Review: Green Day: Punks, but children at heart

Geoff Carter

Thursday, July 26, 2001 | 8:16 a.m.

I once had a friend who ran a preschool and day-care center. She was a would-be hipster -- attended punk shows, read 'zines, dated me (mid-1990s vintage) -- and took it upon herself to teach her charges to sing Green Day's "Basket Case," from its 1994 major label debut "Dookie." She'd gotten the kids up to, "I am one of those/melodramatic fools/neurotic to the bone/no doubt about it" before I asked her if she realized that the song touched on the smoking of cannabis, and visiting a prostitute.

"Really?" she said, honestly shocked. She went out to her car, listened to the song, and came back white as a bleached white bedsheet: "Oh my gosh, you're right."

I could hardly blame her. Green Day's music is so bright, chirpy and melodic that one could be fooled into thinking it is a children's band -- a children's band with a potty mouth and a disproportionate love of the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers, but a children's band nonetheless.

Most of its tunes are in a singsong cadence, and vocalist Billy Joe Armstrong is so darn cute and perky that even when he swears he sounds like a fresh-face amateur. He could have set the audience on fire at the outset of the band's Cox Pavilion performance on Wednesday night, and I would have forgiven him the moment he spritzed the crowd with his ready-loaded Super Soaker water gun. I didn't care if he'd cussed up a storm to that point; the moment he soaked the crowd down, I thought, "Aw, how sweet."

Such moments of generosity don't help Green Day's rep as a platinum-selling punk band (redundancy?), but the band tries valiantly to hide the fact that it's a bunch of softies. Drummer Tre Cool throws away a pair of drumsticks every three minutes or so (a roadie is quick to provide him with another). Bassist Mike Dirnt tries to whip the songs through, but he is either powerless or unwilling to keep the band's maudlin pop underpinnings from taking over. And vocalist/guitarist Billie Ray -- well, how many men in the same line of work have been comfortable with launching a singalong?

That's not to say that these nonpunk tendencies pulled energy from the show. The band gave its all and the crowd devoured everything placed in front of it: the high pop of "Church on Sunday," the loping, insidious charm of "Longview," even the dopey menace of "Brain Stew/Jaded" -- which, as my friend Ronn Benway once pointed out, steals its driving riff from Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4." Guess that makes Green Day an easy-listening project.

No, not really. Even if Green Day isn't as tough a rock outfit as it makes itself out to be -- gratuitous use of the "F" word notwithstanding -- it knows its way around a hook, and that's really all you need to garner fans and keep them. If you give a mob something good to sing, chances are good they won't notice that there's no longer a revolution going on.