On the evening of August 22nd, I was 15 again. Green Day performed in front of tens of thousands of enthusiastic fans at Great American Ball Park, and I was there. Every song on “The Saviors Tour” took me back to my high school days, when I was listening to Green Day Dookie Album from my portable CD player.
The concert included 36 songs from two great albums — Dookie And American Idiot. What made this concert unique was that both albums were played in their entirety. I have been to dozens of shows as a spectator and/or photographer, and none of them had this format.
I’ve been a professional concert photographer for 10 years and this concert is in the top five most exciting concerts I’ve ever photographed. The industry standard is to photograph the first three songs, but with Green Day we got two songs. While that’s disappointing, I always remember that there are 40,000 people behind me who would love to see just one song.
We headed to the crowd to photograph the band. Before the show, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was played, with the whole crowd singing along. The band came out a few minutes later and opened with “The American Dream Is Killing Me.” This mid-tempo song was a great warm-up for the rest of the evening.
The band moved through the remaining Dookie Songs at a breakneck pace. I kept expecting the usual concert routine of talking to the audience to take a break from the performance, but that never came. The intensity with which they performed is, I imagine, the same as 30 years ago. Their performance was incredible. I was most looking forward to hearing “Basket Case” in person. The best way to describe this particular song is epic. It was the song of my freshman year of college that was played just for me and as loud as possible.
While I was familiar with “American Idiot” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” I was not familiar with the rest of American Idiot songs. One of the best things about this show was that it didn’t matter that I didn’t know the songs. The music made me feel something that I didn’t at other artists’ shows. I “felt” the music and felt what the hardcore fans must have felt. It was an incredible concert in Cincinnati that I will always remember.
Green Day moved from one album to the next without much fuss. While Dookiethe stage had a multi-story set that mimicked their iconic 1994 album cover. Everyone I knew in 1994 owned that album. As “American Idiot,” the title track from the 2004 album, began, a large fist and heart-shaped grenade appeared. This, too, mimicked the album cover. There was almost no discernible musical break between albums, which is typical of Green Day’s consistent musical style.
Although I didn’t visit every part of the crowd, I noticed that most people were between the ages of 35 and 55. Of course, there were also preteens and baby boomers singing along to every word of every song. I also noticed that every person I saw seemed to know the entire set list. Usually at a concert, there are people I call “people who just want to see a concert tonight.” I couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t a huge Green Day fan, and that was exciting.
Billie Joe Armstrong, Tré Cool, Mike Dirnt, Jason White and Jason Freese are the current members of Green Day. I can’t stress enough the precision of their instrumentation. The timing between drums, bass and guitars made the music much more powerful than I expected. This, combined with the excellent sound mixing by the sound engineers, made this concert a truly entertaining audio experience.
Concerts like this one at Great American Ball Park are always a great experience. The stages are usually set up in left center field and extend well past the batter’s eye in center field. Green Day’s stage was about 6 feet high and had a protrusion into the crowd that was probably 20 feet long. Protrusions are exciting because the artists can get into the crowd safely. Armstrong used this to really pump up the crowd throughout the show.
Green Day’s performance at Great American Ball Park featured support from The Linda Lindas, Rancid and Smashing Pumpkins. There are 25 more stops on “The Saviors Tour,” including North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.
