We Had the Time of Our Lives

Green Day headlines their Savior’s Tour with The Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and The Linda Linda’s

---

The last time I went to see Green Day it was in September of 2021 in Seattle, Washington.  We were still coming out of pandemic and the world was different.  This was the first concert I was able to attend in the last 19 months and it felt good to get out again.  Green Day was on their “Hella Mega Tour” with The Interrupters, Fall Out Boy and Weezer and I was with some of my best friends in Mason and Selina. We were working on a catering staff that provided lunch for the 300+ crew workers setting up the event.  For this, we not only got paid but also had a pretty much all access pass throughout the stadium. It was one of the concert-going highlights of my entire life.  This time I was in Nashville, Tennessee and The Linda Linda’s, Rancid and The Smashing Pumpkins were filling out the bill for Green Day’s “Saviors Tour” at Geodis Park.  I was here to take it all in thanks to my new friend Josh.

Geodis Park is an open aired soccer specific stadium that debuted in 2022 in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood of Southwest Nashville. It hosts nearly 31,000 people, but it rarely accommodates for concerts.  The last gig held here was Pink in September of 2023.  Pro tip, the park is surrounded by residential areas so there is no need to pay for parking if you want to leave your car a few blocks away and hike it.  There are also plenty of people who will let you park in their yards and I heard many a folk negotiating the price. 

Doors for this event were at 4pm and posted a start time for the show of 5:30pm which I absolutely loved.  However, I knew it was going to be a longer event due to the talent of these acts.  The first of those being The Linda Linda’s out of Los Angeles, California.  The all-female group is comprised by Bela Salazar (19 years old), Eloise Wong (16 years old), and sisters Lucia (17 years old) and Mila de la Garza (14 years old). It’s sounds funny when I say that I have been wanting to see them live for a while, because they haven’t even been on the planet for very long.  However, they have been highly successful during their time as a band. 

Mila was just 10 years old, and on the drum kit, when actor/comedian/writer/director Amy Poehler saw the ensemble open for legendary punk icons Bikini Kill in 2019.  She immediately approached them to help with the soundtrack to Poehler’s film Moxie, which they agreed to do. Oddly enough my friends Mic and Nichole were also in LA to see that very same show.  They were the ones who relayed the information to me that The Linda Linda’s were the real deal. I remember them returning to the brewery that I worked at and telling me with a fever of excitement, “You gotta hear these kids!” Everything had come full circle and now I had the opportunity to witness the strength of this young band myself. 

Punk is not dead.  In fact, it is alive and well and The Linda Linda’s are one of the front runners carrying the torch.  They opened the show with an explosion of energy, a volcano of sound and a ferocious sense of stage presence. They play with a conviction that makes it hard to believe that they are so young.  The two sisters, a cousin and a friend demand your attention with bellowing guitar riffs and slamming drumbeats that make the heart pound. 

Lyrically they are savvy as well, writing songs like “Racist, Sexist Boy” which is written about a specific experience that Mila had. She was just 10 years old when a boy in her school said his father told him to stay away from Chinese people because they have the coronavirus. “It was my first experience of racism, and I didn’t really know how to respond,” she told The Guardian, recounting the conversation in fourth grade in March 2020, just before California shut down. She told him she was Chinese, to which he responded by backing away. 

She and the rest of the group have responded since by putting their thoughts and emotion into powerful songs.  They played a seven-song set at the front of the evening and I wish all 31,000 people had scurried to the stadium to catch what they were playing.  I truly believe that this band will be headlining larger and larger venues throughout their career.  Be on the lookout because The Linda Linda’s are coming and their kicking down any doors that stand in their way. 

If the Linda Linda’s are the young women still earning their place in the annuls of punk music, Rancid is the seasoned uncle that has paved the way.  For all the years that Rancid has been ravaging stages, and for as many shows that I have been to, I have never seen them live.  I was worried that maybe I had missed them in their prime, and that this show wouldn’t be them at their best, but that was not even close to the case as their feet still seem to be mashing on the gas pedal of life and music.  

These guys have been around since 1991, and along with Green Day and the Offspring, they are often credited with the revival of a punk rock sound that captured the mainstream.  The sun was still shining as they started up, and there was a nice breeze that floated through the air occasionally so that the only way the audience would melt was with the music.  The day before, Nashville temps had topped out at 104 degrees.  Rancid wasted no time though in ramping up the heat playing an 11-song set that was fanatically enthralling.   

The band has released ten studio albums up to this point, as well as some on-line only live albums which are worth finding.  The Rancid fans, which there were plenty of, sang and jumped around with each and every note. Again, I felt like audience members needed to get here and see this as only about half of the stadium was filled at this point.  The real fans of the band were there though and Rancid was not letting them down.  

The ‘Roots Radicals’ got everyone who was present to get out of their seats. They played hard and fast and crushed down on their instruments like they wanted the heavens to hear, and they did.  Lead singer, Tim Armstrong, took a moment between songs to point up to the sky and mention someone he and the band had lost.  Obviously, they want to make sure he could hear the music in the sky. 

They finished out with three of my favorite Rancid tracks which were ‘Olympia WA.’, ‘Time Bomb’ and ‘Ruby Soho’.  All tackled with precision and impetus. 

Here come The Smashing Pumpkins!  In my experience the alt-rockers are a polarizing band that seem to split the mainstream.  Music fans either really love them or can’t stand them and I have never really understood that.  Although, I can’t listen to any of Dave Matthews music without cringing which has stunned so many of my pals. To each their own.  This was my third time seeing the group, although admittedly, the first time I saw them I was on so many drugs I don’t really remember it (sorry mom). 

I do remember that second time though in Tampa, Florida in 1996 (maybe) when they floored the crowed by playing for nearly 3 hours after Garbage opened. Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness had just released and after playing their initial hits the house lights popped on and stayed there for 20 minutes as a third of the crowd meandered out of The Ice Palace.  Then a piano was rolled out, followed by frontman Billy Corgan, who took the mic and exclaimed, “That was for the MTV fans.  This is for the real fans!”  It was remarkable. 

This night at Geodis Park was just as stunning.  Some of the lineup has changed but it was still everything I remember.  Corgan sounded pitch-perfect and bombarded the onlookers with not only fantastic lines but with a great stage presence. The other note of excellence was the newest Pumpkin Kiki Wong.  Wong, 35, submitted her name for consideration alongside 10,000 others as part of a public casting call to be a member of the band.  Through the power of Tik Tok she is now playing on the biggest stages in the world and she is slaying it.   

The stadium was shrouded in darkness now which seems to be the perfect motif for this cast of musicians. Their set ranged from the softer and more subtle songs like ‘Disarm’ from Siamese Dream to quick paced ragers like ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’. Corgan and Wong, along with drummer Jimmy Chamberlain and band co-founder James Iha put to bed any myths of the Pumpkins sounding good live.  They were better than good on this night they were…incendiary.  

The headliners were now set, and the stadium was bursting at the seams.  It felt like they have jammed 50,000 bodies into this venue.  A costumed person in a bunny outfit stormed the stage doing cartwheels and the worm, and we all knew that was our cue that the band was not far behind.   

This would be my 5^th time seeing the punk rockers from Berkley, CA.  My friend Stacy contacted me before the show because she saw that I was in attendance via social media. “I just had the crazy realization that we went to see them in the 90s at The Edge in Orlando… and suddenly that was 30 years ago…possibly almost to the day” she texted. I looked it up, and in response I clicked “9-25-1994″.  Where does 30 years go?  The good news is the band is still here and so am I.  There were probably 500 people, maybe, that first time I saw them and now they have been headlining international shows that have tipped the 100,000 count. 

There were 37 songs in Green Day’s repertoire on this evening so I won’t go through them all.  They were highlighting the 30 years since the Dookie album release and 20 years of American Idiot.  They played both of those albums in full which I really love.  Lots of bands are following this trending of performing iconic albums in their entirety.  

Green Day looked and played like those guys that I saw in 1994 in the backyard of a small venue in Orlando that was mostly dead grass and mulch.  The vivacity of these three is unmatched.  Billy Joe Armstrong has drunk from the magical waters of Rob Lowe’s garden hose and seemingly earned the powers to never age.  Tre Cool looks like he is having the time of his life (pun intended) and Mike Dirnt bounces from one end of the stage to the other like trampolines are placed amongst the floorboards.  I am going to say that they played for two plus hours, but I really have no idea, and I don’t even care to look it up. All I can say is that all the seconds that they were in front of us, they gave us everything they had. 

The stage setting matched the albums that the band was playing at the time.  As they went into the songs of Dookie, a huge cartoon explosion was created behind the trio, and animated videos of characters from the jacket of the record played electronically.  At one point an inflatable plane, resembling the one from the bands LP artwork hovered above the crowd and dropped prizes down to the fans. Billie Joe’s voice was crisp, Tre’s drum licks sharp, and the savage bass of Mike was like a runaway train of regaling potency. 

American Idiot was more awesomeness as the lighting switched from green overtones to blacks and reds and out of nowhere a giant raised arm holding that archetypical grenade that has become the calling card of Green Day in more recent years.   

After finishing out the album, Armstrong segued into ‘Know Your Enemy’ from 21^st Century Breakdown and called out to the audience, asking for a fan who might know all the words. He pointed to a young fan to the stage and shared the microphone as they belted the chorus and jumped along with each other side by side. After, the two shared a tender moment, taking a selfie together on the stage. Green Day loves these moments sometimes inviting audience member on stage to play whole guitar parts and then giving that chosen one the guitar as a souvenir. 

The band looked like they had finished for the night, but Armstrong returned to the stage one more time to tell the audience that, “We don’t do encores.”  So, for the band’s non-encore encore, they played a song off their new album, “Bobby Sox,” and closed with “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).”   

Armstrong started the tune onstage all by himself with only his acoustic guitar. As the song came to a close, the rest of his band mates snuck up behind him, wrapping their arms around his shoulders and Tre tied something around Billie’s neck . Billie Joe struggled finish out the tune as he was laughing so hard and Dirnt kissed him on the head.  It was a great ending to an unforgettable concert. 

Armstrong and the band bid the crowd adieu, singing, “It’s something unpredictable / But in the end, it’s right / I hope you had the time of your life.” We sure did.