Green Day
Started: 2024-09-21 22:19:07
Submitted: 2024-09-22 21:46:36
Visibility: World-readable
A cultural artifact of my generation
I've been listening to the breakout pop-punk band Green Day since I was a teenager in the 1990s and their cultural reach was inescapable. When I learned they were playing a show at Oracle Park in San Francisco this fall, as part of a tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of their breakout major label debut Dookie (and the 20th anniversary of American Idiot, and also their new album Saviors) I figured I should go, but I delayed getting tickets past the point where the show was officially "sold out" (though plenty of tickets were still available on secondary markets, both on Ticketmaster's official resale platform and on Stubhub). This week I finally got around to asking Calvin if he wanted to go to the show, and somewhat to my surprise he said "sure". (He's at the age where he ought to be developing his own relationship with music that will remain meaningful to him, whatever that music happens to be; but if I can share some of the cultural artifacts from my generation. I still remember going with my father to see The Moody Blues at Fiddler's Green in Denver when I was in high school.) I nipped over to Stubhub and picked up two seats in the first level of permanent seats in the stands, surrounding the field normally used to play baseball that would be replaced by the closest seats in front of the stage at the back of the field.
Bringing Calvin along meant I needed to account for his school schedule in my travel logistics. His last class gets out at 15:35, and the first opening band started playing at 17:30. I picked up Calvin, along with his bike, dropped by the house to deposit the bike and his backpack, and headed across the mountain and up the peninsula. I parked at the Caltrain station in Milbrae, where parking was plentiful and I could catch a train straight to Soma (and, depending when the show wrapped up and when we could get out of the stadium, we had the option of taking either BART or Caltrain back). This was the last day of Caltrain's legacy diesel locomotive service on the peninsula. Caltrain was ramping up to roll out its new all-electric service the next day, and I saw two brand-new red-and-white Stadler EMUs head south while we waited for our northbound train; but they were still running the old timetable and running a few diesel trains.
When our train pulled up it was an old gallery car, distinctive for its center aisle with an upper seating deck open to below, which I'm pretty sure I remember riding as a kid living on the peninsula in the 1980s. I found a pair of seats on the upper level and got Calvin to get a selfie commemorating our last ride in this venerable old rolling stock.
The train dropped us off a block from the ballpark. It looked like half of the other passengers on the train might also be heading to the show; I saw some people looking at maps of the seats in the stadium, and as soon as we stepped out onto the plaza in front of the station we were met by merchants hawking t-shirts for the show. I saw several other groups comprised of GenX dads with teenage children going to the show. We entered the ballpark (one of the security people complimented Calvin on his goggles as we entered), took the escalator to the crowded concourse at the top of the first level of stadium seating, while the second opening band (punk band Rancid) played on the stage below us, and started looking for food. We found nachos, which seemed adequately edible (what they lacked in nutritional value, I noted to Calvin, they made up for in raw calories), and headed to our seats.
My last-minute seats put us in the eighth row of section 104, which I think would be past first base in the normal ballpark configuration, but in concert configuration lined us right up with the stage placed near the back of the outfield. The stage faced home plate, looking diagonally into the field, providing a good view from most of the seats surrounding the field. The bleachers behind the outfield were empty, and the last few sections on the upper tier of seats, where the seats start to wrap around the end of the ballpark to face home plate, were mostly empty. The field had been covered with a temporary white deck that looked like it was probably made out of durable plastic, which supported rows of temporary seats set up in sections oriented towards the stage. I think there was a standing-only pit right at the front of the stage, but I wasn't close enough to see. We were just high enough to see straight across the heads of the people on the field to look right onto the stage, though at this distance the performers on stage were tiny and it was easier to watch the giant monitors on either side of the stage.
I was not previously familiar with the band Rancid, which turned out to be a punk band from the Bay Area. The speakers were loud enough from where I was sitting in the stands that I needed the earplugs I brought. I could feel the thump of the bass vibrating my shirt. I usually couldn't understand the lyrics, but for an opening band I was mostly interested in the vibe and the guitar riffs, and they provided. The frontman took the opportunity to complain about the upcoming move of the Oakland A's to Las Vegas, driven by owner John Fisher's desire to squeeze more money out of the team, at the expense of long-term East Bay fans.
After Rancid finished their set, Smashing Pumpkins to the stage for a career-spanning 65-minute set. I was aware of the band as a teenager growing up in the 1990s, and I could pick out a couple of their hits, but I hadn't really listened to them at length until the week leading up to the concert, when I started cramming the music I was about to hear live. Frontman Billy Corgan wore a long coat with a black-and-white pattern and led the band through an energetic set, most of which I didn't recognize. My best view of the stage was through the large LED monitors on either side, which focused on the long-term band members and mostly ignored the other people on stage, including a woman playing guitar and dancing on stage. I had a hard time finding a bass player on stage; I could hear the bass in the music but whoever was playing bass was not standing up front and wasn't favored in the camera. The monitors, and the stage itself, ended up over-exposed and washed out in the photos I took with my phone, because its camera was trying to adjust to the overall light in the ballpark, which was much dimmer than the stage lights.
From where I sat the mix sounded a bit muddled; it was hard to follow the music, and even harder to understand the vocals. But part of this seemed to be Smashing Pumpkins' overall aesthetic (the mix on their studio albums also puts the vocals low in the mix), and for the songs I recognized (including "Today" and "1979"; and my new favorite "Cherub Rock", which articulates the band's early-nineties post-grunge arena-scale rock aesthetic) I had an easier time hearing the music, because I knew what it was supposed to sound like so I could fill in the gaps in the on-stage orchestration and the frequency response in the arena. And I could sort of sing along with the songs I recognized.
As the sun set the fog rolled in, mixing with the fog generated by fog machines on the stage to add an ethereal glow to the stage lights.
Smashing Pumpkins finished their set and I took advantage of the intermission to drop by the restroom and get something to drink, which involved traversing the very-crowded concourse, made somewhat worse by the lines for the concessions and merch (and the restrooms, which I accidentally found myself standing in, but turned out to be exactly what I wanted) obstructing the flow of people on the concourse.
The intermission ended before we had the chance to get back to our seats. (The music from the stage drew everyone off the concourse, clearing out the crowds.) By the time we got back to our seats we saw that the band wasn't quite out yet; first was a costumed bunny (looking like a sports mascot, wearing a Giants jersey) that is apparently a fixture at Green Day concerts. The band took the stage while bars from the Imperial March played, then launched into "The American Dream Is Killing Me" from their new album Saviors, before kicking off their 1994 album Dookie end-to-end, starting with fireworks launched from behind the stage and an illuminated recreation of the explosion from the album cover emanating from the stage next to the platform where drummer Tré Cool played.
My cramming for the concert involved listening to Dookie end-to-end a couple of times in the week before the concert. I sang along to "Basket Case" ("Do you have the time/ to listen to me whine/ about nothing and everything/ all at once"; I sent Calvin the 30-year-old music video on YouTube ahead of the show) and enjoyed the whole set.
In the middle of the album a small blimp with "Bad Year" scrawled on the side appeared to the right of the stage, connected to handlers on the ground who walked it through the crowd on the field to the other side of the stage. Bombs fell from the blimp as it climbed, matching the animation on the monitors on stage showing a plane engaged in a dive-bombing run.
One thing I wondered, while watching the band play thirty-year-old material, is that they've been doing the same thing their entire lives. They formed the band in high school, then released their breakout album when they were 22. Now the trio at the core of the band are all 52 years old. I'm glad I don't have to keep recreating my professional achievements from when I was 22; but the career of an engineer is rather different than the career of a rock star.
On the car on the way to the show I pointed out to Calvin that Green Day formed their band in high school, and while I didn't want to suggest that he could definitely become a rock star if he started a band, this is his opportunity to try things and take risks because he'll learn interesting things about what he does and doesn't like to do (and because failing, and learning to fail, is also a useful experience that he can experience now while the stakes are lower).
Dookie ended with drummer Tr&ecaute; Cool dancing around the stage singing "All By Myself", the hidden track at the end of the album. I listened to the album ripped from a CD I bought decades ago, which includes the "hidden" track in the manner that was the fashion at the time: several minutes of silence at the end of the real last track, followed by the hidden track.
Green Day played several songs from other albums, then launched into a full performance, end-to-end, of their 2004 album American Idiot. I bought this album (on CD, which I still have, somewhere in my garage) when it was new and listened to it on heavy repeat. This album was written in response to the invasion of Iraq, and it brought me back to that era and reminded me of how it felt to live through that period when the short, victorious war turned out to be anything but, and that the weapons of mass destruction we had been promised turned out not to exist. Looking back in hindsight, from twenty years later, I can compare and contrast the turmoil of the time with the current time. At one point in the album frontman Billie Joe Armstrong made that comparison explicit by singing, "I'm not part of the MAGA agenda", replacing "redneck agenda" in the original, to riotous cheers from the crowd.
After playing American Idiot in its entirety, the band played a few songs and wrapped up the show with an acoustic version of "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)", which I remember as being in heavy rotation from my own high school graduation (and as a fixture of graduations in the 1990s), which apparently still shows up in graduations this decade. It was a suitable, melancholy ending to two-and-a-half hours of pop-punk music playing to Green Day's home-town crowd.
After the show, as the stadium lights started to turn on, we began the climb up the aisle to the concourse, and from there down a crowded stairway onto the crowded plaza on Third Street. Here the crowd started heading in different directions, and the laminar flow out of the stadium grew turbulent. I wanted to head back to the Caltrain station to see if we could catch the special train that was supposed to depart "15 minutes after the concert, or when full", but the obvious route across Third Street was blocked. I found a route through the crowd, crossed Third, headed down Berry Street to avoid the crowds on King Street, and arrived at the station in time to find a stream of people boarding a waiting train. (I wasn't sure how to parse Caltrain's statement; did the timer start when the band left the stage and the lights came on? Was the "or" a minimum, or maximum?) We boarded the train, which turned out to be a new EMU, and waited for the train to depart. The train waited what seemed like a long time on the platform; I couldn't see beyond my own passenger carriage but when we boarded it was standing-room-only and I wasn't sure how many people were going to fit in the train. We eventually departed and headed down the peninsula, skipping all of the stops until Milbrae, which turned out to be the stop we wanted. It was midnight by the time we reached Milbrae, and we still had to drive home; but I'd seen Green Day live, and convinced Calvin to come with me (and he had enjoyed himself) so I'm going to count the whole thing as a success.
