The evening didn’t start well; we hit a traffic jam about halfway out of Austin that seriously impeded our progress and put us into a time crunch. Unfortunately, due to traffic I missed the opening band Franz Ferdinand, although from all accounts I heard they were good.
So here we have Green Day, the band that brought “punk rock” to the masses. After their massive hit album Dookie they had a slew of mediocre albums but have recently become media darlings once again.
Having seen Green Day in ’89 play for about 40 people, this was the first time I’d seen them live in 20 years. The crowd was unbelievable, the AT&T Center is a huge venue and it was packed. Packed full of screaming, squealing adolescent brats in the latest Hot Topic gear.
Billie Joe and company came running out also dressed in the latest Hot Topic fashions. They opened up with hits from their latest album 21st Century Breakdown. Although the critics love the album and the crowd seemed to eat it up, I found the music to be pedantic and their stage antics were straight out of the Jonas Brothers playbook.
There were two other guitar players, one of them behind the scenes and I’m not exactly sure that Billie Joe was actually playing guitar most of the time. He was busy trotting around the stage and up and down the ego ramp à la Joe Jonas. I was actually surprised he didn’t have one of those headphone mics on.
To be honest, the show and music is straight up pap for so-called disaffected middle-American suburban kids. There’s just enough swagger to thumb their nose at authority while in reality they go along complacently with the status quo.
I walked out about half-way through the show. I’m told they did play some of their hits from the Dookie album (which wasn’t a bad album). Predictably they closed the show with "Good Riddance," which you may recognize as that song from countless TV dramas, also known as “Time of Your Life”.
The masses love these guys, but then again these are the same people that bought 10 million Kelly Clarkson albums. Call me jaded, but I just wasn’t buying what they were selling.
