Foo Fighters kick off their tour with a rousing D.C. set
Foo Fighters not WASHINGTON only kicked off a mammoth global tour last week, but also christened a new concert venue.
The band’s frontman, Dave Grohl, who grew up in nearby Alexandria, Va., before becoming the drummer for Nirvana, fed off the festival-like atmosphere inside The Anthem, a 6,000-capacity theater along Washington’s developing southwest waterfront.
Early in the 21⁄ 2- hour set, Grohl ventured to the front of the stage and put both hands on his heart as the crowd serenaded him with the chorus of Learn to Fly, a soaring hit from the 1999 album There Is Nothing Left to Lose.
Soon after, Grohl told the crowd he had asked the music hall’s owner about a curfew. “There isn’t one!” he informed the raucous revelers.
Compared with other stops on the Foo Fighters tour, which continues this month throughout the Midwest and Southeast, this venue is small.
The sardine-packed standing crowd pulsed with excitement. Throughout the 22-song set, the band interspersed grungy greatest hits from their two-decadeplus career, such as All My Life and Monkey Wrench, with material from the band’s latest album, Concrete and Gold, released last month.
That mixture satisfied the crowd, which sang — or screamed — the chorus of Best of You.
Along with Grohl, who wields a guitar, lead guitarist Chris Shif- lett, rhythm guitarist Pat Smear and bassist Nate Mendel created a hefty wall of hard rock sound.
Drummer Taylor Hawkins handled vocals on new, psychedelic-tinged Sunday Rain and the Rolling Stones’ Bitch. Keyboardist Rami Jaffee rounds out the band, which brought out a trio of backup singers for some songs. A musical high point was Con
gregation from 2014’s Sonic High
ways. The escalating, rhapsodic song unleashed midway through the set transformed the venue into a raucous rock cathedral.
Grohl mentioned neither the passing of fellow rocker Tom Petty, for whom he played drums on a 1994 Saturday Night Live broadcast, nor the city’s baseball team, the Washington Nationals, who 2 miles away were about to be knocked out of the playoffs by the Chicago Cubs.
He did thank the city for “the best childhood a person could ever ask for.”
Grohl has become a standard bearer for hard rock music: He directed and produced the docu- mentary Sound City, about the famous L.A. recording studio, and 2014 HBO series Sonic Highways, about music across the USA.
Grohl and his fellow Foos are even more revelatory in the flesh.