Review: Foo Fighters’ Grohl rocks hard – even while seated

You don’t often see a rock and roll concert where the lead singer shrieks, bangs his head and shreds his guitar, all while seated.

But somehow, rock star Dave Grohl is even more compelling doing his thing from atop a rock ‘n’ roll throne.

Grohl and the rest of the Foo Fighters performed a loud, high-energy show in front of a near-sellout of 10,500 people at Intrust Bank Arena on Wednesday, delivering one of the few pure rock shows the arena has had in its five-year history.

And Grohl led the proceedings from his tricked-out, rolling chair that he told the audience he sketched out for his road crew shortly after he fell off the stage at a concert in Sweden in June, breaking his fibula. The band canceled the rest of its European tour but returned a few weeks later with the throne.

“If you’ve never seen the band before, you probably think that I always sit in this ridiculously ... awesome throne,” he said. “I would tell you the big, long story about how I wound up in this throne, but I will not do that tonight, because it’s long and boring and I’m ... sick of telling it, to be honest.”

The video screens behind the band then showed Grohl’s hand-drawn sketch of a megachair with guitar necks jutting from the side, a halo of lights behind the seat. His road crew constructed it, he said, then added a cup holder and hydraulics that help it roll up and down the catwalk.

“When I broke my leg, I told them, ‘Hey, man, if we wanna keep touring for the rest of the year, you need to build me a ... killer throne,” he said.

Grohl, in between thrashing his head of long hair around and smacking on a piece of chewing gum, led the band through a long list of its biggest hits and deeper tracks.

Occasionally, he would get carried away and stand up for a few seconds on his boot.

Early in the set, the band played “Learn to Fly” plus “Times Like These,” “Something From Nothing,” “The Pretender” and “Congregation.”

The camera regularly projected drummer Taylor Hawkins onto the big screen behind the stage as he played. At one point, Grohl turned the microphone over to him to sing “Cold Day in the Sun.”

“I’m a drummer that turned into a singer,” Grohl said. “Taylor Hawkins is a singer that turned into a drummer.”

When the band performed “My Hero,” a song originally released in 1998 and featured on the band’s second album, “The Colour and the Shape,” Grohl stopped singing and urged the audience to take over. It did, singing several verses.

“That means we’ve got some old-school Foo Fighters fans here,” Grohl said, pointing out that a few people he could see from the stage with “salt and pepper beards” were wearing classic Foo Fighters concert T-shirts.

He launched into a story about how he now drives a Honda Odyssey minivan to get his three kids to school.

“I’m gonna sing this one for all the old-school fans tonight – and for everyone with a Honda Odyssey,” he said before launching into another older song, “Breakout” from 1999.

Grohl, salty but charming from the stage, also jokingly ridiculed the “car dealers” in the box seats, who he said were likely eating chicken fingers and looking for ranch dressing to dip them in. He promised, in an expletive-ridden rant, to rock them just as thoroughly as the hard-core fans on the floor.

He also chided one fan for burying his face in his cellphone, then later urged fans to get their lighters and phones out to light up the arena for a slowed-down version of “Big Me.”

“Every lighter and iPhone 6 in the house,” he said. “Samsung is welcome, too.”

The band wrapped up its just-over-two-hour set with songs “Ariandria,” “Monkey Wrench,” “These Days” and “What Did I Do?/God as My Witness” and “Best of You.”

This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 10:47 PM with the headline "Review: Foo Fighters’ Grohl rocks hard – even while seated."