Green Day rocks Philadelphia in the rain

Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong rocks out

Set the scene: it’s a hot summer day in Philadelphia in early August, and the storm clouds are quickly creeping in. Raindrops begin to fall, and although the all-female pop punk group, The Linda Lindas who are due to open must back out, the rain clears in time for California legends Rancid to take stage. 30 years in, these Berkeley boys show no sign of slowing down, bringing out punk anthems such as ‘Time Bomb’ and ‘Ruby Soho’. Next up in this all star line up is Smashing Pumpkins, who have also been gracing stages around the world for more than three decades. Bringing us classics such as ‘Tonight Tonight’ and ‘1979’ Billy Corgan rips into his songs like there’s no tomorrow.

The moment everybody has been waiting for nears, signaled by Green Day’s trademark “Drunk Bunny”—a mystery person dressed in a pink bunny costume—who “drunkenly” stumbles onto the stage, dancing, pumping up the crowd to The Ramones ‘Blizreig Bop’. Conducting all 40,000 of us to a singalong to Bohemian Rhapsody, a perfect build up to a montage of Green Day throughout the years following by them finally bursting onto the stage in all their glory. The crowd goes wild as the band explodes into one of their newest singles, ‘The American Dream is Killing Me’, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong commanding the crowd like a punk rock army general.

A giant blimp, featured on the album artwork of 'Dookie' floats around the stadium

“Welcome to the 30 year anniversary of Dookie!” Armstrong announces after the opening song, going straight into playing the power chord filled album that made the band a household name 30 years ago in 1994 from front to back. Despite the fact that the storm clouds are now directly overhead, pelting down rain over all of us, leaving us soaked, they power through classics ‘Basket Case’, ‘She’, ‘Welcome to Paradise’, ‘Longview’. At the end of the Dookie set, they even have the self proclaimed “World’s Most Dangerous drummer”, Tre Cool come out and sing for the album’s secret track, “All By Myself”.

At this point in time it’s unlikely that anybody in this crowd has not heard at least one song by Green Day, with their collection spanning multiple generations of kids growing up with their music from the pop punk classics emerging straight after the early 90s hype of grunge and underground punk to the more polished rock opera of 2004’s ‘American Idiot’.

Drummer Tre Cool singing 'All By Myself'

Bassist Mike Dirnt pounding out classic bass lines

The band powers through the Dookie set, not seeming to lose steam for one moment. Mid way through the 2009 single ‘Know Your Enemy’ Armstrong announces that he “needs somebody to come up on stage right now”. The army of Green Day fans in the front row seem to have been waiting for this moment for all their lives, prepared with an array of signs asking if they can sing with Armstrong. A female fan in the front is chosen, climbs a ladder strategically set to the side of the catwalk and jumps up and down, giving Armstrong a big hug, nearly bursting into tears and singing the final verse alongside of the frontman.

Despite being powerful veterans of stadium rock, after all these years the band still holds up with their manners and gives the Linda Lindas an opportunity to come back on stage to play one song in the middle of Green Day’s set, since they missed their opportunity to during the opening slot due to the rain.

With the rain starting to subside, the band goes into their second ‘classic album’ set of American Idiot, the 2004 rock opera that opened gateways that most musicians had never dared to enter. Going on to win a Grammy for Best Rock Album of the Year in 2005, becoming a Broadway musical, and paving the way for punk rockers to continue to break the status quo, the album very well might be one of the most influential rock albums of the past 20 years.

It would not be a Green Day show without pyrotechnics, intricate visuals, and the entire band running around stage constantly to singalongs such as ‘American Idiot’, the politically driven title track, ‘Holiday’, the adventurous journey into drugs and alcohol, and the morning after crash of a song, ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’. For many fans who have come back time and time again (I personally have seen the band at least two dozen times over the years) these are standard to the set list, but the real treat is songs such as ‘Extraordinary Girl’ and the album’s finale ‘Whatsername’, which were rarely played live even during the 2 year run of the original American Idiot Tour in 2004-2005. For a band of this caliber, constantly churning out new material, to break out songs from the past that so many hold near and dear was surely a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Frank Turner returns to Crossroads in Garwood, New Jersey

Frank Turner has played thousands of shows across the world since he started as a solo artist in 2004. To be exact, he’s played 2,876 shows at the time of this article’s publication. Starting out as the singer of hardcore band, Million Dead, but taking influence from and touring with artists from Counting Crows to Gaslight Anthem to NOFX, Frank has managed to blend a variety of genres into his poetic lyrics. He never seems to stop touring, hopping back and forth across the pond from his home in England.

One of the unique things about seeing Frank Turner is that you never know what you’ll get with his live shows. The set list tends to change from show to show, as does the nature of the shows and venue. Sometimes you’ll see him play a sold out 2,000 cap venue with his full band, billed as Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls, but other nights you’ll see him play solo just with him and a guitar in a bar in New Jersey. And that’s exactly what I got to see on a Thursday night in April just a few weeks short of his tenth studio album, Undefeated being released.

This was the second time that I was lucky enough to see Frank play a late night gig at this particular legendary Jersey bar, Crossroads. The last was back in June 2021, during his ambitious 50 States in 50 Days tour, immediately following a full band show in Queens earlier that night. Once again arriving from an earlier show—a record store gig at Looney Tunes Records in Long Island—Frank joked that maybe one day he would play a show at Crossroads in which he wasn’t rushing in from another show, with time to sit down and relax a bit, with a beer beforehand.

Starting off the set with some newly released songs from Undefeated—Do One and Girl From the Record Shop—the energy in the small, but tight packed crowd was electric. Shortly followed by ‘If Ever I Stray’, the anthemic ode to the place he hails from (Southern England), the friends and life he’s created for himself.

Halfway through the set came one of the most magical moments of the 70 times I have seen Frank Turner. While several songs on the upcoming album, Undefeated had recently been released on an EP, a song called ‘Somewhere Inbetween’ had not yet been heard or played live yet…until tonight.

“This song’s my favorite song on the album; it’s about some heavy shit” he told the crowd, strumming right into a certainly heavy opening line singing:

“I’ve been pretending to be somebody else since I was just fifteen

and I don’t know if the show was for them or for me anymore, I’m not sure

And I don’t recall being born but I remember being underwhelmed when I worked out who I was.

Cause that didn’t fit with any of the things that I’ve been thinking”

The five minutes that it took for him to sing this song may have been the stillest, yet emotional I’ve ever seen a room full of 200 people in a dive bar. It seemed that every person in that room resonated with Frank’s words. When he finished, the crowd burst out into an applause that almost didn’t seem to end. But then again, that’s fairly normal for Frank Turner shows, which seem to have a very special camaraderie to them.

The rest of the set was equally as magical with as always, a variety of the hits, deep cuts, and new songs that will surely become classics. It’s safe to say that every person in that New Jersey bar had the time of their life that night.

Frank Turner’s new album Undefeated is now out and available at your local record store, Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you get your music. He will be back in the tri-state area on May 26th at The Paramount in Huntington, NY on Long Island.