Foo Fighters

At the Pacific Coliseum on Sunday, March 30

People love Dave Grohl. Moseying onto a long catwalk that extended into the audience, he spent the opening moments of the Foo Fighters’ show at the Coliseum on Sunday casually bathing in the crowd’s adulation, and taking his sweet time about it too. He could afford to: the band had two-and-a-half hours to kill up there.

The appeal is obvious. Grohl is so able, intelligent, and confident in his role that he’s impossible to resist, and he leads his band of ordinary men through a sturdy catalogue of radio hits with humour and authentic charm. He has also weathered the effects of aging better than anybody from his early ’90s milieu, and has just enough cred left to lay down a big, fatuous rock show—complete with drum solos and 15-minute blues jams—and still march off-stage smelling like fresh-baked cookies.

There is, however, a creeping superficiality to the affair. At times, it seemed a little too easy for the wisecracking frontman, even as the band pushed already ferocious levels of energy into the red. Four songs in, “Breakout” gave Grohl his first chance of the evening to try on his hemorrhoid-popping rock-monster voice, and he barrelled from one side of the stage to the other, stopping just long enough to spit phrases like “Well, all right!” into the mike. But as kinetic and crowd-pleasing as it all was, Grohl’s commitment to his performance seemed like the work of a really great actor.

A long middle section suffered from bloat as much as it offered value for money, starting with an endless journey through parts of “Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up Is Running)”, “This Is a Call”, and “Stacked Actors” that you never knew existed. Somewhere in the middle, Grohl got his Steve Miller on, strolling through a slow blues-rock portion that registered as either sardonic or sincere, depending on who you think Dave Grohl is these days.

All eight touring members of the Foo Fighters (including on-again, off-again guitarist Pat Smear) convened at the end of the runway for the “intimate” part of the evening, including some genuinely funny business concerning a triangle solo by percussionist Drew Hester. It was during this section, thanks to “My Hero”, that Grohl scored himself his first, super-extended standing ovation of the night. Indeed, it was the turgid end of the Foo’s catalogue that seemed to bring the most out of the crowd. As did the series of (some might say tedious) false endings that rounded out “Monkey Wrench”, which seemed to morph into the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. Deliberate or not, it defined the Foo Fighters audience almost perfectly: picture everybody who’s ever appeared in Vice magazine’s Dos and Don’ts column pumping their fists to the future model of classic rock.

Not that it resolved the lingering is-he-or-isn’t-he questions concerning Grohl’s own relationship with his work. Notwithstanding how lovable he is, there was a smirk behind the rock-show bombast. Given the overall generosity of the concert, the reason for that smirk felt like the single, vital thing that the people’s rocker wasn’t sharing with his fans.