Green Day Comes to Town

I’ve never been the biggest Green Day fan. I’m also not big on Rancid – too ska punk for me. But when the two of them were announced to be coming to Fenway Park, I knew it would be worth it because of The Linda Lindas and Smashing Pumpkins being on the bill.

Green Day is taking the playing-an-album-in-full thing to a whole new level, performing both Dookie and American Idiot in their entirety to celebrate their respective 30th and 20th anniversaries. It also happens to be the three-decade anniversary of when a riot broke out in Boston when the Bay Area punk rockers played the Hatch Shell.

Over at Vanyaland, I did a short preview of tonight’s show and touched on said riot. Sample:

“The music stopped abruptly less than 20 minutes in, and a generation of kids raised on sugary cereals and Saturday morning cartoons started throwing bottles and doing a bunch of other unrest-y shit. Some 50 people were locked up by police, and a legend was born.”

As for Smashing Pumpkins, those cats are hardly a nostalgia act. Check out one of their more recent bangers if you aren’t familiar in “Beguiled.”