Like A Zipgun On Parade: Green Day Live at the Wachovia Center, Philadelphia, September 7, 2005

While the Moms and Brads are away....

"This is totally not what I expected," said the father of the 10-ish year old girl who sat behind us at Wednesday night's Green Day show at the Wachovia Center in Philly. "I expected lots of leather and spiked hair and chains. This is like family night."

True, very true: I too had expected a sea of kids in black clothing and red ties and mascara; truth be told, I dont think I saw anybody dressed like Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day's punkily puckish lead singer/guitarist, which struck me as odd. What I saw were a lot of parents (like me) bringing their teenage and not-too-but-somewhat-rebellious kids to the show.

I have liked Green Day since they first hit the scene a decade or so ago. Their first major album, Dookie, kept the rebellious teenage stance of the best of punk but managed to have incredible pop melodies that you could hum along to. Certainly they were the most "bleeped" top 40, Grammy winning band I had heard, but I liked them. Later, like everybody else, I loved their life-affirming semi-ballad "Time of Your Life". They were a good band - not classic, but great. And, to be honest, they seemed to drop off the radar -- so when my son started raving about them last year when their album American Idiot came out, I was completely surprised.

Rage and Love

American Idiot is one of that trickiest of sub-genres in popular music, the rock opera. Usually they, well, suck. AI has a plot, one that takes some lyric reading to put together; it has characters. Essentially, it is the story of a kid called the Jesus of Suburbia, an angry suburban teenager in Bush's America, largely left alone by his divorced parents, who appears (again, this is my interp - apparently Billie Joe has a film treatment making the rounds, so we'll see) to gather something of a following around himself, only to find his status as a leader of subdivision kids is not enough. Around him, parents lie, Presidents start bad wars, and everything is constantly called into question.

Jesus leaves for the big city looking for some kind of redemption and reinvents himself as a gang leader/rabble rouser named St. Jimmy and falls in love with another rebel girl referred to as Whatsername. Jimmy apparently gets involved with drugs and a host of other things that ruin his life even further; Whatsername leaves him, and eventually he finds his way back home to the 'burbs, wiser for the experience and reflective on his life and relationship.

Or something. Anyway, thats what I think.

In any event, American Idiot is a flat-out, start-to-finish great album, which a year later we are still listening to and I dont get tired of. It is one of the best rock albums I have ever heard, at times blisteringly hard and caustic; at other times achingly sad and wistful. Green Day --which, by the way, is a trio, including the aforementioned Mr. Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tre Cool--throws out the rulebook on punk and allows Beatle-esque songs, arena-ready singalongs, and a couple of five-part, nine-minute songs that are the high points of the record.

For the MoleSon, Green Day is a religion at the moment, so when the opportunity to get really good tickets for him arose back in April I took it and kept my mouth shut. We ventured forth this past Wednesday to the Wachovia Center to pay respects.

I Got A Rock and Roll Band

I expected the crowd to be 28,000 teenagers and 2,000 parents, and that's probably about right, but I expected the teens to look more sullen and cranky. Didnt happen. To be honest, I was grateful.

After a good but not particularly involving opening set from up and comers Jimmy Eat World, Green Day promptly took the stage a few minutes after 8:00 blasting the strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra (aka the 2001 "bom, bom, bom BOM BOM" music) and ripped right into American Idiot, the brilliant 9-minute opus Jesus of Suburbia, and the "anti-war not anti-America" hit single Holiday. It was an excellent start, especially for those of us hoping this would be one of the intermittent shows on this tour where they play the entire American Idiot album, start to finish. They didn't but it was a welcome opening nonetheless.

Never have I seen more pyrotechnics, explosions, and lighting effects than at this show, which got a bit tiresome after awhile. Billie Joe Armstrong has obviously taken to playing enormous arenas, running back and forth from one end of the stage to the other and screaming "Philadelphia!!!" at least 35 times over the next two hours. He has a real charisma but unfortunately (and the fifteen year old worshipper with me concurred) they spent way too much time during the show doing goofy audience participation stuff and unnecessary (and unfunny) jokes. With all the shenanigans, they could have easily added another two or three (or more) songs to the lineup, especially for a band whose catalog is largely made up of 2 minute songs.

Still, these are ultimately minor sour grapes. Green Day is a great live band and put on 3/4 of a great show. Dirnt and Cool are one of the best hard rock rhythm units ever, as far as I'm concerned, right up there with Alex + Mike and Geddy + Neil (shame on you if you have to ask). They ended up doing about half of American Idiot (also including Wake Me Up When September Ends, Are We The Waiting, St. Jimmy, and Boulevard of Broken Dreams) and good selection of their greatest hits - including Longview, She, Maria, and Basket Case, among others.

They closed the show with Queen's We Are The Champions, and Billie Joe did a solo electric take on Good Riddance (Time of Your Life). All in all, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best concert you've ever been to (for me, u2's Rattle and Hum concerts in Tempe, Arizona, December, 1987) and the worst concert you've ever been to (Pink Floyd with no Roger Waters, Seattle Kingdome, December, 1987), this would be about a 7.5-8.

Can You Hear Me Whining?

I always wonder when bands reinvent themselves and hit it big like this, what they will do next. I am certainly hopeful that Green Day will not turn into just another arena band and lose the subtleties and wry humor they have always put into their music. I have recently read they have no intention of rushing into the next record and I applaud them for that; they are one of the best rock bands out there and I would hate to see them disappear again.

When I hear Green Day-wannabe bands like My Chemical Romance (a very good band) say their next album will be more "arena friendly" I cringe for fear they will dump what made them so interesting in the first place. I dont think Green Day set out to make an arena-rock record with Idiot - it just turned out that way.

Everybody take a lesson from bands like System of a Down who are on a ride down a particular road and have invited us to come along -- as opposed to those who pick us up and then ask us for directions. Your instincts for your music are much better, usually, than ours - take the time to listen to them. We'll still be here.

Don't want to be an American idiot.

One nation controlled by the media.

Information age of hysteria.

It's going out to idiot America.