Foo Fighters break out the tour
Get a leg up on summer with Concrete and Gold.
After more than 20 years on the road, you can’t blame the Foo Fighters for wanting to change things up this go-round.
“A lot of the venues on this trip are different,” says singer Dave Grohl. In just the last week of April, the band played the first concert at Atlanta’s renovated Georgia State Stadium and returned to West Palm Beach, Fla., for the first time in 12 years.
“I have this theory that if you wait long enough — if you wait a decade to go anywhere — by the time you finally make it there, you’ll have a sold-out show,” he reasons. “Then you just cycle that around the planet.“
The Foo Fighters will get the rest of May off, then spend June touring Europe. When they return to the USA in July, they’ll make their first visit to Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, an amphitheater that’s new to Grohl despite his growing up about an hour away in Springfield, Va.
“I think I’ve seen one show there, but we’ve never played there,” he explains. “I’m kind of excited to be able to fly home and be home for a few days and then play a big, noisy rock show.”
Even the fans on the furthest stretches of the lawn at Merriweather won’t be able to miss another new feature on the Concrete and Gold Tour: Taylor Hawkins’ 60-foot drum risers.
“That thing’s pretty fun,” Grohl, 49, admits. “When it comes to drum risers that go 60 feet up in the air, you can’t lose. That’s a win-win situation. We all grew up loving bands that had one of those at least once.”
Other summer concert stops include Philadelphia, New York City, Pittsburgh, Boston and Chicago.
It may take at least a 60-foot drum riser to top the spectacle of the band’s Sonic Highways tour, which was rechristened the Break a Leg tour after Grohl famously fell off a stage in Sweden in 2015, snapping his fibula and dislocating his ankle. Reluctant to cancel the tour and “inspired” by post-surgical pain meds, he came up with Plan B: a mobile “rock throne” resembling the one from Game of Thrones, but with gui- tar necks in place of swords.
“The first time I saw it or sat in it was at RFK,” he says, referring to the D.C. stadium where the band staged its 20th anniversary show. “I crutched up there, looked at it and started (expletive) howling laughing, ‘This is the stupidest idea.’ But I feel like those were some of the best shows we’ve ever played because I feel like the energy in the arena or stadium really changed when we were faced with some sort of hurdle. You’ll do anything to get past it and bring the place to life. And it did.”
The Foo Fighters, long known for their onstage comedy, are doubling down on the funny bits for their second Cal Jam festival, set for Oct. 6 in San Bernardino, Calif.
“This year, we’re actually doing a comedy tent,” says Grohl. “My cousin Timmy is a comedian and he’s sort of curating this whole thing. But I have a feeling that it will be full of musicians wishing that they were (onstage) in that comedy tent and not on the main stage.”
Which other musicians would he take on a rock stars-of-comedy tour?
“John Mayer is hilariously funny,” Grohl says. “But there is one that tops them all: Tom Waits. He’s brilliant and his wit is so dry. Any of his one-liners steals any show.”
Then there’s Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. “That guy can tell a limerick,” he says.
Grohl even uses humor as a screening criterion to pick potential opening acts or even whose records he buys.
“I’ve spent a lot of time watching interviews on YouTube and if I hear about a new artist, I’ll watch their interview before I even listen to their music. ‘Cause I gotta see if they got the funny.”