Foo Fighters at the IZOD Center

On Tuesday, the Foo Fighers played at the former Continental Airlines Area (and the even-more-former Brendan Byrne Arena… man those were Chris Terreri days…), the IZOD Center! And I was there! It was a pretty good show, for the most part. Aside from Dave Grohl being full of himself and a few douchey fans in front of us, it was quite enjoyable. I’m not trying to bad-mouth Dave Grohl… he didn’t really come across as a douche (I need a thesaurus), but the amount of time he spent soaking in the crowd, they could have played “I’ll Stick Around.” Man, how can you not play that song? Also, he’s a dweeb without his beard.

I can’t be disappointed with the song selection, aside from the one I just mentioned. They played everything I wanted to hear, and then some. They started off strong with Let It Die, The Pretender, Times Like These, and Learn to Fly. They kept it going strong for a few more songs (some I recognized, some I don’t think I’ve ever heard before), and then they played “Stacked Actors.” I honestly didn’t know that song before the concert, but it was pretty rockin. But during it, Taylor Hawkins had a pretty sweet drum solo. Being the drummer that I am, coupled with the fact that I’m pretty sure the last drum solo I’ve seen live at a rock show was Travis Barker’s with Blink 182 at the first ever concert I ever went to (Blink with Fenix TX and Bad Religion… ’twas tight), I enjoyed the drum solo thoroughly. Then, they went into a pretty sweet jam with a harmonica player, that I also thought was really cool.

After that 15 minute rendition of Stacked Actors, a stage was lowered from the ceiling in the middle of the crowd, crushing hundreds! Just kidding, about the crushing. The stage-lowering happened. They brought out a bunch of extra musicians and played an acoustic set. Not that it wasn’t cool, I just didn’t really know any of the songs they played. Plus it was acoustic, and they played for quite a while, so it kind of drained me. Dave also introduced all of the people in the band individually, and each of them took a solo… so that probably took another 10 minutes. But the auxiliary percussionist did have the 2nd best triangle solo I have ever heard (Top honors go to me… Junior year in Moonglowers… Haha nice, I love how Vinny conducts. That’s not a video of the triangle solo, unfortunately). But that kind of added to the energy draining, for me at least. They did play a pretty cool rendition of “My Hero,” but I think I would have preferred hearing them rock that one out all electric-like.

So, after concluding their acoustic set, the band went back to the main stage, but Dave stayed and played the majority of “Everlong” by himself. I wasn’t completely impressed by it in the beginning… but at the end the whole band kicked in and made up for it. I thought the best part of the whole show was when Dave ran from the acoustic stage to the main stage while playing the end of Everlong, and then kicking it straight into “Monkey Wrench,” my favorite Foo Fighters song by far. They were making it a habit of playing extended endings for all of their songs, and I think they took it too far with Monkey Wrench. They broke it up in the middle in a weird way, and I felt that if they just played it through I would have enjoyed it more. In any case, it was still fun to hear.

Then they closed with “All My Life,” Dave got full of himself again, and then they encored. The encore was pretty good, they played “Big Me” (come on, there’s no way I could have gotten through this post without linking this video), their version of “Bargain” by The Who (which they played at The Who Rock Honors… if you didn’t get a chance to watch that, I recommend you do. They also played “Young Man Blues,” which they played at the Rock Honors), and wrapped it all up with “Best of You.” Here’s the whole set list, along with some pictures and crappy videos. I forgot my camera, so pretend I took them!