Foo Fighters sell out Dallas tour opener; give shoutouts to Dimebag Darrell, Taylor Hawkins

Dave Grohl said it was gonna be a long night.

He wasn’t lying. When you’ve been in a band like the Foo Fighters for almost three decades, it takes a while to work through all of your hits, let alone the deep cuts.

“We’re gonna play as many as we can before they kick us out of here,” Grohl told the crowd at the beginning of the sold-out show.

Over the course of nearly three hours Wednesday night, the Foo Fighters frontman and his band — bass guitarist Nate Mendel, lead guitarist Chris Shiflett, rhythm guitarist Pat Smear, keyboardist Rami Jaffee and drummer Josh Freese — led nearly 20,000 people at the Dos Equis Pavilion in Dallas in a master class in rock showmanship.

There was dancing. There was rocking. There was yelling and screaming. There was swearing. And there was a lot of running and sweating — or, as Grohl said while comparing himself to a Coors Light can, “condensation.” At one point, Freese caused the whole pavilion to shake with each rapid kick of the drum.

The setlist was heavy on the hits like “Best of You” and “My Hero,” with just enough new songs to prove that Grohl and co. are showing no signs of stopping, even after nearly 30 years.

At this point in their career, the Foos are like 100-degree days in a Texas summer: you can always count on them to deliver. If you’re looking for straight-up, muscular, down-the-middle rock ‘n’ roll that will get you screaming along with the band, there’s nobody better.

‘My Hero’ for Dimebag Darrell, Texas shoutout for Taylor Hawkins

This Dallas show is the first stop on the Foo Fighters’ new Everything or Nothing At All tour, in support of their latest album “But Here We Are.”

There were plenty of Texas shoutouts.

Grohl dedicated the band’s hit “My Hero” to late Pantera guitarist and Arlington’s own “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott. When the band played “Aurora” near the end of the night, Grohl said they play it at every show now because it was late drummer Taylor Hawkins’ favorite Foo Fighters song. Hawkins died in March 2022.

“He loved to play here because he was from here,” Grohl said. Hawkins grew up in Laguna Beach, Calif. but spent the first few years of his life in Fort Worth.

“Every time the Foo Fighters played here, in Dallas, he had his whole family come out. And all of his Texas relatives would come backstage,” Grohl said to cheers from the crowd.

Hawkins’ presence was felt at another moment of the night — the first encore song “The Teacher” is a beautiful, melancholy, 10-minute exercise in grief and processing Hawkins’ death, which Grohl performed while wielding a double-necked guitar. But the night felt more like a celebration than anything else, which Grohl acknowledged multiple times.

“I feel like we’re in someone’s backyard at a keg party,” he joked after introducing each member of the band with a mid-set jam session that included bits of songs from DEVO, the Beastie Boys, the Ramones and Nine Inch Nails.

It was hard to argue with him, especially when that jam session, and the concert in general, just felt so energetic and so fun. These guys clearly love hearing rock music, and they clearly still love playing rock music.

Hopefully they’ll still be screaming hits like “All My Life” and “My Hero” 30 years from now. And hopefully they’ll keep playing late into the night.

FOO FIGHTERS SET LIST, DOS EQUIS PAVILION, DALLAS TEXAS (MAY 1, 2024)

1. Bridge Burning

2. No Son of Mine

3. Rescued

4. The Pretender

5. Times Like These

6. La Dee Da

7. Breakout

8. Medicine at Midnight

9. Walk

10. Band introduction: Snippets of “Sabotage” (Beastie Boys cover); “Blitzkrieg Bop” (The Ramones cover); “The Outsider” (A Perfect Circle cover); “Whip It” (DEVO cover); “March of the Pigs” (Nine Inch Nails cover)

11. My Hero

12. The Sky Is A Neighborhood

13. Learn To Fly

14. Arlandria

15. These Days

16. Shame Shame

17. All My Life

18. Nothing At All

19. The Glass

20. Monkey Wrench

21. Aurora

22. Best of You

Encore

1. The Teacher

2. Everlong