We expected to be among the oldest people there, but that wasn't quite the case. Turns out, there are lots and lots of Green Day fans aged 35-50 who - get this - brought their kids along to get their tender eardrums split at last Saturday night's show in Albany, New York. Would I have brought my kid to a Green Day show if he was only ten years old? I'm not sure. I guess if they really were fans of the band, and one wasn't squeamish about having their kids hear words like "nee" or "motherfucker," I'd have to say, uh, maybe.
Truth is, unless you've been homeschooling your kids from an isolated location in the woods, they've already heard just about every variation of the "F" word by that age, so I guess it isn't the big deal it was when I was ten. I was just surprised to see so many ordinary-looking suburban parents bringing their elementary school aged children to a punk rock show, even if real punks insist Green Day isn't really punk.
Forget whatever you might have heard in my diaries about rock being dead. This was rock at its best, ten times better than the CD, played by a group of future Hall of Famers, and I've been around long enough to remember when classic rock was just plain old rock music, otherwise known as AOR.
We start with the first part of 21st Century Breakdown. The background is showing the shining city at the end of the Hudson, New York City. Beautiful. Then came the title track of the new album, punctuated with pyrotechnics. New York was then on fire as Green Day played Know Your Enemy as if the band had spend the past half-hour backstage listening to Bill O'Reilly review their album, if you could imagine; I don't listen to Bill-O if I can help it, so I wouldn't know if such a review exists, but I digress. Finally, Billy Joe leads a sort of mock religious revival where he brings one of the aforementioned ten year old kids onstage to be "saved." I think I saw that one at the pizza joint we went to before the show. Nice kid. Hope somebody got video of it for the other kids at school. Note to fundies: You won't like this part of the show.
Then it was the best of American Idiot, which seemed to mesh quite nicely with the new stuff. After that, it was on to the best of the 1990s for Mom and Dad, with some good-natured goofing around mixed in that involved a Super Soaker and what I would describe as a toilet paper gun (basic design - a leaf blower, a paint roller, and some duct tape). Finally, it was back to the end of 21st Century Breakdown where they make 21 Guns sound much, much more awesome than either the CD or on television. Then there were the curtain calls, which brought us back to American Idiot, and if you could sort of sing, or play the guitar part to Jesus of Suburbia, and you happened to be standing in the general admission area (as opposed to the regular seating we got because we're old), you might be invited to come up on stage and prove it by playing his guitar before being compelled to take a stage dive. It's probably just as well we were seated at the opposite end of the arena; I tip the scales just north of 225, and after showing every Green Day fan in New York State how badly I sing, I might have injured someone.
I'm still jealous of the people who paid half what I paid for my tickets; if we were close to the stage, I might have scored an official Tre Cool drumstick when he came around and tossed a few dozen down there like foul balls at a baseball game. So to sum up, reserved seating = comfort for middle aged fatasses, general admission = opportunities to be invited by Billy Joe to make a fool of yourself in front of thousands of people and/or actual band swag.
Two and a half hours later, the show was over, and we were exhausted. You just can't rock as hard in your late 40s and early 50s as you could when you were in your twenties. It felt good though, as if for a brief while, we really were young again. If you still have time to get tickets before Green Day comes to your town, it's a blast, it's awesome, and it's official - you can bring the kids.