after some Mariachi band (Mariachi El Bronx?). RA was okay, not a huge fan of theirs but like a few of the songs. The show however was bad, mostly due to the sound mix. You could not hear the vocals at all, and the instrumentals were all over each other. Every song sounded the same because all I could hear was screaching guitar.

Grohl and the boys came on just after 9:00. They opened with a couple of favorites, including Pretender. I liked the way they mixed in the new songs (all of which rock by the way). They hopped around in the catalog quite a bit, but they covered a vast majority of the favorites. Awesome rendition of Let it Die and Monkey Wrench. They added a lot of solo and instrumentals in the breaks, but the vocals stayed, for the most part, as you would hear them on the record. Meaning you can still sing along, but you don't feel like you are just listening to the CD with 20,000 other people. And there was a lot of singing along. There was even a cover of Pink Floyd (complete with laser lights) and Tom Petty, both very well done. The encore started off with a 2-1/2 song acoustic rendition, including Best of You. He started acoustic on Times Like These, but then half way through the band started up again and rocked out the finish (hence the 2-1/2). Best part of the show for me. The night ended on Everlong after damn near three hours of great music.

You could tell from the start the Dave Grohl had the crowd in his hands. He controlled that show like no other. He started off right by saying how he lived down High street as a very young kid. And the crowd was with him all night. Hawkins on the drums is a beast. Thought his arms were going to fly off a few times, and he did appear to break a tom drum in the middle of a song. I will never know how somebody has the talent to play drums and sing lead vocals on a song or two. I can barely talk while playing guitar, let alone sing. Much respect.

The show itself was pretty simple. The most they had were multiple concave, three sided video screens hanging above the stage, and of course mutiple can lights that changed with the music. Grohl had a small lifted stage toward the back of the arena that he used a couple of times. No smoke, no fire, no real flashy light show. Just Foo Fighter blowing the roof off of Nationwide Arena. And I loved every minute of it. Easily top 3 show I have seen. Highly recommend.