These days, when people ask me who my favorite band is, I always say the same thing:

“Do you want the cool answer, or the Green Day answer? “Because it’s Green Day.”

It’s true. It’s partly a Bay Area pop-punk localistic loyalism, sure. It’s largely nostalgic. Mike Dirnt and I share a birthday. Counting in years, I’m as old as Dookie is. I had the clean versions of “Boulevard” and “Holiday” on an overstuffed (but catastrophically unhip as to contents) iPod shuffle. Green Day was my path to the Ramones, which (honestly) is the path to all American punk rock, in a way. But even I can admit: Green Day’s music is far from universally cool, and even farther from universally good.

When I was ten, American Idiot dropped like a neutron bomb on the 2000s rock scene. I heard “Boulevard” for the first time when a fourth grade friend told me (in hushed tones) that it had a cuss in it. So did “Holiday.” So did the title track. Mom hated all of ‘em, and it was easy to sing along. I was hooked. 

Mortified at my Idiot fandom, a certain older cousin (it’s always an older brother or cousin) played me a few songs off the International Superhits comp (“Maria,” “Poprocks & Coke,” and “J.A.R.”), and he “humbly” (not humbly) suggested that I check out the older stuff. Since I wasn’t really in the mood to do a research deep dive yet, and since nobody explained peer-to-peer to me until middle school, I hit the iTunes store(!) for the most popular tracks. What I found was “When I Come Around.” I didn’t fully understand why I liked it—I have a distinct memory of thinking “he sings like he has a stuffy nose.” Of course in retrospect it was that melody, that glorious nearly broken high note on “and it’s me out on the prowl,” and its bitter delivery. But at the time, I tabled my exploration of early Green Day, keeping it limited to songs that were already FM Radio staples long before 2004: “Basket Case” and “Welcome to Paradise.”

For a while after that, Green Day was mostly just a comfortable constant in the still-felt-distant world of popular rock music. I watched them play “Warning” on a Mad TV rerun. They won the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards. I got too into 21st Century Breakdown when it dropped in 2009 (the year I went to my first real rock show—not Green Day), and then at some point, somehow developed the belief that Green Day was radically uncool.

I’m not sure what first did it. College radio, maybe. I worked at a public station between 2012 and 2016, in the predatory heyday of southern california bubblegum trash-rock and the last great days of San Francisco garage-psych. Admittedly, those were not strong years for Green Day. I wasn’t even paying close attention to them at that point—I’d moved on to Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords, Bomb the Music Industry, Flogging Molly and the Aquabats and (ugh) an embarrassing amount of third-wave ska-punk (Mustard Plug, anyone?) as I advanced through high scool, developing a raging snide streak and a major authority problem along the way. I’d even flirted with other East Bay bands, contemporaries of the young Green Day—Rancid especially. But on the door of our college Music Director’s office, a constantly shapeshifting menagerie of snark-tastic stickers stacked so thick it stuck out an inch from the door itself, was the taped-aloft CD booklet from Green Day’s Uno! Dos! Tre! album trilogy, with “DO NOT PLAY THIS BULLSHIT” or some such message brazenly and defiantly plastered across it in cold, judgmental black sharpie.

So I became a Green Day apologist—a moderate defender of Dookie and some of Kerplunk, which I bought used from Amoeba San Francisco on CD. Guess something in my brain couldn’t let me stay away completely—maybe I convinced myself that it was hipster-socially acceptable to be into the virtually unknown-to-my-peers Green Day, rather than—y’know, the popular songs that most people actually enjoy. Regardless, that’s how I first heard Kerplunk. From then on, and up until very recently, I described myself as a fan of “Green Day before ‘03.” I was lying.

It wasn’t until about 2018 that I finally gave early Green Day an honest try. I had just moved from Northern California to Virginia, and I was undoubtedly feeling homesick—but, having bonded with a few east coasters whose penchant for pop-punk hilariously included an unironic appreciation of Relient K, and having recently read this article in BrooklynVegan by Andrew Sacher on a whim, I fired up Insomniac. It was incredible, so I gave Slappy Hours a try. And when that was incredible, I threw on Warning. That one was arguably even more incredible than the others. But however you rank ‘em, the result for me was the same: I was thrown hard back into sincere fandom. I wasn’t quite ready to forgive ‘em for Uno! Dos! Tre! and Revolution Radio—I’m still not—but the circle was complete. They were my favorite band again.

I completely missed the opportunity to see Green Day in sixth grade. Nobody told me about the arena tour, and by the time I heard about it, tickets were already sold out. At the time, I was devastated—and hearing the live cuts from Bullet in a Bible didn’t help at all. After that, for over a decade, it seemed like every Green Day show happening anywhere in California was inaccessible to me—final exams, geographic distance, and (eventually) my own snobbery kept me from ever taking a chance on this band’s live show.

But sixteen whole years later, it finally happened. I got my chance to see Green Day at San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival—a wretched sprawl of basic bitches in Insta fits, drug-riddled dance-jocks, tech yuppies, allegedly cool dads, and straight-up hippies—to which I swore I’d never return. But as soon as I saw their name firmly atop the entire lineup, I knew what I had to do.

On Saturday, August 6, 2022, I battled my way to the front of a wannabe hypebeast Jack Harlow audience for Green Day’s subsequent set. It was a tremendous slog—but mercifully, I was by myself rather than in a group, which made navigating my first music festival fan deluge in six years moderately easier. Still, nothing quite like getting violently shoved as you squeeze between a series of teenagers with Jake and/or Logan Paul white boy perms and their accompanying long-haired, Ariana-ponytailed in crop topped biddies, getting a copious quantity of beer spilled on you with increasing frequency. It has never been clearer to me how old and uncool I have become.

The set began with some dude in a pink rabbit mascot costume dancing faux-drunkenly to “Blitzkrieg Bop,” followed by a relatively mid clip show of various noteworthy classic rock moments—a kind of Canton, Ohio Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame-centric, not-so-secret society propaganda for the way things used to be—a club that Green Day clearly wants to portray itself as belonging to. This makes sense, but the overwhelming gorgonzola stench of it all made me nervous. Was this about to be a posturing, misguided attempt to cement the band’s legacy, or would there be an ounce of self-awareness anywhere in this set? Finally, they took the stage. The second Billie Joe’s eyeliner-caked, wrinkled face appeared, the crowd lost its collective shit.

What we got after that was a solid enough hits-upon-hits, mean-as-fuck fundamentals “Green Day 101” 2000s barrage. The deepest cut all night was “King for a Day,” which was frankly fucking unexpected. The crowd of college kids near the front had no idea what the “Longview” bass line was when Mike let it rip—but a few of them started a mosh pit with me for “Brain Stew.” I felt like a kid, not even pretending. It was nonstop classics, no brand new or even relatively recent trash. Only the finest from a whole host of their albums—from Warning’s “Waiting” to Nimrod’s “Hitchin’ A Ride.” Yeah, they did the corny “bring a kid up onstage to play ‘Knowledge’ and give him the guitar” bit, like they do at most shows—but it was cute and fun and dorky as fuck in the best possible way. Good goin’, Monty. Some of us are still convinced you were a plant.

Clearly, Green Day is a band that cares about making every set feel like a genuine classic rock show, no matter how uncomfortably they may (or may not) fit into the classic rock pantheon. It’s why they cover KISS, the Isley Brothers, and sing bits of Journey songs. It’s why Billie Joe spends so much time between songs goading the crowd into screaming louder. They even do the whole “get really close and lean in alternating directions while you play guitar together” shtick—all the trite shit I usually hate seeing onstage. And the strangest thing of all is that I didn’t mind.

There was a profoundly timid-seeming guy crammed into the space between the outer edge of mine and the college hipsters’ 20-30 person mosh pit, clearly not into being a little aggressively jostled. I was only vaguely aware of him until a raging unironic norm-core in a Manchester polo verbal-violence accosted my confidant among the university crowd-clique I’d befriended—the one who complimented my singing voice (kindly, mercifully considering how amplified I’d been shout-sangin’ along to “Hitchin’ A Ride”). Picture a skinny-spectacled mop-top-sporter in a short-sleeved button-down, an inexplicably but likelier than not handsome (I’m not sure) stoke-machine of a twilight-adolescent. Seemed like a friendly enough light-drug user with a good sense of what’s fun. Anyway, Manchester polo starts screaming obscenities at my skinny-spectacle’d ambassador friend. I try to calm polo down, but he ignores me—and then he fires the “f-word” at ambassador twice, the one that’s hateful toward the homosexual community—as in, “Keep your f_____-ass mosh pit to you and your f_____y little friends.” Reasonably, this scares the shit out of ambassador dude, and they’re forced to shift the mosh pit several rows back and to the left. I ask the timid-seeming jostle-shy guy if he’s OK. He says he’s fine, and that he gets it—he’s sorry some guy he doesn’t know got so pissed on his behalf. “Probably not necessary,” he says, shrugging with an unspoken “I’m kinda sorry” smile. But I stand next to him, quiet and arms-crossed, meditating through the next song. I don’t remember what it was.

I rejoined the pit for “Waiting,” and ended up thrown a few rows closer to the sound board, where I was lucky enough to encounter a small sub-tribe of the shirtless skinny-fat backwards-ball-cap-uniformed dance music lads. I felt even luckier when one of ‘em—a buzzed-hair MMA wannabe who reminded me of a certain high school jock, appropriately enough—started messing with me. The following confrontation started when this loudmouthed featherweight-lite chap removed my hat from behind—my favorite hat, my Steal Your Face/San Francisco Giants one with the Fucked Up Dose Your Dreams, Howlin’ Rain Dharma Wheel, and Raw Garden pins stuck all over it. In other words, a very cool, very stealable hat. In that sense, the Dead logo tracks. Anyway, I think he thought he was being playful or something at first, because he looked surprised when I wordlessly took the thing back from atop his head. At least I was smiling. Come to think of it, he might’ve thought that we were having an extended moment throughout the remainder of the show. From my perspective though, this essentially amounted to him tapping my shoulder to murmur incoherently at me every other song, in between (what I assume out of misplaced kindness for this dipshit were at least partly ironic) shouts of “Bro, come on.” The rest was me ignoring him completely, which I think made him angry, because he started saying to his friends, “Dude, he froze!” I lit a spliff, he leaned in one more time, and I whispered in his ear, “You’re an annoyance.” That was it. Then they played “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” and I was fortunately able to move forward a few rows as the early departures took off from the front. Gotta love that “beat the traffic” crowd.

So the show was great, harassment by pit haters and sweat-sticky rocks-for-brains notwithstanding. And I came away having learned a lesson so goddamn saccharine you could pull it from a Pixar movie: 

This is what connects me to everyone. From the obnoxious, shirtless, hilariously misplaced EDM fratsters to the meek, mild-mannered dork who doesn’t like to mosh, his homophobic polo defender, the open-minded college hipsters, and the surprisingly eclectic armada of diehards in merch. It’s almost unsettling, but I think it’s a bizarrely special thing that this band, which I hold so stupidly, ridiculously dear to the most guarded corners of my nostalgia’s own nostalgia, is something that I share with millions of similarly moronic people the world over—tens of thousands in that park alone. So, yeah—I can be as disappointed/pissed as I want that they didn’t play “Geek Stink Breath,” or “Paper Lanterns,” or “80,” or “Warning.” Sure. I am, slightly. But I’m still pretty fucking thrilled with what I got—somehow, against all odds, screaming to a shittily played KISS cover, moshing my face off to “Brain Stew” with a crowd of upstarts I didn’t know, getting hassled by the Molly squad, smoking a solitary spliff to “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” crying a tiny bit for “When I Come Around,” and not noticing when Billie Joe broke a string during the intro to “Basket Case.” I think I finally get it. That too-good-to-be-true, simply-has-to-be-fake feeling of connection that so many less aggressively cynical people talk about experiencing at music festivals. Billie Joe closed the set with a solo acoustic take on “Good Riddance.” Everyone sang, “It’s something unpredictable, but in the end feels right—I hope you had the time of your life.” At that moment, I experienced musical actualization. I’m not even crazy about that song.

The verdict: Green Day is one of the Bay’s all-time great bands. But you knew that already, didn’t you? I did too—but I don’t think I was ready to fully acknowledge it until now. Or maybe I’m just cracking up.