Fighting Foo

Last week in Orlando Florida I was able to see the Foo Fighters play a private concert. This was part of an invitation only party thrown by the mobile phone division of LG as part of the CTIA convention. Once I heard Foo Fighters were part of this event I worked my industry network and was able to get onto the private list.

A small group of us from Helio broke off from our dinner at Hard Rock Live and headed over to the LG party. Security was one of the tightest as far as the CTIA private events went. If you weren't on their list you weren't going to get in. The party was at The Groove on Universal City Walk in Orlando. The club probably held a couple hundred people at most.

We arrived early around 8:30pm, had a couple of drinks and met up with some of the people we knew at LG. After we caught up I headed to the stage. The band ended up coming on a little after 10pm.

Foo Fighters
The Groove
Orlando, Florida
March 27, 2007

All My Life
My Hero
Times Like These
Learn To Fly
Breakout
For All The Cows
Best Of You
The One
Big Me
Generator
Monkeywrench
Everlong

During the set Dave Grohl made reference that they were playing an office party. Since Dave knew LG was footing the bill he started to joke around about how cool LG was and how Sears sucks and that he won't buy Kenmore, he'll only buy LG. Little did he know that it was the Mobile Phone division of LG sponsoring the event and not the LG appliances division. At least he tried.

Highlights of the set for me were All My Life, Learn To Fly, Monkeywrench and Everlong. I've been playing drums quite a bit a the house and All My Life, Learn To Fly and Monkeywrench are regularly a part of my practice set. The parts aren't that complex but they are extremely tiring to play and are just fast enough to be out of comfort zone. During the breakdown of All My Life I noticed their drummer slowed the tempo to make it easier to play. Pretty interesting that their drummer seemed to struggle ever so slightly with the exact same part of the song as I do.

The oddest part of the show was you had many people, myself included, dressed in casual business attire with jackets and slacks. Many of the people at the show weren't very familiar with the band. It seems such a waste that these private events don't allow for their biggest fans to see them. Fortunately I was able to take advantage of this and was able to get a setlist, Chris Shiflett's , their lead guitarist, guitar pic (red), and Dave Grohl's guitar pic (black). Chris only threw one pic into the audience and that was thrown directly to me. I pulled Dave's pic off his mic stand after the show.

Afterwards the group I was with headed back over to the Hard Rock for another private party. This one was thrown by MTV. After talking to a couple of people at the front desk we were able to get in to the party. The artist at the MTV party was Three 6 Mafia. A hip hop artist I had heard of in name only. After watching about 30 minutes of their set I still don't see the fascination with live hip hop performances. A bunch of people on stage rapping to music coming over the PA.

The MTV event was nice and was much more conducive to visiting with people. The LG Party was all about the Foo Fighters concert, and the MTV party was much more social and allowed for light business networking.

After finding the larger group of Helio people at the MTV party we said our goodbyes, broke for the night, and all headed back to our respective hotels.

Link to more pictures from Foo Fighter's show.