Foo Fighters play loud and long at Atlantis opening night in D.C. |

At 9:38 p.m. — eight minutes past being a little too tidy a time for storytelling purposes — a rising tide of phones filled the Atlantis as Peter Stahl of the 1980s D.C. hardcore band Scream began thrashing about the stage while Foo Fighters (led by former Scream drummer Dave Grohl) banged out Bad Brains’ “At the Atlantis,” the first song christening the new D.C. rock club that’s a kinda-sorta replica of an old rock club that was kinda sorta revived one time already, just around the corner from where this newest club was.

It’s all a bit confusing.

But such is the Atlantis, the newest venue in the general I.M.P. family (9:30 Club, the Anthem, Lincoln Theatre, Merriweather Post Pavilion), which opened Tuesday night with a show by Foo Fighters — who also opened the Anthem and reopened 9:30 Club after its pandemic shutdown.

With a capacity of 450 and walls dripping with nostalgia, it’s meant to evoke the original 9:30 Club (which was originally called the Atlantis) at 930 F St. NW, a tiny rock club (199 capacity) in pre-gentrification downtown D.C. with an outsize influence that hosted acts such as Nirvana and R.E.M. and that was an early incubator for the city’s punk scene. If the Anthem looks like the current 9:30 Club blown up three sizes, the Atlantis is it in miniature.

It’s not a replica. I.M.P. chairman Seth Hurwitz noted that smell is gone, and there are fewer rats. Anyhow, how could it be the same? The cultural world has mostly moved on from rock, so the club probably won’t serve as an incubator for new acts, at least not the way the old one did, when guitar-based rock bands dominated the charts and airwaves. Instead, it’ll be a place for the remaining rock fans to go and relive the past, even if it can never be quite the same.

Case in point: Replacing the infamous pole that blocked views of the stage at the original is a single spotlight that will shine before shows to memorialize it. An actual, less obstructive pole, sits nearby. Case in point No. 2: the replica of the original street corner on the venue’s rooftop, complete with real newsstands (for reasons unknown, The Washington Post’s features the paper from the day Mayor Marion Barry was arrested on cocaine charges), covered in the ever-oxymoronic sanctioned graffiti.

So, it’s all a bit incongruous, a fact Grohl couldn’t help but mention throughout Tuesday’s show. He loved seeing the pole, topped with the crow’s nest where someone used to sit and film shows. He delighted in the desk at the entrance, like at the original. But then he “went to the bathroom, and they had hand dryers, and I thought, ‘This was all wrong.’” That’s the thing with progress. It changes things. Remanufacturing something authentic isn’t possible.

“This is the new old 9:30 Club. The 9:45 Club,” Grohl joked at one point. Later, he added, “I feel like this is the 9:30 Disney, 9:30 the ride.”

And it’s clear. This is supposed to be a place for alternative rock and alternative people, a place to catch unknown bands before they blow up, a fact Hurwitz stated (and restated) several times at that morning’s news conference (which featured the unveiling of a statue in Grohl’s likeness and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, Grohl and Hurwitz cutting a guitar string to open the place). But it debuted with one of the biggest acts in music playing to a crowd dressed appropriately for a Nationals game and drinking $10 beers from reusable cups.

Does any of that matter? Certainly not to the fans. Should it? Not for us to say.

And did it stop the Foo Fighters from playing as hard as Michael Jordan in Game 6, loud enough to literally shake the flooring for nearly 2½ hours?

Of course not.

Four hundred and fifty people is fewer than you think, especially spread out among two floors. The place gets packed tight, but no matter where you stand, you probably have at least some view of the band. Instead, the Foo Fighters fans became fast friends, swapping stories of their favorite Grohl interviews, buying each other beers — even though, as a cop from Herndon grumbled at one point, “They don’t have anything over 5 percent.”

The crowd spent about two hours pre-gaming, more than ready when Foo Fighters (and their brief guest, Stahl) took the stage. Grohl was in his usual jovial mood — you have to be if you’re going to be the ambassador of rock, which seems to be his calling these days — dumping water on his long locks, repeatedly exclaiming how long and loud the show would be, delighting himself by diving into Foghat’s “Slow Ride” in the middle of “Breakout.”

Mostly, he screamed and headbanged his way through the long set of hit after hit after hit — think: “Learn to Fly,” “This Is a Call,” “The Pretender,” “My Hero,” “Monkey Wrench,” “Best of You” — with the endurance of a seasoned athlete, an energy eventually far outpacing the crowd.

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Grohl’s always bantered with the audience, which, as it turns out, works much better when the room is tiny. But the primary target of his lighthearted jokes throughout the night was Hurwitz himself, the D.C. live music mogul who watched from a corner balcony like an emperor. “I’d love to sit here and talk all night, but then I’d sound like that a--hole,” Grohl joked, gesturing to him. Later, he let Hurwitz play drums on “Big Me,” claiming he was bribed 20 bucks to do so. Up went the phones.

Mostly manning the drums all night was Josh Freese, the in-demand session drummer who has done stints with Guns N’ Roses and Nine Inch Nails, among other alt-rock acts. Earlier in May, he was announced as the newest addition to Foo Fighters, following the unexpected death of the band’s longtime drummer, Taylor Hawkins, last March.

If you didn’t know the tragic news of Hawkins passing, you probably wouldn’t have known anything was different throughout the show: The band played like the tight stadium rock band they are, despite this being one of the first shows with Freese.

Though shirts featuring Hawkins’s likeness abounded in the crowd, Grohl didn’t mention him until the end of their set, when, before launching into the emotional slow jam “Aurora,” he said in the evening’s rare moment of solemnity: “Not a day goes by where we don’t think about it and talk about it. So this one’s for Taylor.”

If you want to know the real state of the Foo Fighters as they begin to play shows again following the death of Hawkins, you’d be better served looking outside of the Atlantis. Right outside, where the day started early for some on a chilly, overcast late-May morning, were a scattering of die-hard Foo Fanatics lounging along the brick wall of 9:30 Club in foldout patio chairs, desperate to be on the rails at the show, hoping to catch a glimpse of Grohl and crew (a hope rewarded by that 10:30 a.m. news conference).

Among them was the ticketless Chelsea Cederbaum, 36, who drove in from Gaithersburg in hopes of finding one. At one point, she said she had one in her digital shopping cart but was greeted with ERROR. She suspects her account was mistakenly labeled as a bot, because she was signed in on two devices. Not so, yelled the excitable 27-year-old Donny Shapiro, who overheard and asked her to repeat what time she got denied. May 8, 7:45. “I GOT YOUR TICKET!” he shouted. But they weren’t in competition with each other; she was happy for him, and he was rooting for her. Ticketmaster is a broken system, they explained.

Nine hours later, Shapiro was second in line to enter the venue — he got his rail — which looked like the line for any 9:30 Club show, not a show featuring a stadium rock band playing a closet. Cederbaum was in a separate second line, one the fans without tickets formed as democratically as they could, placing themselves in order of how early they arrived, the first person in line having first dibs on any available tickets.

Only one person in line seemed to be bending the rules, as he waved more than $2,000 in stacked and bound C-notes, offering it in exchange for a ticket. Another guy countered with an offer of $20,000. It was unclear whether he was joking.

You’d think this would be the most dour line this side of a slaughterhouse queue, but it was pure joy. Merely being in the vicinity of their favorite band was worth it. Cederbaum got a guitar pick from them. Totally worth it! John and Joyce Manocchi, an early-60s California-based couple who are following the band Deadhead-style in honor of Hawkins, flew in without tickets in hopes they’d be able to snag a pair. When it became pretty clear it wasn’t happening, they didn’t mind. “We got here early this morning for the statue unveiling, which was awesome,” John said. “So we got to see some good stuff.”

For those outside, the chance to reminisce with other fans, to maybe catch a glance of the band, was enough.

“It’s a good Foos crowd. I think all the people are just good people, because they start with the band,” John said. “The band’s such good people all around, helping the homeless, helping people get musical instruments. They’re just a bunch of good, good brothers.”

Inside, hours later, those good brothers hammered out the evening’s last note at midnight on the dot, finishing with a frequent closer, this time in one of the smallest venues they’ll ever play: their 1997 signature song “Everlong,” in which Grohl sings:

And I wonder

When I sing along with you

If everything could ever be this real forever

If anything could ever be this good again

The lyrics felt particularly poignant in this “9:30 Disney,” especially when you look at the lineup of the 44 bands playing the first 44 shows, bands such as Pixies, Modern English, Yo La Tengo, Bush, Billy Idol, X and Third Eye Blind, bands who might have one day actually played the original 9:30 Club in hopes of breaking big.

Because the answer, as the audience knows, as Grohl certainly knows, is no. Nothing can be “this real” forever. But that isn’t going to stop anyone from trying.

And maybe that’s the point.

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Foo Fighters play loud and long at Atlantis opening night in D.C.

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