WHETHER or not Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl really digs acoustic music, he understands the magic required to make an unplugged performance electric.
At Monday’s Beacon Theater set, the music was unplugged, unflinching and often unforgettable – yet Grohl seemed unable to totally embrace it.
Glued to their seats, fans obviously loved this performance. Still, Grohl peppered the two-hour gig with a wistful patter for heaviness and a longing for his Stratocaster and Marshall amps.
He half-apologized for the acoustic set, saying, “This music is much more mellow than we usually make.” And at the close of the show, he said how jazzed he was to be heading back to the studio to make a rock album.
This show did rock, but it rocked quietly.
No bleeding eardrums, no piercing banshee wails, not even a stinging guitar solo. In many ways, it was probably a harder concert to pull off because volume masks missed notes and off-key musical collisions.
During the opening song, “Razor,” Grohl’s cascading finger-picked riffs approached classical precision, and until the last couple of songs, when his voice started wearing thin, his tenor was clear and forceful. For a point of reference, think of a young David Crosby singing “Almost Cut My Hair.”
Grohl was best, however, during his vocally bombastic, chest-thumping power ballad “My Hero.” He was at his worst on “Next Year,” a poopy Foo song tapped for the failed TV series “Ed.” That number should have died along with the show.
The Foo Fighters’ strength lies in the band’s aggressive rock shouters, such as “Best of You,” which was performed during the encore.
The other encore song of note was “Friend of a Friend,” in which the lyrics seem to reference Grohl’s relationship with his late Nirvana bandmate, Kurt Cobain.