September 3, 2005
Now a Band That It Once Would Parody
By JON PARELES
The New York Times
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Sept. 1 - The concert at Giants Stadium tonight was every bit a stadium concert, reveling in big-event shtick. The headliner arrived to the "Also Sprach Zarathustra" fanfare; there were smoke machines, explosions, sing-alongs, confetti, lighters held aloft and, of course, the Wave. The lead singer shouted "New Jersey!" on any plausible occasion and proudly announced that it was the biggest show the band had ever played in America.
The odd thing was that the headliner was Green Day, a band that came out of the punk clubs of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1980's. Punk, of course, had arrived a decade earlier as a corrective to bloated 1970's stadium rock. The three-man Green Day always had a sense of melody, as well as more outright virtuosity than a typical punk band, and in the mid-1990's it fulfilled the long-delayed promise that punk rock could triumph in the pop Top 10. For all it owed to the Ramones and California punk-pop bands like the Adolescents, Green Day also had its own twists, like the swing-band beat of "Longview."
Green Day's most recent album, "American Idiot" (Reprise), is nothing less than a rock opera, with music that has no use for punk-rock orthodoxy. After its punk-speed title song, it reaches back to glam rock, Merseybeat and the rock suites that bands like the Who and the Beatles came up with in the late 1960's. It also has tuneful, expansive ballads - "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" - that were more than ready for the cellphone-illuminated sing-alongs they got tonight. But the songs maintain the point of view Green Day started with in the late 1980's: disgust with authority - particularly what "American Idiot" calls the "redneck agenda" - and sympathy for outcasts.
Onstage, Green Day's lead singer and guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, wore two armbands: "Rage" on his right arm and "Love" on his left, echoing lyrics from the album. And Green Day started the concert by playing through most of the album's first half, with all its variety and instrumental episodes. To perform the new songs, Green Day added three musicians onstage, playing guitar, horns and keyboards, along with its versatile, tireless rhythm section of Mike Dirnt on bass and Tré Cool on drums.
But rather than finish out the album's dramatic arc, Green Day then chose to play at being a stadium band. Mr. Armstrong bounded across the stage and onto a runway into the audience, using every frontman tactic from Chuck Berry's duckwalk to rappers' crotch-grabbing; sometimes freed of his guitar, he could use his arms and microphone to gesticulate.
There were long stretches between older hits, including "Longview" and "Basket Case," and old authority-tweaking songs, like "Minority." Mr. Armstrong used them to coax applause and boos from each side of the stadium - the fans didn't mind accepting his authority - and for one stretch he went into a soul medley complete with a parody of James Brown's collapse-and-cape routine. One of Green Day's longtime concert routines - bringing three audience members onstage to be a band - discovered a woman who not only knew her chords, but also did her own stadium strut and leaped off the drum riser for a finale.
Mr. Armstrong pleased most of the audience; he has timing, charisma and plenty of eyeliner, and he's not afraid to sweat. The fans know their stadium cues as well as he does, and they yelled all they could. But what may have been a fond parody of rock excess started to turn into, well, a stadium concert, complete with a full-length version of Queen's "We Are the Champions," which has a very un-Green Day sentiment: "No time for losers."
Standard punk was made for clubs, not stadiums, and a full set of three-minute punk blasts wouldn't suit the band or the place. But Green Day's own catalog of songs include such diverse material - as Mr. Armstrong proved with a final, solo version of the folky "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," intermittently revving up for punk guitar strumming - that the band could have played a stadium concert with far less filler.
Sharing the bill were two bands that represented the convoluted, self-conscious, latter-day punk-pop known as emo. Jimmy Eat World's songs switch between self-help advice and mixed emotions, mirrored in song structures that knock together idioms, like major-key punk-pop colliding with grunge. Against Me, which opened the concert, has a singer who blurts personal ambivalences and political grievances in an accusatory punk rasp. Around him, however, the music often sidesteps punk, reaching back to muscular, midtempo 1970's rock instead. The band treated the stadium as a larger club, not yet a format all its own.
Green Day performs tonightat Gillette Stadium in Boston. Its North American tour concludes on Oct. 9 in Carson, Calif., after stops that include Philadelphia on Wednesday and Hartford on Friday.
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