Dave Grohl Doesn’t Appreciate Your Hipster Mustache

Dave Grohl enjoys a good mustache. “Not the fuckin’ ironic mustache,” the Foo Fighters front man quickly clarified midway through the band’s two-hour set at a sold-out Madison Square Garden Tuesday. “Not the fucking kids thinking they look like Burt Reynolds.” Ironic or not, it took the crowd (who were, to be sure, more K-Rock than Williamsburg) about the length of a Burt Reynolds film (ironic choice: Cannonball Run) to warm up to the Recording Academy’s favorite arena-rock band. But it wasn’t for a lack of effort. “Goddamn it, we’re playing Madison Square Fucking Garden tonight,” Grohl growled early on. “I hope everybody took a piss — we’re gonna be here for a while.” And with that, the former Nirvana skin man launched off of every accessible drum riser he could find, inserted “motherfucking” into virtually every song introduction (“This is motherfucking ‘Breakout’”), and spat his way through a barrage of Foo hits, stopping only briefly to indulge Taylor Hawkins in possibly the worst drum solo in MSG history. Oddly, it wasn’t until an acoustic mini-set that Grohl’s exhortations to “Come on!” finally seemed to move the crowd. By then, though, the room seemed a touch too big for the Foo Fighters, a big-hearted band dependent on a loving — and unironic — audience. —Dylan Stableford