MUSIC: The Foo Fighters fly high at The Joint

    “Daddy likes to talk.”
    And so it began.
    “I’ve had a couple of drinks.”
    And so it continued.
    Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl was in fine spirits at a sold-out Joint Thursday night at the Hard Rock, and by spirits, we mean the kind that Grandpa refers to as his “cough medicine.”
    If you listened hard enough, you could hear the dude’s liver gently weep.
    Its loss, our gain.
    Grohl was on fire right from the start, and he knew it.
    “This might as well be the last show you ever see,” he quipped early on in the show. “It’s all downhill from here.”
     And clearly, Grohl was enjoying the ride, his shaggy mane earning overtime pay as it flew about the place like the business end of a dust mop in front of some giant turbine.   
    The guy was everywhere at once, bounding about the stage in grand leaps, strangling the neck of his guitar while bent at the knees, looking more animated than the collective works of Hanna-Barbera.
    The setting had a lot to do with it. 
    “Here’s the deal, we’re used to playing places that hold 300,000 people,” Grohl snickered during one of his many extended monologues. “All the places that U2 plays, they’re too small.”
    And so the band’s gig at The Joint went off like an M-80 in a broom closet.
    Things reached a fever pitch early, as a show-opening “Let It Die” slowly built from its muted first strains into an eruption of power chords and curled lips.  
    From there, it was like the band was in a batting cage, bashing out one hit after the next — “Times Like These,” “Learn To Fly,” a turgid, anvil-heavy “Stacked Actors.”  
    The momentum was slowed down a tad by an extended acoustic interlude, where the volume was toned down on more reflective numbers like “Skin & Bones” and “My Hero.”
    The songs were fleshed out by a violinist, keyboardist and percussionist, the latter of which Grohl had great fun with.
    “It’s 2008, it’s the year of the triangle, you a!@holes,” he yowled as he brought the guy out for a triangle solo.
    But then it was back to business as usual, with Grohl positively howling through tunes like “Monkey Wrench” and “All My Life” while the band added thick layers of muscle to the already beefy tunes.
    Grohl came to fame in an era of dour, overserious rock stars, and what’s made the Foos fan favorites is that Grohl always broke from that tradition and seemed to, you know, actually enjoy himself from time to time.
    He’s long been a rock and roll populist — and proud of it.   
    His big contribution to the ’90s alt-rock boom other than a slew of solid hits: the big, goofy, satisfied grin.
    And he wasn’t alone in sporting one on this night.