Live review: Green Day -The Saviors Tour live at the PNC Music Pavilion

Charlotte, NC – 26 August 2024

Come for Rancid and The Linda Lindas, stay for Green Day

I remember having Green Day‘s Kerplunk album on cassette tape back in the early 1990’s and wearing it out. For you that are not old enough to have listened to cassettes, the more you played them, the more the sound got distorted and in extreme cases could even drop out. Then I got Dookie on one of these fancy new compact discs. After that, for whatever reason, I never bought another Green Day record. Now I heard and enjoyed songs off of Insomniac, Nimrod, and the rest of their later releases, but CD’s were not cheap, and these albums I guess never quite sparked my heart liked those first two had. And yes I know they had an album called 39/Smooth that came out before Kerplunk, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it. Green Day’s current tour is called The Saviors Tour although they are celebrating 30 years of Dookie and 20 years of American Idiot. Lucky for me, they are playing Dookie in its entirety as well as American Idiot, and only a few songs from Saviors and technically one song from Kerplunk. Having never seen them live this sparked my interest and if I’m being honest, the opening acts are really what lit my fire.

Starting the night off was the always energetic and fun The Linda Lindas. The Linda Lindas are huge in my household, they are one of my daughter’s favorite bands so this was a big draw for us. We had just seen them at their headlining show in Richmond less than a month ago, so seeing them again so soon as the opening act took a little bit of the excitement away, at least for me, not my daughter. They didn’t care if most of the crowd was not there to see them, they played like they did as a headliner and gave the crowd full effort. Their short set lasted less than 20 minutes and included about 7 songs. We were treated to one yet unreleased track named “Excuse Me” off their forthcoming album called No Obligation due out 11 October. There was some scattered fans here and there moving and singing along to The Linda Lindas but later on I found out just how many fans came to see them (more on that later).

As much as I enjoyed seeing the young rebel girls known as The Linda Lindas again, up next was one of my favorite bands Rancid. I believe this would be my fourth time seeing the east bay ska-punk group but the last time was well over 20 years ago. I was hoping to get to hear some “newer” tracks that came out since that last live show many years ago. They came through with some songs from their album’s Tomorrow Never Comes, Trouble Maker and Indestructible, I didn’t hear anything from Let the Dominoes Fall, but they did go all the way back to Let’s Go, And Out Come the Wolves which is about all you can ask for a 30 minute set. It’s hard to top the energy of The Linda Lindas especially when you have been at it as long as Rancid has, but they played just as fast and fierce as ever and ripped through about 11 songs total in their short time on stage. They keep to their DIY style with nothing fancy, not even a backdrop, and other than some “Ruby, Ruby, Ruby Soho” crowd chant banter, it was just good old ska-punk anthems and a worn-down left-handed guitar.

The Linda Lindas announced at the end of their set they would be having a meet and greet near the merch booth at 7:30pm, which was right when Rancid was set to take the stage. As soon as Rancid finished we high tailed it over to find a surprisingly gigantic line for the meet and greet.  It was very cool to see how many fans came out to see them. They had already cut things off and weren’t allowing anyone else in line, which was fine by me as it looked to be a 45-minute wait or longer. We had already meet 3 of the 4 Linda Lindas at the last show so not a big deal.

Just as the stage crew was finished setting up for the headliners, Queen‘s “Bohemian Rhapsody” played in its entirety to which the now packed house sang along to. That was followed up by The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop” while someone dressed in a bunny suit attempted some Olympic inspired gymnastics and tossed what I would guess was a t-shirt to the crowd. When I asked my 8-year-old what her favorite part of the Green Day portion of the show was, the bunny person came in second. Then came the Star Wars “Imperial March” as the band finally took their spots on the stage. They busted right into a Track from the Saviors album and then played Dookie completely in album sequence I believe. As I am most familiar and was looking forward to the Dookie tracks, to hear them all first was fantastic. It would have been perfectly acceptable to me to have skipped Tré Cool’s goofy little number “All By Myself” but Tré came out from behind the drums donning a leopard print robe and skipped around the stage and had fun with it (this was my 8-year-old’s favorite part). Following that performance Billie Joe picked out a young lady named DJ from the audience to come on stage to sing along to “Know Your Enemy”. I believe they do this at every stop, so if you want to sing on stage, make sure you know the lyrics and are in the front of the pit after Tré takes off his bathrobe.

Other than this short break there was little rest for the band as they played all the way through American Idiot next and ending with “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” after about 2 hours and 20 minutes of almost straight music playing. At one point my daughter asked me how old Billie Joe was and I responded that I thought he was in his 50’s (he is 52) to which she didn’t believe he could be that old. The next day I showed her a photo of Billie Joe from back when Dookie came out and one of him now which then convinced her he was in fact, that old. Although they don’t look as young as they did 30 years ago, they sounded just like they did back then. Billie Joe’s vocals haven’t declined much as he sounded so much like the original Dookie recordings, I was almost convinced he must have been lip singing to a playback track.

Speaking of sound, the venues sound system was on point all night. All the bands sounded great, not just Green Day. Now I am perfectly fine and almost prefer to see bands in dark little hole in the wall venues. I feel if the music is good and the band can play live, I don’t need a Pink or Taylor Swift style large production, and all the bands on this bill could play and don’t need anything else. But here comes the but, the ticket prices for this show were not cheap. At this price, I do expect a show, and Green Day had it all. There was the usual smoke and lights, bursts of flames, streamers, confetti, fire cracker bangs (that I actually found more annoying), inflatables, and at one point a giant disco ball came down from the rafters. There was even a row of flames that went across the stage in front of the drum riser that was pretty cool. The one thing that impressed me the most was the video feed to the two giant monitors on each side of the stage. They didn’t just have video feed of the bands, but it was like watching a music video. They had all kinds of Instagram filters, tons of camera angles, cool effects, a 360 camera that went around Tré Cool’s drum kit. That footage alone would be cool to watch.

Punk rock music has always had a history of political ideologies and it’s cool to see both the youth bands like The Linda Lindas and the veteran bands like Green Day not afraid to speak their opinion with The Linda Lindas encouraging everyone to vote, so we don’t get the racist sexist boy for president again, and with Green Day changing the lyrics in “American Idiot” from “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of a MAGA agenda”. I was already huge fans of The Linda Lindas and Rancid and I can say this concert has made me more of a Green Day fan, after all, I do share the same tattoo artist as Billie Joe Armstrong.