Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
The LA Phil has played with plenty of pop and rock acts before, but it may have taken Foo Fighters to really put the dude in Dudamel.
And not a moment too soon, with this being famed conductor Gustavo Dudamel‘s final weekend at the helm of Los Angeles’ primary house symphony. The Phil’s hookup with Dave Grohl and company Saturday night was the middle act in a three-night local finale for Dudamel — a delectable dip into what old-school symphony buffs would once have considered low culture. The entire weekend, though, was about asking Beethoven to roll over, as it were, for some of the maestro’s less classical loves. The Foos collab was sandwiched in between Friday and Sunday concerts where the focus was on acknowledging Dudamel’s connections to Latin American and specifically Venezuelan music.
Understandably, Grohl had to make it at least a little about himself, too, or more to the point, this being a milestone for his 32-year-old band. “ This is a first,” he told the sold-out crowd at the outset. “First of all, I don’t know if you know, but Foo Fighters has never played the Hollywood Bowl before… Usually in this part of the program I ask the audience if they love rock ‘n’ roll music… But tonight, i’m gonna ask this question for the first time: Do you love Dudamel? Me too. so let’s play some rock ‘n’ roll for Mr. Dudamel. That’s what we came here to do.”
For a while, it seemed as if this show might really mark a serious first: Grohl, who tends to pepper his stage banter with the F-word at least once in every sentence — used as an exclamation, adjective, adverb, noun, verb and preposition — seemed to be inspired by the occasion, and by the presence of dozens of the world’s finest musicians in formalwear, to be deliberately abstaining from profanity. But if that was indeed a goal, finally, toward the end, he couldn’t help himself. “Ladies and gentlemen, on an evening like tonight, I don’t really know how to say goodbye, because I wish that we could do this every fucking night for the rest of our lives with all of these amazing people.”
A quick, unscientific survey of Foo fans suggested that not one of them would have a problem with that (in, you know, the theoretical world where Grohl could outspend and out-prestige the New York Philharmonic, where Dudamel is headed next). Fans online — those who’d been at the concert and those just tracking it from afar — immediately began clamoring for a commercial release of Saturday’s show. That desire was well-justified. When some bands do symphonic hook-ups, it makes for a satisfying experiment, but not necessarily one you need to hear endlessly. The arrangements here were so well-balanced, and so in keeping with what made these tracks feel as dramatic as they did in the first place, that you could imagine recordings from the show taking the place of the originals in some fans’ streaming playlists, indefinitely if not for all time.
Some artists who do Bowl shows with the LA Phil or its sister symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, run through something close to their normal set and require whoever is assigned to do the orchestrations to follow suit. Fortunately, Grohl took a broader view of what catalog material might benefit most from the augmentation, even if it meant narrowing down the length of the setlist, since orchestral players by definition don’t work rock ‘n’ roll hours.
“Listen, tonight we’re gonna play as many things as we can before we have to stop,” the singer said early in the hour-and-40-minutes performance. “You know, we usually play for three hours a night. But tonight, we picked the best songs that we could perform with our friends in the LA Phil and Mr. Gustavo Dudamel. Some of these you may have never heard before. So sit back and enjoy a song called ‘A320.'”
Now, pretty much the only people who’ve been holding out for “A320” to rejoin the Foos’ set after a quarter-century of absence are the half-dozen people still clutching to their CDs of the 1998 “Godzilla” soundtrack, where it first lived and kind of died a quiet death. But, as one of the rare songs to have included string arrangements on the original record, it was prime territory for revival here. (And the band has also been trying it out at a few non-orchestral tour stops this year, maybe with the thought of getting it ready for the Bowl.) As on the age-old original, the first half of the six-minute track was sweeping in its use of orchestral augmentation, and then the second half put aside both strings and vocals to turn into a pure band jam. That’s counterintuitive, since it would be more common to start a song without orchestration and then add it in, rather than the reverse. But the band fury is as climactic as anything that could be done continuing to have the full ensemble play… and Dudamel looked happy enough to put his baton down, turn around and just watch the group play for a few minutes. (The Phil was present at points on every one of the 15 songs song, but there were plenty of stretches within those songs where they took five.)
The band’s most faithful followers may be happy to hear “Times Like These” played for the 894th time (according to setlist.fm), but having “A320” come into the set early was a sign that this would really be a night to make the hardcore happy. And there ended up being three more rarities to set fans aflutter: “I Should Have Known,” being played live for the first time since 2012; “Razor,” being performed for the first time since 2006; and “Home,” getting a live airing for the first time since 2007 (and only the fifth performance overall). What these surprise additions meant, in human terms, is that Grohl understood the assignment, when it came to joining forces with another powerful institution: you find the songs that have been waiting for that moment.
Of course, he also considered some of the band’s greatest hits to be in that category. “This was made for the Hollywood Bowl, I think,” Grohl said, prefacing “My Hero.” It was hard to argue with that assessment, when the song took on a healthy dose of brass that sounded noble enough for a military funeral… not to mention a surprise solo harp for just a few seconds when the rest of the onstage complement dropped out for a dramatic pause.
But it really was some of the lesser known or slightly less celebrated songs making bigger impressions. A choir came out on two songs in the middle of the set, both of them highlights. First among them was “The Sky Is a Neighborhood” (the title of which lets you know that Grohl does have a poetic side, however much his stage banter falls into the category of basic-bitch). The frontman did some of his punkiest scream-singing of the night, content to know that the dozen or so berobed figures surrounding him could keep up the melodious quotient of the tune; Chris Shiflett turned in a short, sweet and rare guitar solo over some of that choral wailing, as the band thunderously pounded it out in 6/8 time. Maximalism doesn’t come much more maximal than that, and it was genuinely musical as well as bombastic.
Then, taking it way down, members of the participating YOLA (the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles), identifiable by their shirts (and by their, duh, youth), did a somber string opening for “Run,” replicating or replacing the studio version’s extended acoustic guitar intro, before the rock and the choir kicked in — another certain highlight, despite the tune not being on the list of internationally approved classics.
More expected standouts included “Aurora,” which Grohl has been faithfully dedicating nightly to Taylor Hawkins, with the orchestra again going silent during the final stretch so that the core band could use the hypnotically interesting riffage to send a former comrade into the afterlife with 17,000 phones aglow.
It didn’t seem as if it would get much more sentimental than that, yet it did, as the unlikely penultimate pick turned out to be “Home,” of which Grohl said, “We’ve only done this song once.” (He was off-count by about three instances, according to the online stats, but close enough.) Taking a stool for the most sedate of his ballads, Grohl explained that he was never previously able to get through the 2007 song “because it’s such a meaningful song to me that whenever I heard it, I couldn’t stop from crying. And whenever we played it, there’s no way I could make it through the entire song without just bursting into tears. But what I’ve found is that while you’re singing it, if you think of other things, you can actually make it to the end without crying.” There was a pause, while the audience waited for Grohl to explain if he was picturing the audience naked, or something. “I’m not gonna tell you what I was thinking about,” he then announced. “But we got to the end of the fucking song, so there you go.”