Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong Is Getting Older

Billie Joe Armstrong, co-founder and front man of Green Day turns 50 this week. His birthday is the day before mine, although I am sufficiently older and of a different generation. Last Saturday night Green Day, the band he cofounded 35 years ago played a show in Los Angeles along with Miley Cyrus as part of the confetti and noise surrounding Super Bowl LVI. Theirs was the final show of the Super Bowl Music Fest 2022 held in the newly named Cryto.com arena.

For those in the ticket selling business, the Music Fest was a bust. It ran three consecutive nights: February 10^th-12^th. The first show was Halsey and Machine Gun Kelley. Tickets for this show scaled well above $275 at face value and those prices did not hold. In the run up to the event, tickets were widely available on resale platforms at a 75% discount prior to fees. The second show was Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani, a couple in real life, but performers with completely different audiences. Tickets for their show were available for 12 cents on the dollar, plus fees, as early as three days prior to the event.

Green Day prices held their own. The day before their show there were plenty of face value and platinum tickets left on Ticketmaster, and nearly 1,000 tickets available on secondary markets at a modest discount. By show time the room was essentially full. I know this because I like Green Day, and had the show on my radar, but also had a fluid schedule with all the other hoopla in a town littered with events and invitations. Ultimately, I decided it would be more fun to see Green Day than go to yet one more grip and grin. By the time I parked and walked to the former Staples center, Miley Cyrus was already on the stage.

As always, there was a crew working outside the arena selling tickets. What there was not were any buyers. Almost an hour after the posted show time most people who are going are already there. I was offered a pair of floor seats for approximately the price of buying one seat just below the rafters had I walked another fifteen yards to the box office. After some quick negotiation, the pair of “safe-tix” were transferred into my account from that of someone named Jennifer. Quick shout out to Ticketmaster: that transfer process removed every bit of doubt whether the tickets purchased would scan at the gate. I had two newly issued and validated tickets on my phone before any money left my pocket.

Green Day has a strong following. Their fans are engaged during a show, which adds to the ambience. And Billie Joe Armstrong is an engaging performer. Like most, he has his set pieces: stopping the show to pull cheers from the left, then the right side of the room , sitting on the stage face in hand and refusing to play further until there’s enough applause to motivate him, choosing a “random” person to play guitar on stage and tonight something I had not seen, literally handing a microphone to some guy in the standing room pit area next to the stage and letting him carry lead vocals for nearly an entire song.

Looking around the room I saw the multi-generational crowd. There were a lot of grey haired and balding men, a club into which I am being involuntarily inducted. Some came with an entire family in tow, some with their crew, likely in town for the Super Bowl, and a surprising number of couples were there of all ages.

As I looked around the room, which was packed and engaged, I wondered what the future would be for these multigenerational shows. Who are the artists to fill these 20,000 seat rooms and will any of them know how to play guitar in a rock and roll band? Green Day’s magic comes from their sound which is based on the classic guitar, bass and drum arrangement which has set the rock standard since the early days of the British Invasion.

The acts which are heading back on the road as touring resumes after the Covid “pausedemic” include many who are on their penultimate or likely final tours: The Who, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Aerosmith, Guns N Roses and Kiss to name a few.

The next generation includes Green Day and The Foo Fighters, whose lead singer Dave Grohl is now 53. The Foos are currently celebrating 26 years as a band, and playing an aggressive schedule of arenas, stadiums, festivals and even a post-Super Bowl concert in the metaverse. However, while Dave Grohl has spent the last several years on the road, on television and in print cementing his position as the head of America’s favorite Dad band, Billie Joe Armstrong has flown Green Day under the radar as to their members’ advancing age. Still, the last music release of theirs I can remember which grabbed my attention was American Idiot, which came out in 2004. For me that was one marriage and two long term relationships ago.

Last night, as I watched Billie Joe, Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt play on the big screens I thought about all the times I’d seen them, and in which venues. Just last September they dominated the Saturday headlining slot at Live is Beautiful. I was in the VIP section, but very far back in the space because of Covid concerns. It gave me a perfect view of the gate which segregated the GA wristband holders from those with the VIP bands, and there was a show in itself. Green Day had an astonishing number of fans who aggressively tried to crash the gate. Some did the fake tap the wristband on the sensor move, some just tried to bulldoze through, and one guy even tried to ride it out because he was carrying an inflatable shark. As they were inevitably turned back, most accepted their fate and went to the GA area. However, one guy, and there’s always one guy like this, decided to fight for it. It took four security guys to push him out of the VIP. I was surprised they didn’t duck walk him out of the festival.

On Saturday night in Los Angeles, only three of us were walking into the arena because the show was well underway. My pair easily cleared the ticket scan. The guy next to us simply walked through, cell phone pressed to his ear as he continued his conversation, and no attempt at all to present a bar code to be scanned. The woman manning the gate tried to stop him, but he just kept walking. Now, in a crowd this move might carry, but through an empty gate and into a vacant concourse it’s a much harder move. Add in the fact this guy was at least 6 foot seven, and it’s comical in its ineptitude. His plan was to go directly to the men’s room and hide in a stall a tactic which failed miserably as he was immediately removed and summarily ejected from the arena.

Ultimately, it is the birthdays this week which remained in my thoughts over the past week. There is little commonality in music anymore. People don’t buy records, we aren’t tuned into radio, everyone has their own personalized playlist running into their brains through their AirPods. Without commonality, its very hard for an act to break through at scale in the same way that Green Day came up. Now, it’s more about the single which gathers attention until it doesn’t while the circus moves to the next town. This is why Billie Eilish is fading and her prices falling on resale markets, while Olivia Rodrigo is getting considerably less airtime even before her first tour gets underway. There’s too much content and no consensus. There are a lot of DJs who fill arenas and large rooms by turning them into a mobile party, moving from town to town. But, other than country music, where are the new guitar players building skills, and what will become of us dinosaurs who would rather hear a rock and roll band shred than watch a light show while a knob twister onstage pumps his fists in the air?

I wish Billie Joe the happiest of birthdays, and continued success as he takes Green Day out to play. For the rest of us, I wish that the pendulum swings back to encouraging young musicians to form rock and roll bands and bring out their axes so that those of us who learned that great music comes from the bended string will still have an open door to new music. As we whirl around the sun seemingly faster each year, it would be spectacular to have a killer playlist along for the ride.