First real rock concert: Green Day, July 6, 2009

I realize that for a 28-year old I'm a bit odd. The number of Symphony-Orchestra concerts I've attended greatly overshadows the number of rock-popular music concerts I've attended. I can count the latter on one hand: Paul McCartney (awesome), BNL (loved), Sarah Sleen/Rufus Wainwright (I'd never heard of either of them before I was invited, but highly enjoyed) and now Green Day. Andrew and I are not, in particular, Green Day fans. I like the songs of theirs that I know (mainly those played on the radio), but the only album I have is Warning, which is definitely not their best work. We were offered the tickets by one of Andrew's prof's (who's also the husband of one of my co-workers) as they were unable to use them.

And so we went. And we enjoyed ourselves. I'm not going to dive into an in-depth description of the night's events, since as I've already mentioned, neither Andrew or I are Green Day aficionados nor do I expect are any of my readers. Just a few words:
In general: lots of fireworks, flame bursts and lighting changes. Very cool light-up city scape backdrop.
Green Day itself: Billy Joe Armstrong has a crazy amount of energy and spent a good deal of time running and jumping around the stage and working the audience. He used a little more profanity than I care for, but whatever, this was Green Day, they're supposed to be punk. I also think Billy Joe actually has a pretty good voice with an interesting tone. It's really noticeable in some of their slower songs.
Overall: the atmosphere in Rexall was great. I was a little concerned things could get out of hand, but everyone around us seemed to be enjoying themselves. We were on our feet the whole time and I danced for much of it. Ages ranged from little kids (say 6 years old?) to adults (probably around 40 to 50 year olds).

Finally, some fun things. Several people got pulled up on stage. A couple of little kids came up on at separate times. One led the crowd in hand waving and the other got to squirt people in the mosh pit with a huge water gun. Three people got pulled up to sing different verses of Longview, unfortunately they didn't all sing terribly well. Green Day performed a 50's rock medley including: Shout, Earth Angel and Stand By Me.

We didn't stay right to the bitter end. We decided to leave halfway through the encore in favour of catching the LRT home before the masses descended. Consequentially we missed Good Riddance, which would have brought the total of songs I knew all the words to, up to 2. If given the chance, I would be happy to see Green Day again, although perhaps I'd brush up on their catalog a little more thoroughly before going.

Us waiting to catch the LRT to take us to Rexall Place:


The stage when Green Day first came out.


These pictures were taken off of Andrew's palm, which doesn't have a very powerful camera. Unfortunately we don't have a tiny digital that we could have brought with us.

Ciao,

Andrea