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.

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 any classic rock playlist. “Learn to Fly” and “Times Like These” were crisply melodic; “My Hero,” which Grohl dedicated to Smear and his broken foot, was somehow bludgeoning and propulsive. “Monkey Wrench” sounded like an atomic-powered version of “Johnny B. Goode.” And “Best of You” had a soulful tug that reminded you that Prince famously covered the song in the rain at the Super Bowl in 2007.

The Wednesday show also celebrated Dave Grohl’s 57th birthday.

(Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times)

Around the halfway mark, Grohl threw a bit of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” into the Foos’ “No Son of Mine” — “That was for Lemmy,” he said of the late Motörhead frontman — then had his bandmates take a break as he sang a solo rendition of “Under You,” about his struggle to accept Hawkins’ passing.

The last time Foo Fighters played the Forum, he noted, was in 2022 at an all-star tribute to the drummer. After “Under You,” the rest of the group returned for a long, searching take on “Aurora,” which Grohl has said was the first song he and Hawkins wrote together.

“Sorry we’re getting so emotional,” he said, though few in the intergenerational crowd seemed to mind. (Less enthusiastically received was the band’s aimless jamming in “Run.”)

Foo Fighters closed, as they typically do, with “Everlong,” the sturdy mid-’90s alt-rock anthem that never seems to go out of fashion even — or especially — among kids who hadn’t been born when it came out.

“Hello,” Grohl sang coolly over a bed of thrumming electric guitars, “I’ve waited here for you.”