It wasn’t until we all shuffled down the stairs of the Fillmore, ears ringing from an epic two-hour Green Day set, sweat dripping off our shirts and the cold San Francisco night air hitting our bewildered faces, that I realized just what we’d all just witnessed.
After all, it’s not often that Green Day, who headline a tour of huge baseball stadiums later this summer, play a small show at a 1,300-capacity room like the Fillmore. Outside at the 8 p.m. showtime on Tuesday night, over a dozen people walked the sidewalk with hopeful signs: “Dad who needs 1 ticket,” “Name Your Price,” and “Help! Need a ticket to join my wife and 8-year-old stepson for the show… and it’s our wedding anniversary today! Please!!”
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Those who did get in, however, were treated to two hours of the Bay Area’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll export (sorry, Metallica), and at one of the country’s best venues, no less.
Here’s what I can say definitively. In the past 35 years — starting in 1989, yeesh — I’ve seen Green Day at youth centers, warehouses, house parties, high schools and Rotary Club halls. And though they know how to rock a stadium just fine, they always thrive in small spaces, face-to-face with the crowd and making the tiniest room feel like the entire universe.
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The Fillmore show Tuesday night — a benefit for United Nations Human Rights climate justice initiatives and the Recording Academy’s MusiCares charity — was no exception. As Green Day had announced the day prior, they played the entirety of their new album Saviors, and the entirety of their 2004 opus American Idiot. Big, anthemic stuff.