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Home > News About Green Day > News Archive > The Top Ten (6 - 10!!!) Most Ass-Kickingly Memorable Green Day Concerts of All Time:
Posted: 4/4/06
The Top Ten (6 - 10!!!) Most Ass-Kickingly Memorable Green Day Concerts of All Time:
Wigan, UK, December 21st, 1991
This is the earliest show on the list. It made the cut because it was such an awesome combination of good old-fashioned Green Day and an almost eerie vision of things to come.
It was the boys' first European tour. They were still spending most of their time playing clubs and small venues around Cali, and all of a sudden they were doing shows for packed houses in the UK. This was long before all that "is Green Day punk or not," east-coast-American-punk-vs.-UK-punk rivalry bullshit started happening.
The particular show in question went down in Wigan, a town in Lancashire, England. It was a cold winter night just a few days before Christmas, but the rotten weather didn't keep people from filling up the tiny venue. No one can remember exactly what the club was called. It might have been the Rainbow; it might have been the Den.
The only sure thing is that it was your classic dark, greasy little club for catching all the coolest bands before they become too famous for you. The stage was little more than a platform that barely came off the ground, the sound quality was terrible - if Billie Joe was three inches away from the mic you couldn't hear him - and the overall production values basically sucked ass, but it was still one of the best, and most legendary Green Day shows ever.
Even in those blurry, early days, with no big budgets or elite road crew, Green Day knew how to put on a show. In honor of the holiday season, they started things off by staging their own little Christmas play. Mike was the Charlie Brown-style narrator and Santa Clause, Billie Joe was the one wise punk, standing in for the three wise men because "one wise punk is as smart as three wise men," and Tre was the lovely virgin Larry…er, Mary.
To begin, Green Day made the whole crowd sit down quietly on the floor like good little boys and girls. Wearing a dress that looked surprisingly like the dress he wore in the "Holiday" video, Tre was laid out on a dais in front of the crowd, skirts hitched up, doing his best job of imitating a woman in labor.
Eventually, an enormous, hairy baby Jesus - played by the band's buddy, Shaun - popped out from between Tre's legs, wearing nothing but a big white diaper, I mean, swaddling clothes, and gave the whole crowd a lecture about this being HIS birthday, not Santa Clause's.
Unfortunately for Jesus, while he was lecturing, his dear mummy Mary was still in the process of producing the afterbirth. The band filled a bag with rice pudding and tomato sauce and called it the Holy Placenta, which was hurled unceremoniously out into the crowd along with a ridiculously long umbilical cord.
Then, just when Jesus was getting the crowd's attention again, Santa Clause came in with a bag of presents and stole the show. Or he would have, if a giant Easter bunny chugging a beer hadn't followed him in. Ring any bells?
Halfway through the show, Tre got up to the mic and asked the crowd who should win, Jesus or Santa Clause? The man in the red suit got the majority of the cheers, but then Billie Joe asked who thought the Easter bunny should win, and everybody went nuts.
"Okay," Billie Joe said. "The Easter bunny wins." Perhaps it's thanks to that historic evening that a huge, bear-swilling bunny still makes an appearance onstage for most Green Day shows.
It was that night that they guys really started to show the first signs of the crazy stage performances they were going to give in the years to come. After the touching nativity scene, they played a super-long set including "Going to Pasalacqua" (arguably their first totally fucking awesome song), and "Welcome to Paradise," which they introduce as one of their newest songs. The crowd had clearly never heard it before, but when those crunchy opening chords sounded, everybody fucking rocked it anyway.
Even though they were on a tiny stage, the super enthusiastic crowd was stage-diving like crazy. The mosh pit was intense, and the disgusting remnants of the Holy Placenta were getting thrown around throughout the entire show. By the end of the night, there were so many people running around on stage, moshing and crowd-surfing and singing along, that there was hardly any room for the band, but they didn't seem to mind.
Green Day was at their relaxed and innovative best. They talked and interacted with their fans a ton, and they didn't mind going off-road and doing some freestyle jamming every once and a while. It was an amazingly professional performance for the relative newcomers, and their killer stage presence totally shone through all the technical difficulties and crazy crowd antics.
Of course, part of what made the show great was the wild crowd. There were tons of punks, but remember, this was the early nineties, a bit before everyone was being fit into their own little niches from which they would never return, so there were also lots of hippies, doing their spaced-out groove thing. And there were some ravers, too. This was also just the very early beginning of the rave scene in the UK, and so all these crazy dancing, dressed up ravers were there moding to "Going to Pasalacqua" like it was some sick DJ shit.
It was an incredibly diverse, weird, excited crowd, and everybody was just so happy to be there, a few days before Christmas, listening to wicked music and partying their asses off. Green Day couldn't have picked a more receptive audience for their nativity scene, or a more appreciative crowd to play their hearts out for.
Since the Wigan show, Green Day seems to go out of their way to put on awesome shows right around Christmas, like the KROQ Almost Acoustic show in 2004, and the now-legendary stadium gigs in Australia in 2005. If there could be said to have been a night when Green Day really kicked off their careers, getting started on the path that has led them to where they are today, this would be it. If you were there, you are one lucky bitch. If you weren't, too bad, so sad, there will never be another Green Day show quite like it ever again.
Jaded in Chicago, 1994
"What's up, you stupid motherfuckers!"
As Green Day threw themselves into "Going to Pasalacqua" with a manic intensity, it became immediately apparent that this was going to be an interesting show. Because Jaded was an MTV production, a lot of people expected it to be just a bunch of slick, commercial bullshit from a band that was suddenly getting too big for their pogo britches, but Billie, Mike, and Tre made sure that everyone in the audience, and everyone watching on TV didn't get too comfortable with the idea of Green Day becoming the darlings of the mainstream music scene.
The entire show was this rare combination of high-energy insanity and technical precision. A lot of the time, when a band is trying to show off with a bunch of superstar antics and craziness, the music suffers. A lot. But at Jaded you saw Mike jumping around like a maniac, and his bass playing was still phenomenal.
Of course, it was Billie Joe who took things to a whole other level of insanity. He was clearly fucked out of his tree on speed or meth or some wacky shit, and he made it his business that no one on stage or in the audience would decide that this was their big chance to mac in front of the cameras. This was still a dirty punk show, and fuck anyone that thought different.
Billie punctuated his frenzied performances of all the great songs off "Dookie" with incoherent babbling and sing-song spoken word madness that held the crowd glued to the stage. He was so fucked up that he was sweating and drooling all over the place. After the show, a bunch of people in the first row were complaining loudly that Billie Joe had spit all over them, but that's the price you pay from that brief, brightly burning flame of performance intensity that comes with the use of hardcore uppers.
The show was so intense that at times it was almost scary. The pit was dangerous, and everyone felt like Billie might actually go nuts at any second. Once, he grabbed a cameraman's camera and filmed himself giving the at-home audience (and MTV, in general) the finger. Another time, he just stopped dead and stared out at the crowd in total, glassy-eyed silence for a full minute before breaking into "Basketcase" with all the manic precision of a meth-fiend sorting bolts.
But the almost-scariness was dispersed into the ether near the end of the set when Tre came out from behind the drums to sing "All By Myself." Tre was his usual hilarious self, and even though Billie Joe was running around behind him wearing a gorilla mask and brandishing a butcher knife, he just wasn't that scary anymore. Then Billie got on the drums and Tre stayed on guitar for a high-energy, countrified version of "Dominated Love Slave" to which Tre and Mike goofed off to the max.
Jaded in Chicago definitely proved that Green Day might get rich and famous and super popular, but no matter what, they were going to keep doing things on their own terms, and fuck anyone who wanted to turn them into slick pop-stars. It might have been a mainstream show, but Green Day made it great by putting on anything but a mainstream performance.
Fillmore, San Francisco 1997
This list wouldn't be complete without at least one hometown performance. The show at the Fillmore in 1997 was probably not Green Day's most glorious moment, but it was definitely one of the most memorable concerts of all time.
It was the second night of a three-night stint at the Fillmore. Of course, as with most engagements of this type, you see the same sea of faces on the floor night after night. This puts the pressure on the band to throw up a unique show every time. It also lets lots of fun emotions like love and hate and lust and disgust build up. This all came together to make for one interesting evening.
In order to demonstrate his deep and abiding affection for his home turf, Billie Joe starts off the show by saying, as sarcastically as possible, "Nice to be home. I'm in a good mood." Of course, the crowd is not thrilled, to which he replies, "What's the matter, you in a bad mood?"
These first comments set the tone for the whole show. In case you haven't guessed yet, what puts this show in the Green Day history books is that it's the scene of the notorious Fillmore Fight. It was two songs into the set. Billie Joe barely lets "Geek Stink Breath" crash to a finish before he's calling out some dude in the front row.
"Why don't you come here, you little mohawk motherfucker? Why don't you come up on stage? I'll fight you right now, get up on stage and fight." When the guy doesn't leap on stage, Billie Joe leaps into the crowd after him and kicks his ass. The whole crowd surges forward to get a glimpse of the scene. It's total fucking anarchy.
From up onstage, Mike yells at the dude in the crowd, "Why don't you go back to your momma, you little bitch! Sorry, but these people didn't come here to put up with your shit." What was the fight about? It remains a bit of mystery to this day, but odds are Billie Joe just got fed up with some freak who fought his way to the front of the crowd just so he could scream about how much he hates the band. As all long-time Green Day fans understand, some people love to hate music even more than they love to love it.
Bouncers finally pulled Billie Joe out of the fight, and he spent the rest of the night stalking up and down the stage like an angry tiger. However, Green Day obviously weren't pissed at the whole crowd. One of the coolest aspects of the Fillmore show ended up being Billie Joe shouting out into the crowd, asking them what they wanted to hear. It ended up as an almost all-request show, which led to a very happy and very rowdy crowd, and a good mix of old, new, and rare material that few audiences, especially today, ever get to see.
Not to be outdone by Mike and Billie, who got to act crazy throughout the whole two-hour set, Tre finished things off by throwing himself over the drum kit he'd been stuck behind all night, and totally trashing it before dousing the crowd with bottle after bottle of water. Billie made a quick exit, but Mike stuck around to help Tre take apart the drum kit with the help of his bass (if an guitar is an axe, then maybe a bass is a sledgehammer).
Green Day played three shows at the Fillmore that December, but only this one is well remembered. Interestingly, it was the show attended by Billie Joe's mom. He got the whole crowd to scream "Hello, Mrs. Armstrong" at her, and apologized to her for fighting Hmm, maybe the guys were showing off for her? Or maybe they were just drunk and pissed off in that punk sort of way.
Whatever the motivations were behind this super-charged, aggressive performance, at least Green Day enjoyed themselves. You can always tell if they like the show or not based on whether Billie moons the crowd. Although this is many a fan's favorite concert moment, Billie only does it when he thinks the show is a total shit-fest (pun intended).
Carling Weekend: Reading Festival 2004
It had been a long weekend of great shows. The crowd was burnt out and grumpy. 50 Cent came on stage, and the Reading audience was not impressed. They had already booed one band off the main stage that Sunday, and they proceeded to voice their displeasure to poor old Fiddy.
The American rapper lasted about twenty-five minutes before the hail of boos, clods of mud, and bottles of piss became too heavy, and his crew left the stage to a chorus of "50 Cent's a wanker! 50 Cent's a wanker!" Once they had won that battle, the crowd started screaming "Green Day! Green Day!" but were they just going to end up booing another American act? After all, half the people in the crowd seemed to be waving upside-down American flags.
It was still a month before the release of "American Idiot." No one could guess at the storm of success that was about the break for the guys, but when Tre, Mike, and Billie Joe ran onstage and immediately starting banging out "Don't wanna be an American Idiot!" there was no doubt that they had the crowd in the palm of their grenade hand.
At this point, nobody really knew the stuff from "American Idiot," so the set list was made up mostly of material from "Dookie" and "Minority." The crowd loved it. Like the Wigan show, this was truly a sign of things to come. Green Day were back on top of their game, more than capable of playing to huge venues. There was no doubt that the coming American Idiot tour was going to be pure gold.
Because the 50 Cent show had been so short-lived, Green Day played for more than two hours, ending a long set of original material with a few awesome covers like "We are the Champions," that were on their way to becoming staples of the AI tour.
The show finished with a moving solo performance by Billie Joe of "Good Riddance." The whole crowd sang along softly, lighters sparking in the night like symbols of hope. A tear trickled down Billie Joe's cheek. He was probably just starting to realize that the time of his life was not long over, but only just beginning.
Festival-goers agreed that Green Day put on the best show of the entire weekend, far outperforming other headliners like The Darkness and the White Stripes, and proving that they, and not the Offspring, were the punk kings of America. Reading Festival was not the first stop on the tour, but it was the moment when the phenomenal monster-rock success of American Idiot really began.
Live 8, Berlin 2005
Green Day's Live 8 performance is pretty different from any of the other shows on this list. It wasn't very long, or very intimate, and nothing scandalous happened during the four-song set. But it was still one of the most interesting and amazing Green Day concerts because of everything that it represented and stood for.
As any Green Day fan knows, the three guys are very politically involved. They support a lot of good causes, and never miss a chance to speak out for something they believe in. They understand that music is an incredibly powerful tool, and that as musicians, they have a lot of influence over the hearts and minds of people everywhere. Mike said in an interview that when they heard about Live 8, the guys in Green Day knew that they had a responsibility to participate.
The Live 8 concerts were all about raising awareness regarding the global poverty crisis, and putting pressure on the G8 leaders to reduce or eliminate the national debts of the world's poorest countries.
As members of one of the world's richest countries, Green Day felt that it was important for them to represent, and to speak to their fans about the importance of this issue. Billie Joe said he knew that Green Day wasn't the voice of America, but he hoped that maybe they represented the other side, a different kind of American that was more concerned with global human rights than with waging wars for personal power.
When Green Day performed at Live 8, they took part in something that was really important to the whole world, and also showed the world that there was a huge side to America that was still globally conscious and concerned. This show was so important because it raised awareness of a massive portion of the world that is often overlooked, and it represented the voice of a massive portion of the American population that doesn't always get a chance to be heard.
On top of all this, it was an amazing show. A crowd of 100,000 people came out in the blistering heat to demonstrate their support, and completely rocked out to Green Day's four very well-chosen songs: "American Idiot," "Holiday," "Minority," and "We are the Champions."
These four songs really almost told a story that represented what Green Day hoped their fans would do. Stop being capitalist sheep, refuse to be part of the problem (American Idiot). Wake up, get informed, realize that the fate of the whole world is at stake (Holiday). Stand up for what you believe, be loud and angry even if you're just one tiny voice (Minority). If we really get our shit together and make our voices heard, it might be tough going, but we can make a difference (We are the Champions).
So there you have it. Green Day's message to the world, from the western minority opposition. A great concert, a great cause, and definitely another reason to think that Green Day is the greatest band in the world, and that Green Day fans are the best on the planet. Whether we are few or many, at least we can all stand together and say that we are proud of our favorite band, which is more than a lot of fans can say. Thank you, Green Day, for so many awesome shows, and for representing the ever-growing minority.
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