Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age and Some Good Old-Fashioned F*cking Rock & Roll

Review

A note before we start

We usually try to find the right words for what music does to us. Sunday night at BC Place apparently required one word — and its many variations — more often than most.

Fuck.

There is more swearing than usual in this review. After Queens of the Stone Age played like that, Foo Fighters played for nearly three hours, Dave Grohl kept asking who loves rock and roll, and we somehow ended up a few feet away for “Marigold,” cleaning up the language started to feel dishonest.

Consider yourself warned.

It has been a few days since Sunday night at BC Place.

I’m glad I didn’t write this on the drive home.

There are things you remember immediately after a show — the volume, the lights, the song you can’t stop talking about. Then there are the things that stay after some of that adrenaline wears off.

And a few days later, I keep coming back to something Dave Grohl asked us again and again throughout the night.

Who loves rock and roll?

He asked it over and over again.

Not rhetorically, either. Dave seemed genuinely committed to establishing exactly how much rock and roll BC Place was prepared to tolerate.

At one point, he launched into a whole thing about how Foo Fighters weren’t one of those bands. They weren’t going to come out, play for an hour and a half and disappear.

Two hours?

Fuck that.

Two and a half?

They had a lot of songs, motherfuckers.

And he wasn’t kidding.

Foo Fighters would play for nearly three hours. Before them, Queens of the Stone Age spent an hour completely blowing the fucking doors off the place. By the time “Everlong” finally brought the night to an end, we’d been given a pretty convincing demonstration of what happens when two bands still believe deeply in the basic proposition of getting on a stage, turning everything up and playing the shit out of their songs.

But Grohl kept coming back to that question.

Who loves rock and roll?

Standing in the pit at BC Place, the answer seemed fairly fucking obvious.

It was in the people around us. The ridiculous range of ages. People who had been carrying these songs around for decades standing beside people who couldn’t possibly have been alive when some of them were released. Everyone arriving at the same songs from completely different places and somehow ending up in exactly the same one.

That’s where this night gets interesting to me.

Because for almost four hours, Queens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters gave BC Place something increasingly easy to overcomplicate:

A bunch of people in a room together.

Guitars turned way the fuck up.

Songs we love.

And the chance to lose ourselves in them for a while.

So, Dave.

Who loves rock and roll?

We’ll get there.

First, Queens of the Stone Age Blew the Fucking Doors Off

We almost missed the beginning.

Mike and I had headed down to Vancouver with a couple of buddies, and by the time we made our way into BC Place and down to our spot in the pit, there were maybe ten minutes left before Queens of the Stone Age were supposed to start.

Then “Afternoon Delight” came over the PA.

Which, on its own, is about as wonderfully ridiculous an entrance song for Queens of the Stone Age as I can imagine.

But then things started getting weird.

The giant screens initially filled with huge images of the band members. As “Afternoon Delight” played, the images switched between their faces and other increasingly strange visuals.

Then the song itself started to change.

Slowly, this wonderfully harmless piece of ’70s soft rock began descending into some kind of fever dream. The sound warped. The atmosphere shifted. And every time the band members’ faces returned to the screens, something else had gone wrong.

They were becoming malformed.

Misshapen.

Distorted.

The visuals got stranger. The music got stranger. The whole thing kept deteriorating until whatever pleasant little world “Afternoon Delight” had started in had been completely fucking dismantled.

There could not have been a better introduction to Queens of the Stone Age.

Because a few minutes later, I realized the intro had essentially just explained the band.

Something recognizable.

Something seductive.

And something deeply fucking weird lurking underneath it.

Then:

“You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire.”

Fuck.

Queens of the Stone Age just detonated.

And somehow they did it while sunlight was still pouring into BC Place.

This band is incredibly tight.

Incredibly precise.

And yet somehow, simultaneously, loose and chaotic and sexy as fuck.

That’s the contradiction I couldn’t stop thinking about while watching them.

Everything is exactly where it needs to be, but it never feels sterile. The songs lurch and swagger. They threaten to come apart. They feel dangerous. But underneath it all are five musicians completely locked together.

Jon Theodore is fucking ferocious behind the drums. Troy Van Leeuwen, Michael Shuman and Dean Fertita build this enormous, crooked machine around Josh Homme, and the whole thing can feel like it’s staggering sideways even though the people playing it know exactly where it’s going.

And then there’s Homme.

What a fucking frontman.

He doesn’t chase your attention.

He has it.

There’s a looseness to him that somehow makes the band feel even more dangerous. The swagger. The humour. The guitar. That voice.

And watching him reminded me of something I’d heard him say in an interview with Neal Brennan a few years ago.

Talking about those rare nights when everything connects, Homme described wanting to create “moments where we’re in the moment together.”

That might be the best explanation I’ve heard for what he does onstage.

Because Homme isn’t just performing at the audience. He’s working the room. Pulling people in. Playing with them. Letting things breathe. Seeing how far he can push something before pulling everybody back.

He’s spoken about the other side of that relationship too. Discussing why Queens will continue playing “No One Knows,” Homme once described it as an “agreement with the audience.” People come wanting to hear certain things, but they also want the possibility of having no idea what’s going to happen.

Give them the constants.

Then you can surprise them.

Watching Queens of the Stone Age, you understand exactly what he means.

“Sick, Sick, Sick.”

“Misfit Love.”

“I Sat by the Ocean.”

“My God Is the Sun.”

“Paper Machete.”

And then “Make It Wit Chu.”

This was where you could see that relationship happening in real time.

Homme had the entire fucking place eating out of the palm of his hand.

He stretched the song out and let the crowd take it. Thousands of voices came back at him, and suddenly this enormous stadium felt strangely intimate.

Not performer over here and audience over there.

Everybody inside the same moment.

That’s the thing a setlist can never really explain afterward.

On paper, it says:

“Make It Wit Chu.”

That’s factually correct.

It’s also completely inadequate.

Because in the room, the song became something else.

Then came “Little Sister.”

“Go With the Flow.”

“No One Knows.”

And finally the absolutely monstrous “A Song for the Dead.”

Then they walked off.

An hour.

That was it.

And I immediately wanted another hour.

Actually, fuck that.

I wanted two.

I went into BC Place excited to see Queens of the Stone Age.

I left already wondering when I could see them headline.

Sometimes a live show satisfies your need to see a band.

Sometimes it makes the problem considerably worse.

This was the second kind.

Who Loves Rock and Roll?

Then Foo Fighters came out.

There was no easing into this one either.

“All My Life.”

“The Pretender.”

“Times Like These.”

“Rope.”

“Stacked Actors.”

That’s the first five songs.

It’s fucking ridiculous.

And somewhere in all of it, Dave started asking.

Who loves rock and roll?

It became almost a running conversation between Grohl and the crowd over the next three hours.

Something becomes obvious pretty quickly when you’re watching Dave Grohl from the pit:

He performs like someone who still fucking loves being in a rock band.

He runs. He screams. He laughs. He tells stories. He fucks around with the audience. He smashes at his guitar. He talks to a stadium as though he has somehow just bumped into all of us at a bar.

And then he asks again:

Who loves rock and roll?

The thing about enthusiasm is that, when it’s real, it’s contagious.

Grohl’s certainly is.

And Foo Fighters have a frankly absurd number of songs with which to make the case.

“My Hero.”

“Learn to Fly.”

“These Days.”

“Walk.”

“This Is a Call.”

One after another.

And looking around, you could see that these songs didn’t belong to one generation anymore.

That’s the strange thing about a band surviving this long.

Thirty-plus years of music doesn’t create one generation of fans.

It creates layers.

Maybe you found them through the first album.

Maybe The Colour and the Shape was yours.

Maybe it was There Is Nothing Left to Lose.

Maybe “Best of You.”

Maybe “The Pretender.”

Maybe Foo Fighters were already part of the furniture in your house before you were old enough to decide whether you liked them.

The crowd reflected all of it.

Kids.

Teenagers.

Twenty-somethings.

People in their thirties and forties.

People who had been listening to Dave Grohl make music since Nirvana.

And they weren’t experiencing these songs in exactly the same way.

That’s the part that interests me.

A song can be almost thirty years old without being almost thirty years old to you.

For one person in that stadium, “Everlong” might carry decades of memories.

For somebody else, maybe they’re only beginning to attach memories to it.

Same song.

Same room.

Completely different history.

Then everybody starts singing.

And for a few minutes, all those different histories collapse into the same moment.

Then the Stadium Got Small

Eventually, the gigantic rock show shrank.

The band made its way out to the B-stage.

Which, from where we were standing, meant Foo Fighters suddenly appeared almost directly in front of us.

The scale of everything changed.

After giant screens, stadium lights and thousands of people, there was Dave Grohl, right there, playing acoustic guitar.

“Wheels.”

Then came one of the moments of the entire night for me:

“Marigold.”

There are songs you hope a band plays because they’re hits.

And then there are songs that mean something different simply because you never really expected to be standing a few feet away when they played them.

Hearing “Marigold” live, from there, was one of those moments when the internal monologue becomes extremely sophisticated:

Holy fucking shit.

They followed it with “Big Me.”

Then Dave stayed out there alone for “Under You.”

For a few songs, a stadium show stopped feeling like a stadium show.

And that contradiction is part of what makes live music so strange.

You’re surrounded by thousands of strangers, and somehow one song can still make the experience feel intensely personal.

Then the rest of the band came back.

Time to turn everything up again.

The Best Kind of Band Introduction

Even the band introductions became something more interesting than band introductions.

Instead of simply calling out everyone’s name while they took a solo, Foo Fighters started playing pieces of the music that brought each member here.

Chris Shiflett’s history with No Use for a Name through “Invincible.”

Nate Mendel and Sunny Day Real Estate through “Seven.”

Rami Jaffee and The Wallflowers through “One Headlight.”

Pat Smear and The Germs through “Manimal.”

Inside BC Place.

The fucking Germs.

Come on.

Then Ilan Rubin stepped out from behind the kit and picked up a guitar for “Tap Dancing in a Minefield” from The New Regime.

And Dave sat down behind the drums.

There is something about watching Dave Grohl climb behind a drum kit that still feels significant. But there was something else I loved about this whole sequence.

Foo Fighters didn’t appear out of nowhere.

None of this music did.

Punk leads somewhere.

Hardcore leads somewhere.

Emo leads somewhere.

Alternative rock leads somewhere.

Bands break up. People move on. Musicians meet other musicians. Someone joins another band. Someone hears a record. Someone starts playing guitar.

Music keeps passing from person to person.

And standing there looking at the generations in the crowd, it was hard not to see the same thing happening on the other side of the stage.

The music gets passed down there too.

And They Just Kept Fucking Playing

By this point, Queens of the Stone Age had already destroyed the place for an hour.

Foo Fighters had been going for what felt like forever.

And somehow they weren’t remotely finished.

“Monkey Wrench.”

“Breakout.”

“Aurora.”

“Best of You.”

Remember that thing Dave had said earlier?

An hour and a half?

Two hours?

Two and a half?

They had a lot of songs, motherfuckers.

He really wasn’t kidding.

There are shows where you start checking the time near the end.

This wasn’t one of them.

Nearly three hours into Foo Fighters, I still didn’t want them to stop.

Eventually they left the stage.

Then came the encore.

And they reached all the way back to the first Foo Fighters record for “Exhausted.”

Then there was only one place left to go.

“Everlong.”

Of course.

Thousands of people singing it together inside BC Place.

Some had been carrying that song around for decades.

Others hadn’t.

For those few minutes, it didn’t make much difference.

Everyone knew it now.

So, Dave: Who Loves Rock and Roll?

You kept asking.

For almost three hours:

Who loves rock and roll?

And maybe that’s the part of the night I keep coming back to.

Because the answer wasn’t really in how loudly everyone screamed whenever you asked.

It was everywhere else.

It was in people losing their shit to Queens of the Stone Age while daylight still poured into the stadium.

It was in “Afternoon Delight” slowly mutating into a fever dream before Queens had played a single note.

It was in five musicians being impossibly precise and somehow still sounding loose, dangerous and sexy as fuck.

It was in Josh Homme holding the place in the palm of his hand during “Make It Wit Chu.”

It was in someone recognizing the first notes of a song they’ve carried around for decades.

It was in someone else hearing that same song live for the first time.

It was in Pat Smear playing The Germs inside BC Place.

It was in Dave Grohl getting behind a drum kit.

It was in “Marigold” making one little section of an enormous stadium suddenly feel very small.

It was in four friends heading down to Vancouver to see some bands.

It was in looking around the pit and seeing people of every age completely fucking overjoyed to be there.

And it was in the fact that, almost four hours after Queens of the Stone Age first walked onto that stage, we still didn’t want the night to end.

That’s what I think I’ll remember most.

The joy of it.

Not complicated.

Not cool.

Not ironic.

Just thousands of people having a fucking incredible time because some people walked onto a stage and played songs they loved.

Music doesn’t stay where it started.

It moves.

From bands to listeners.

From records into rooms.

From one generation to another.

From the musicians who made it to the people who carry it with them.

And then, every once in a while, all of those histories end up standing together in the same place.

So, Dave.

You wanted an answer.

Who loves rock and roll?

After Sunday night at BC Place?

We fucking do.

Resoundingly, unequivocally: yes.