Foo Fighters Play Epic Club Show in Washington, D.C.: Concert Review

By Jem Aswad

Senior Music Editor

Dave Grohl is nothing if not loyal. He's said many times that he owes much of his iconic rock career to the nightclubs of his hometown of Washington D.C., and he's now brought his Foo Fighters to open or relaunch three of them for local promoter I.M.P., playing venues much, much smaller than the band's usual arena and festival stages. Over the past few years the band has played the opening gigs at the relaunched 9:30 Club, the legendary city venue where Grohl saw hundreds of bands as a teen; the Anthem; and, on Tuesday night, the new Atlantis, a state-of-the-art, 450-capacity club built to the almost identical specifications of the original 9:30 on F Street, which even has a rooftop bar filled with artifacts (a parking meter, phone booth, posters, newspaper stands and more) from the old club.

And for the opening song of their two-and-a-half-hour-long set at the Atlantis on Tuesday night, the band nodded to that shared history by opening with "At the Atlantis," a cover of the song by D.C. hardcore legends Bad Brains, featuring a guest vocal from Pete Stahl, singer of Grohl's pre-Nirvana band the Scream, who naturally enough finished by diving into the crowd. The band then launched into a 24-song set that featured nearly all of its hits as well as several songs from their forthcoming album "But Here We Are," which comes out Friday.

But for all the elation and nostalgia of the evening, everyone in attendance was aware that a very big shadow filled the room: It was just the fourth concert by the band since the sudden, tragic death of drummer Taylor Hawkins last year. He left very big shoes to fill, but there was never any question that the band would continue, and they have found a perfect new bandmate in veteran, versatile drummer Josh Freese. He's played "with a thousand bands," Grohl said onstage — "Actually about 930," Freese joked in one of countless references to the old club — noting that he’d played with everyone from punk group the Vandals to Nine Inch Nails, along with Sting, Guns N’ Roses, the Replacements and countless others (head here for more on his formidable background). "We could go down the list with this motherfucker and people would be like, ‘Now he's in the Foo Fighters?! What a demotion!’" Grohl laughed.

Freese brings all of that experience and more to his new role as touring drummer (reps for the band respectfully have declined to say whether he's a full member yet). His style is adjacent to but very different from that of both Hawkins and Grohl (who is one of the greatest drummers in rock history for his work with Nirvana alone). It's heavy but fluid, with thundering rolls and flashy, often jazzy fills, and he reinterprets many of the band's older songs respectfully while putting his own stamp on them. And he follows Grohl flawlessly — at countless points during the two-and-a-half-hour-long show, the two locked eyes, with Grohl giving a nod or a shrug that Freese immediately mirrored, or stretching out a fade or a crescendo longer and longer and longer, with the drummer gritting his teeth and playing energetic, complex gradually building snare rolls or flourishes, not showing any fatigue until a phew! when the song finally ended.

Make no mistake, the drums always have been the lead instrument in the Foo Fighters, and although the drummer is very different, the dynamic remains the same: The musical and visual focal points are Grohl and the drummer behind him, and the former is very clearly reveling in exploring the new possibilities offered by the latter.

Which is not to say that Hawkins isn't painfully missed; he very clearly is, although Grohl did not mention him until near the end of the show. "Getting up and playing shows again has been weird," he said. "I don't know if you know this but most of the people we work with have been around for 25, 30 years, so it really is a big family. That goes for everybody that you see up here. So just getting back up here and doing it again has been… a trip.

"And I can honestly say that we wouldn't be able to do it without you guys, so thank you very much for helping us heal," he concluded. "Not a day goes by where we don't think about him or talk about him. So this one's for T." The band then launched into "Aurora."

But that was the evening's only bittersweet moment: The rest, as always, was about the joyful release of rock ‘and’n’ roll. The band soared through 23 songs from across its entire career — along with a spontaneous cover of Foghat's 1975 dad-rock classic "Slow Ride" — from the small stage. Guitarists Pat Smear and Chris Shifflett hammered out power chords, the former providing the punk power (mostly on Gibsons) while the latter brought the finesse (ditto Fenders). Bassist Nate Mendel thundered out powerful and melodic basslines while keyboardist Rami Jaffee, playing with pared-down equipment due to space limitations, did his best to be heard above the riffage (what is a keyboardist supposed to do in a band with three guitarists?). Grohl's daughter Violet joined the band for a version of "Shame Shame," and the man himself was in fine vocal form for the rest of the night, "screaming my balls off," as he delicately put it, without growing hoarse until the very end.

Grohl seemed to know approximately half of the people in the audience and talked directly to a lot of them during the set, dropping lots of local references and inside jokes throughout, and even brought I.M.P. founder/ longtime 9:30 owner Seth Hurwitz onstage to play drums for one song (he did OK under the circumstances — hey, you trying following Josh Freese). But he summed up the spirit of the evening early in the show.

"The best thing about the original 930 was it was really inclusive," he said, "and kids like me, dorks from the suburbs, could come an d see these amazing, inspiring bands — and most of them were from Washington, D.C., which I consider to be one of the musical capitals of the country, of the world, for real. When we were little people we’d get to see our friends play, and our friends became our heroes, and they became the bands we wanted to impress."

And that rock ‘and’n’ roll circle of life is something that Grohl has basically dedicated his entire to. Back in 2012, he did a tour around his "Sound City" documentary about the L.A. studio of the same name, which basically functioned as an excuse for him and the Foos to bring people from his high school album collection on tour: Stevie Nicks, John Fogerty, Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick, Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan and even, to less-positive effect, soap opera star-turned-pop-rocker Rick Springfield. At the New York show, Fogerty said between songs, "Dave loves the rock ‘and’n’ roll so much, he's like a little kid."

And his infectious energy and sheer joy in reveling in the spirit and history of rock ‘and’n’ roll was on full display Tuesday night, and will continue as the band tours behind the new album, probably for upwards of the next couple of years. Now, if I could only get "Slow Ride" out of my head…