Kansas City Music Blog

I don't think I ended up in a bunny suit last night at Green Day's show at the Sprint Center, but I'm not sure, either. Or maybe that was you I'm thinking of. Were you wearing black Chucks? Do you have a vague recollection of going for beers and coming back in a bunny suit and ending up on stage in front of Tre Cool's drum set dazed in the lights, feeling your bunny ears? Yeah, me too. It was one of those shows: absolutely crazy, totally thrilling, where anything could've happened and most of it did.

Scott Spychalski

How did I get here?

If they could, Green Day probably would dress people up in animal suits and have them dance and sing on stage. But because that's the Flaming Lips' shtick, Green Day instead have perfected a level of crowd interaction that is sustained for an entire, two-and-a-half-hour show and stops just short of the band turning its instruments and mics over to random audience members and letting them perform the favorite songs -- well, most of the time.

There was that one time when Billie Joe Armstrong picked out a prepubescent girl from the crowd, had security hoist her onto the stage and let her sing the first two verses of "Longview," then found a slightly older boy in baggy jeans and tank top and let him finish it off. The kids killed it, too, singing loud and running up to the drum platform like it was their audition for American Idiot: The Musical.

Scott Spychalski

Click to see more photos of Billie Joe & co.

Green Day's latest, the sonically epic, boundlessly earnest concept album21st Century Breakdown, seems to have left old-school fans wondering where the picking-nose--while-masturbating slacker punk-pop heroes of yore have gone. Listen to the new stuff and it's obvious where they've gone: They've grown up. You can't expect them to keep using the same simple, boneheaded approach their whole career. What are they, the Ramones?

But live, live, Green Day is a celebration of what it means not to grow up. William Golding was wrong. Kids left alone on an island would not kill each other. They'd become Green Day, cussing, flicking boogers, spitting, abandoning any notion of adhering to any kind of authority ever again, and singing their little skulls out.

Scott Spychalski

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That said, there was a certain seriousness -- or perhaps determination would be a better word -- inherent in the band when it churned out new songs like "The Static Age," "Before the Lobotomy" and "21 Guns." Those songs really can't avert seriousness, with their clunky verses about characters named Christian and Gloria and how they're journeying through a something to get to a something ... America! Fuck! Sample verse, from "Before the Lobotomy": Life before the lobotomy/Christian sang the eulogy/Sing my love a lost memory/Run the end of the century.

Fortunately, whatever levity the new material lacked was more than countered by Green Day being the most excited band on earth and sounding loud and awesome throughout the whole show. Even as he hobbled and careened around stage like a Tim Burton marionette, Armstrong never wavered in his musical attack -- his voice was strong and more tuneful than I realized, and that decal-slathered guitar of his was crisp and loud during the rare occasions when he abandoned crashing power chords for up-the-neck riffage. Of course, it helped that Green Day has doubled in size. Joining the original core are Arkansas boys Jeff Matika and Jason White on guitars and vocals, plus Jason Freese on sax, keys and accordion.

It was their job, along with Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt, to keep it steady, loud and raging while Armstrong led the crowd in almost continual, riotous sing alongs. (It was also Tre Cool's job to hurl his sticks high behind him into the backdrop at every opportunity.)

Scott Spychalski

Seems like the first song had barely begun when all of a sudden Armstrong jumped off stage and ran up into the seats, trailed by a couple of security dudes. Before I knew it, there he was, straight across the aisle from me, not more than six feet away, standing on a chair and casting his twisted, wide-eyed, fool's gaze up at the spotlight. It was awe inspiring.

Antics involving rubber chickens, oversize tighty-whities, SuperSoakers, toilet-paper guns, T-shirt cannons and intentionally half-assed classic rock cover medleys went over joyously. Others were more peculiar, such as when Armstrong called for a child to be brought on stage, indicating that a sacrifice of some kind would take place. "Sir, would you sacrifice your daughter for Green Day?" Armstrong asked, peering into the crowd. A little girl, 8 years old or so, was lifted on stage to play a part in "East Jesus Nowhere." Billie Joe asked her name -- it sounded like "Leilani" -- and spoke instructions into her ear. At the end of one of the verses, he shouted the line "And infiltrate Leilani," and the girl fell backwards, as though faith-healed, to the sound of a massive pyro explosion and lay there the rest of the song.
Billie Joe ushered her off stage, shouting, "Get your ass off my fucking stage, Leilani!" It was fucked up and bizarre, but I think it was all in good fun. That kid's probably feeling pretty goddamn cool today, I reckon. (However, my friend and fellow writer Annie Z. in St. Louis found this feature of Green Day's set creepy and wrong.)

All in all, Green Day managed to not only sell its new songs, they had them singing half the lyrics. Reaffirming the band's status as spokespunks for the suburbs, the crowd itself was comprised, almost to the point of homogeneity, of regular-looking white kids and adults: uninteresting T-shirts, plain old jeans or shorts. Normal hair. If there were any Hot Topic kids lurking, I didn't see them. In fact, I was surrounded by 30- and even 40-somethings about whom absolutely nothing was punk. To them it was just a wild and catchy rock show.

But to the kids whose major, seemingly life-threatening concerns at the moment revolve around acceptance in school (or perhaps a church youth group), it was a revelation.

Scott Spychalski

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Early in the night -- what seems like days ago now, virtually -- natty Glaswegian quartet Franz Ferdinand played the role of chipper English boarding school boys warming up for American reform-school punks. They got the crowd bopping and clapping to their funky, ever-so-slightly-punky songs like "No You Girls," "Do You Want To," and "Take Me Out," the latter of which, my concert companion the Ginger Man informed me, was used by MLB as a theme song for the 2004 World Series. I don't have the energy to Google this fact.

Scott Spychalski

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Actually, I'm pretty hungover because Green Day guitarist Jeff Mantika is friends with some KC musician buddies of me and the Ginger Man, including Mean Melin and his band, the Dead Girls, and they invited us to the VIP area after the show, where there was the largest private supply of Jermiah Weed Sweet Tea Vodka in probably the whole universe. So, yeah, thanks for reading this far. If you wanna know what Franz Ferdinand is like live, please read my review of there headlining spot at the Beaumont last April.

Green Day Set List
Song of the Century
21st Century Breakdown
Know Your Enemy
East Jesus Nowhere
Holiday
The Static Age
Before the Lobotomy
Are We the Waiting/St. Jimmy
Boulevard of Broken Dreams
JAR
Hitching a Ride
Welcome to Paradise
2,000 Light Years Away
Iron Man/Crazy Train/Sweet Child O'Mine/You Really Got Me (brief medley)
Brain Stew
Jaded(?)
Longview
Basket Case
She
King for a Day
Shout/Goin' to Kansas City/Break on Through to the Other Side/Earth Angel/Free Fallin'
21 Guns
American Eulogy

Encores
American Idiot
Minority
Macy's Day
Last Night on Earth
Time of Your Life