11 May 2005

GREEN DAY!!!

Okay, so I went to a Green Day concert Monday night, and it was the best concert IN THE WORLD!!! My good friend Claire had tickets and invited me to join her, and I'm so amazingly thankful that she did. Me and Claire got down to the concert about three hours before the doors opened, so we sat in the car for a good hour or two just listening to music. When we finally got inside, we both took places on the floor because we all know that the best place to enjoy a rock (or punk rock) concert is on the floor, right kids? And speaking of kids, as people are funneling into the arena, Claire and I notice that we are horribly outnumbered--the vast majority of people at the concert are high schoolers. This will come into play shortly. My Chemical Romance opened for Green Day. As soon as they took the stage everybody on the floor rushed towards the stage barriers. Unfortunately, the large number of juveniles made the floor/mosh pit suck because there was lots of pointless pushing/shoving/leaning causing people to fall over and other not-so-fun stuff. My Chemical Romance started at about 7PM and played for about 45 minutes. I've personally never heard any of their material, but some friends of mine like them. I would have enjoyed them more if I could have heard what they were singing, but some teenage girls near me who obviously knew them made sure that I had a hard enough time trying to decypher what they were singing. By the time Green Day came onstage Claire and I had made out way up to within about 20 feet of the stage barrier. They opened with American Idiot and started playing through their most recent album track by track. Unfortunately we had to surf Claire out of the pit before Jesus of Suburbia because she was getting squished real bad and we didn't want her asthma acting up. I left the pit shortly after Jesus of Suburbia to get myself a drink. There was A TON of audience participation, and the amazing stage presence of Green Day only made it bigger. After the third or fourth song Billy Joe pulled out a super soaker and started squirting the mosh pit---then he grabbed a kid out of the pit, pulled him on stage, and let the kid go nuts with the squirt gun. WILD! But it gets better. I believe it was during Longview, but three guys got to go onstage and play Trey's drumset, Mike's bass, and Billy Joe's guitar! After that short little shin-dig, Billy Joe told the kid playing guitar that HE COULD KEEP THE GUITAR!!!!!! Talk about a fucking souvenir, right??? The age of the crowd really shone through when the band started playing some of their older stuff off of Dookie and Nimrod--the crowd singing died down because the young 'uns didn't know the lyrics, and all us older folk were singing and rocking out like mad. It was great. They did covers of Shout and We Are The Champions; excellent covers. They came out and did an encore (or was it three? They played like 5-6 songs after we brought them back out, so who knows?). The concert ended with Billy Joe doing Time of Your Life solo. Amazing. There really aren't enough positive adjectives in the English language to come close to describing how mind-blowing, amazing, excellent, righteous, gnarly, and kick-ass this concert was. My sympathy to all of you who couldn't or won't be able to see these guys in concert.