Green Day does its thing
Air Canada Centre Thursday, April 11
(out of 4)
Does this function as a way into a Green Day review? “Letting the days go by, into silent water / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground / Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was . . . ” I’m trying too hard. Probably
waaaay too hard in context, actually.
Still, I left Green Day’s big, posttraumatic South by Southwest comeback at Austin’s Moody Theatre a month ago with Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” roosting in my head, and I had that “same as it ever was” refrain cycling back through my brain mere minutes in- to the California trio’s touchdown at the ACC on Thursday.
The rest of the verse, I’m trying very hard to make work metaphorically in relation to the way Green Day and its fans have absorbed frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s onstage flameout at the iHeartRadio festival in Las Vegas last September, his subsequent, tour-derailing vacation in rehab, and the unshowy, business-as-usual return to action that brought the trio’s uproariously received “99 Revolutions” tour to the ACC. And I think it stands. Green Day has tastefully not made a big onstage fuss of Armstrong’s brief sidetrip, nor do the band’s supporters seem terribly interested in dwelling on past behavioural hiccups. Everyone’s just happy to have Green Day back doing the Green Day thing that Green Day does so well. That’s about it these days, though. Green Day does the Green Day thing very well. But for a band borne of the Bay Area punk scene, Green Day has come to rely on more than a few showbiz moves that long ago shed any semblance of punk-rock spontaneity and now come off as almost comically rote: busting out a “spontaneous” chunk of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” midset; pulling a nervous kid from the floor to squawk through the last verse of “Longview” before urging him to attempt a climactic stagedive; firing Super Soakers, toiletpaper cannons and T-shirt bazookas into the crowd; donning funny hats for “King for a Day” before Tré Cool comes out to do his high-kick drag-soul-queen thing. One assumes Armstrong has appropriated his endless, Ozzy Osbourne-esque exhortations of “Let’s go crazy!” with a measure of rock-literate self-awareness, so maybe the rest of it — like how he’s introduced “Holiday” with “Do you wanna start a f------ war?” for nine years — is part of the same metashtick. Fun as it is, though, it’s starting to look dangerously like the automatic behaviour of a classic-rock act that might have been mocked by a band like Green Day 20 years ago.