Green Day

It would be hard to imagine this show without that frenzied, moshing GA mass. Throughout the concert, portions of the standing crowd threw itself into whorls. But during more uptempo tunes - or the uptempo choruses of slower songs - the entire crowd, observed from the grandstand, looked like some indiscriminate hysterical swarm, right out of an insect special on the Discovery Channel. (Army ants on fresh meat? A killer-bee hive under attack?) During the opening act by the Chicago trio the Riverdales (rhythmically acute Ramones lovers undercut by the usual opening-band sound murk) grandstanders had made occasional rushes for the gates onto the floor and been held back by security. But when Green Day broke into "Welcome to Paradise," their third song, the dam broke: down at least one aisle seen from across the hall, a crowd poured like molten lava through a gate and into the arena-length mosh pit.

It would be mistaken to underestimate Green Day's musical performance in this equation. Yes, it was loud and fast, but the simplicity of Green Day's material can be overstated. The three-chord AABA and ABA song structures wind each piece tight, into little punk-rock vortexes, at the same time that their keening melodies and precisely inserted vocal harmonies (between Billie Joe and bassist Mike Dirnt) expand them outward and upward. With the audience singing along to every word of "Longview," it was easy to admire the textbook use of a bridge in a pop song at the same time that you felt your body lift. It also doesn't hurt that this seems to be a outfit utterly without pretension. If some rockers play Dionysus and Lucifer, Billie Joe is the trickster Puck, mugging, bringing an under-15 boy up from the pit and encouraging him to yell "Fuck off!" to the audience, or stripping off his own clothes for the final encore and strutting around the stage, like a three-year-old, fresh out of the bath and into the parents' living room. Forget political punk, this was liberating art for art's sake.