Review: Green Day Brought All the Hits to Pyro-Heavy Show at Coors Field

When Green Day first brought Dookie to Denver’s old Mammoth Events Center in 1994, surely the last thing on Billie Joe Armstrong’s mind was how the album would push the band to eventually sell out stadiums.

In honor of the groundbreaking record’s thirtieth anniversary this year, the 52-year-old frontman and his best friends Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt (who has been friends with Armstrong since age ten) are performing the entire album cut-for-cut on tour. And then immediately after, they perform all of American Idiot, the revolutionary punk-rock opera that once made it to Broadway and celebrates its own twentieth anniversary this year. With Dookie only having a forty-minute run time, why not make it a double birthday party?

Oh, and just to push the “we’re not a nostalgia band” ideology, some tracks from Green Day's new album, Saviors — inarguably its best since 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown — are in the mix, too. Just to keep things new.
The tour came to Coors Field on September 7, where we saw that the guys have ditched the eyeliner, for the most part, but remain youthful as ever, outside the fact that all three core members still bleach and dye their hair. Armstrong’s on-stage leaps, Dirnt rocking the hell out of an orange jumpsuit, and Cool’s ability to rock shorts better than AC/DC’s Angus Young gives you hope that it may take a while for that generation to age.

Following the standard crowd sing-along of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a giant pink bunny in a Rockies jersey pumping fans up to the Ramones’ “Blitzkreig Bop,” Armstrong and the boys wasted no time in ripping into Saviors’ electrifying opening track “The American Dream Is Killing Me.” “Kiss me, I'm dead inside," sang Armstrong. "Who needs suicide when the American dream is killing me?"
Within seconds of the painfully relatable track ending, the first of many fiery explosions to come went off on stage, and Cool kicked off Dookie’s own opening track, “Burnout,” with the mushroom cloud from the album cover appearing on stage almost out of nowhere.

Not only does the album still hold up, but it flows just as smoothly live. “She” remains a pro-feminist theme song; the screens above the band showed images of women marching in the streets with signs. Armstrong swayed his hips like Elvis before opening “When I Come Around,” which had a slightly slower tempo than normal. The radio hit segued into “Coming Clean,” an underrated LGBTQ+ anthem that depicts his experience of coming out as bisexual.

And to close the album out, Cool came out from behind his drum kit to prance around in a cheetah-print bathrobe while singing the still-hilarious “All by Myself,” accompanied by MIDI strings from Jason Freese rather than the original acoustic guitar.
After a Saviors-heavy break, Armstrong launched into American Idiot, with an opening title track that featured a well-received “MAGA agenda” second verse line that made his “go woke, go broke” fans turn their backs earlier this year at Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. Misfit tears flowed during all nine minutes of “Jesus of Suburbia,” and Armstrong held the heart-shaped hand grenade during the first bit of “St. Jimmy” before throwing it behind him and causing another, technologically unlinked explosion.

As for “Wake Me Up When September Ends"? Clearly, Armstrong still has a hard time singing the tune inspired by his father’s death from cancer in 1982. Silent tears, man.
At the start of “Letterbox,” Armstrong let the packed crowd sing half of the “Nobody likes you, everyone left you” intro, but when that melody was reprised in a higher key near the end of “Homecoming,” Dirnt finally got a chance to shine on vocals, and it makes you wish he sang leads on more Green Day tracks. “Whatsername” closed the album out, and with only two songs left in the two-and-a-half-hour set (“Bobby Sox” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”), the video of Armstrong crying when the band finished recording the track probably rolled through some fans’ heads.

“And just like that — twenty years,” Armstrong stated before striking the last note.
Fans also got to witness the future of pop punk with the incredibly youthful and energetic openers, the Linda Lindas (featuring fourteen-year-old Mila de la Garza on drums), as well as punk-rock history with an all-too-short set from Rancid, featuring Operation Ivy alumni Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman.

And just to keep it interesting, Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins flexed their badass new guitarist, Kiki Wong, while playing a brief career retrospective.
Talk about a lineup that couldn’t sell out a stadium thirty years ago.

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