Foo Fighters mark Dave Grohl’s birthday at the Forum

Dave Grohl had a solution in mind for anyone who didn’t know the words to the song he and the other Foo Fighters were about to play Wednesday night at Inglewood’s Kia Forum. “Look at the old guy next to you and just f-ing sing that,” he told the crowd, stringy black hair matted to his sweaty, reddened forehead. “Odds are he’s been listening to KROQ since the f-ing early ’80s.” Wednesday’s show was billed as both a celebration of Grohl’s 57th birthday - at one point two stagehands wheeled out an enormous cake - and a fundraiser for a couple of organizations fighting homelessness in the band’s hometown of Los Angeles. But nearly four years after the shocking death of drummer Taylor Hawkins , the concert was also a showcase of Foo Fighters’ essential durability: the group’s dogged yet cheerful determination to keep going no matter what. Wednesday’s show was a fundraiser for two organizations fighting homelessness in L.A. (Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times) Last year, the band fired Hawkins’ replacement, Josh Freese, without much explanation, then replaced him with Ilan Rubin of Nine Inch Nails. (In a very KROQ twist, Freese went on to take Rubin’s spot in Nine Inch Nails.) The drama with the drummers followed Grohl’s revelation in late 2024 that he’d fathered a child outside his marriage - a threatening reputational blow to a guy long regarded as a kind of benevolent rock ’n’ roll uncle. And just last week, the Foos announced that guitarist Pat Smear would miss the band’s upcoming gigs after accidentally “smashing the s- out of his left foot.” Jason Falkner, a former member of the great ’90s psych-pop band Jellyfish who’s played for years with Beck , filled in for Smear at the Forum, where Rubin’s kick drum bore a picture of Smear’s face. Despite all that, Foo Fighters came on like they always have: heavy, crunching, speedy, tuneful. “You know, I haven’t gone to the bathroom once this whole show,” Grohl said as he approached the two-hour mark. After coming up through the punk scene in Washington, D.C., Grohl became a star as the drummer of Nirvana ; he started Foo Fighters in 1994 as a way of grappling with the death that year of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Over the decades the band’s music has moved steadily toward the kind of classic rock that punks once professed to hate - think of Led Zeppelin, think of Aerosmith, go ahead and think of Boston - while Grohl has taken up the role of jocular frontman with a gusto approaching that of David Lee Roth. Here the Foos performed on a rotating stage that the singer happily said made him feel like “I’m in the showroom at the Mercedes dealership in Van Nuys.” (He also pointed out that the setup ensured that everyone would eventually “get a nice look at my ass.”) Key to the band’s longevity, of course, is a deep store of hits that now themselves count as staples of...

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