A 3-year-old boy with a magenta mohawk. A guy who delayed his flight back home to New Zealand. A father-daughter duo celebrating dad’s 65th birthday. Legions of screaming, singing and — in a couple cases, at least — sobbing fans waited for hours on Sunday in Pinole to get a glimpse of the band Green Day.
They stood under a beating sun in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on a typically quiet stretch of strip-mall suburbia. It was the unexpected last stop on Green Day’s whirlwind weekend in the Bay Area, which started off with a sold-out show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park on Friday night.
The homecoming was meaningful not only for their die-hard fans, but also for the band members, who took several moments throughout the weekend to reminisce about their roots.
Why did 7-Eleven make the cut on their speedy tour stop back home? The convenience store chain is the carrier of the new medium-roast Anniversary Blend from Green Day’s Punk Bunny coffee line.
Sure, a brand partnership with a ubiquitous corporation may not sound like the punkest thing in the world. But that particular Pinole Valley Road store and block has special meaning for the musicians.
“We spent a lot of time in class, and ditching class, across the street,” bassist Mike Dirnt told the crowd Sunday. “But always in the search for something creative, finding our people, our tribe.”
Growing up in Rodeo, lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong met Dirnt at Carquinez Middle School in Crockett in the early 1980s. They both attended Pinole Valley High School for a period of time, although Armstrong dropped out. In high school there, they formed the band Sweet Children, a precursor to Green Day, which drummer Tré Cool joined soon after. They famously came up at Berkeley’s 924 Gilman Street and similar local venues, alongside other East Bay punk legends like Rancid and Operation Ivy.
During their Sunday visit to Pinole, Mayor Maureen Toms gifted them a golden key to the city. Some of their family members, who are still local, were in attendance.
Representatives from 7-Eleven revealed a plaque that says, “At the center of the earth in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven….Billie, Mike and Tre were here” – lifting lyrics from their song “Jesus of Suburbia.”
And they doled out cups of coffee, lots of coffee.
Punk Bunny is the recent rebrand of Green Day’s Oakland Coffee Works line. Its blends are all organic and fair-trade certified. A portion of the proceeds is distributed among an evolving collection of charities — and their Rooted Soul blend benefits the Oakland soccer teams’ foundation.
The Anniversary Blend is a tribute to the 30th and 20th anniversaries, respectively, of the band’s seminal albums “Dookie” and “American Idiot,” and the 60th anniversary of 7-Eleven inventing coffee to go, according to the company.
By Sunday, the band members probably could have used a cup or two. On Friday night, they played an energetic and personal 2.5-hour set during the San Francisco stop on their Saviors Tour, which they’re headlining with the Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Linda Lindas.
Green Day seamlessly sang through the entirety of both “Dookie” and “American Idiot,” fitting in other favorite tunes like “Minority,” along with songs from their new album Saviors. Their thrashing, screaming and jumping belied their 50-some years.
From the stage, Armstrong let their love for the Bay Area, and their particular corner of it, be known.
“We are the refineries. We are the cold bay. We are the mud that lives under there. We are East Bay,” he shouted, touching his heart. “Green Day, East Bay, forever. Can you feel me?”
He said, “This one’s about Oakland” before playing “Welcome to Paradise” with lyrics like “Some call it slums, some call it nice.”
And he took a profane and well-received dig at a widely despised man.
“We don’t take no shit from people like John fucking Fisher,” Armstrong said, “who’s selling out the Oakland A’s to Las fucking Vegas.”
The statement was not a very rebellious one to make at the Giant’s stadium, but it’s just one in a series of anti-Fisher actions by Armstrong. At Toronto’s Rogers Centre, he spray-painted a Baller’s “B” over an Oakland A’s logo.
The crowd at the show was a mix of middle-aged punks, their toddlers sitting on shoulders in the pit, and teenagers who will forever gravitate toward music about feeling alone and othered.
A woman with green hair named Becky said she was first introduced to Dookie by a shipmate in the U.S. Navy during the early 1990s while stationed in San Diego. Ten years later, the anti-war rock opera “American Idiot” moved her deeply. Becky, who declined to give her last name, was at the show with her husband, whom she met in the military, and their friends — all dancing their hearts out.
The message of the album likely also meant something to the young people in the audience, who are growing up in an era of extraordinary conflict, polarization and environmental emergency. Armstrong yelled “Ceasefire!” before launching into American Idiot’s title track.
Sunday’s Pinole crowd was similarly multi-generational and passionate. Most people had heard about the event just that day, from an Instagram post by the band.
At the front of the crowd was Ashley Lim, 27, who got to go up on stage at Friday’s show and belt the song “Know Your Enemy” into a microphone with Armstrong, who’d scoured the crowd for somebody who knew the lyrics. Lim, who works in theater in Berkeley, said she’d had an odd premonition that something exciting might happen to her at the show.
Lim, who has fire-colored hair and an undercut, said she believes Green Day has so many hardcore fans because they’re the “resident leaders of the lost and found.”
“It’s this calling for people who feel like they don’t belong.”
For Whitney Boyle, 34, it was hardly her first time sharing space with the members of Green Day. Based in Melbourne, Australia, she’s followed them around the world, including on this tour’s stretch of five U.S. shows.
“Little 14-year-old me cannot believe I can see Green Day and Rancid in their hometown,” Boyle said in Pinole. Hearing “American Idiot” on the radio as a teenager “quite literally changed the course of my life,” she said. “All I do is work and spend my money on live music.”
Standing near her was fan Bob Hayes, 65, and his daughter Lauren Hayes, 28, who bought her dad tickets to the Oracle show for his birthday.
“It’s comfort music,” she said, holding a 924 Gilman sign. “I listened to them when I was a baby in the car.”
Some in the crowd were fans of the coffee line too, and had subscriptions to Punk Bunny beans.
They assured this reporter that the watery stuff on offer at the event paled in comparison to a cup made fresh at home.
