Green Day’s setlist:
American Idiot
Holiday
Fuck Time
Longview
Oh Love
St. Jimmy
Basket Case
Not being interested in artists like Bon Jovi and Jason Aldean, the long wait for Green Day after No Doubt had played at the IHeartRadio Festival was pretty painful. Not to say there weren’t any highlights. As someone accustomed to spending weekends at bar shows, it is kind of cool to admire the incredibly elaborate stage set up, complete with LED monitors bigger than any house I’ll ever own, a 180-degree rotating stage to keep the show moving swiftly and huge pyrotechnics. A cylinder stage on the opposite side of the MGM Grand made up completely of LED lights for house band Swedish House Mafia came across as a poor man’s Daft Punk pyramid but was still pretty amazing to see in person, and Usher’s smooth voice and charisma made his set a joy to watch. Between all of this a myriad of celebrities ranging from Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, and, um, former MTV personality Kennedy came out to praise radio and introduce who would be playing next.
Now I feel I need to say, being that this is a humongous festival being put on by Clear Channel, essentially the overload’s of modern radioland, that I honestly haven’t listened to the radio since my office worker days of the early 2000s. I feel like a huge “trying way to hard to be cool” dork by throwing this statement out there in a review for the largest radio lovefest in the world, but I feel it’s important to put you in my mindset. I found most of the love heaped on the format by huge stars kind of hollow as I much prefer the control (and lack of commercials) I get through creating my own playlists via iTunes or creating a personalized station on Pandora. But Green Day, who were introduced by actress/pop singer Demi Lovato and former Saved by the Bell and Pet star host Mario Lopez, did manage to make it seem a little more personal than most. Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong talked about radio as the last of the old formats for getting your music to the public, alluding to the rapid decline of physical media in the age of digital downloads and piracy. He also spoke of MTV, the format that broke Green Day to the public with “Longview” in 1994, long ago abandoning music videos for schlocky reality shows.
I like to poke fun at Armstrong for his propensity to stall during sets with flurries of “I said a waaaaaaay oh” and other such call-and-response techniques but in all honesty I really do think he’s one of the best frontmen in music, particularly when it comes to bands at Green Day’s level. He has a way of making even a huge arena show feel personal, and that was no different on this night. To paint a picture of the stage setup, the rest of the band, drummer Tre Cool, bassist Mike Dirnt and second guitarist Jason White rocked out against a huge LED screen while Armstrong spent most of his time inserting as many “fucks” as possible into stage banter between belting out songs as close to the crowd as he could get at the end of a long runway. He took his guitar out there during opener “American Idiot” and when he decided that wasn’t close enough to the fans he passed his mic down into the crowd and hopped down with them for his own personal floor show in a reversal of Green Day’s signature “invite audience members on stage to play” routine.
I thought if any band was going to askew the only-play-the-hits format of IHeartRadio it would be Green Day, a band who earns massive respect from me for keeping songs from their pre-major label days in their current setlists. But as it turned out, Green Day stuck with the radio hits, mainly from their breakthrough album Dookie and monster second coming American Idiot along with a track each from new records Uno and Dos. The lone non-single, non-new track was “St. Jimmy,” a favorite of mine from the aforementioned American Idiot. Armstrong allowed White to take over as sole guitarist on the fast-paced song and gifted his extra mic to the crowd to allow himself maximum room for running along the stage.
The band chose to end their set with “Basket Case,” but the show’s organizers had other plans as the band was dangerously close to the end of their allotted time on stage. Before starting the pop punk classic Armstrong lamented that the band had only “four fucking minutes left, what am I going to do with four fucking minutes.” When the one minute warning came down, Armstrong lost it, stopping the song and shouting “One minute left, one minute fucking left. You’re gonna give me fucking one minute? I’m not fucking Justin Bieber, you fucks!”
“Basket Case” was never finished and Armstrong stormed off the stage after smashing his guitar to pieces in an epic tantrum that left the entire arena pretty stunned (Dirnt, seeing what Armstrong had done, proceeded to destroy his own instrument, seemingly in a sign of solidarity). Was their set really over? Was this planned or not? The house lights came back on and a commercial for “The Voice” (which Armstrong appears on this season as a mentor) signified that their set was indeed over. It seemed to me at the time that the band had severely overreacted to the one minute warning and Green Day later apologized for the incident, saying in a statement to The Associated Press that they were sorry “to those they offended at the IHeartRadio Festival” and admitted that their set was not cut short by IHeartRadio festival organizers Clear Channel. In the same statement, Billie Joe Armstrong revealed he’d be entering treatment for an undisclosed substance abuse problem, and we at Punks in Vegas wish him a speedy recovery.
Green Day is set to return to Las Vegas on February 8th, 2012, once again playing the MGM Grand and this time as headliners. Los Angeles-based pop rock band Best Coast will open the show and tickets are available now.
(You can check out my coverage of No Doubt’s set at the iHeartRadio fest here.)
-Emily Matview
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