Live Review: Green Day Thrills the Fillmore In an Intimate Two-Hour Show

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!!”

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.

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.

But without needing to play to the nosebleed seats in Section 327 above third base, they were able to give focus to epic songs like “Jesus of Suburbia” and “Homecoming.” Dressed in a sport jacket and Cramps T-shirt, Billie Joe Armstrong didn’t have to engage in much rockstar cosplay — for a hometown crowd, he still felt like just plain Billie from Rodeo, who you might bump into at Winchell’s after the Corrupted Morals show at Gilman.

What was evident onstage — what he and Mike and Tré have picked up along the way since those early days — is not only a tight musicianship bordering on the miraculous, but a thespian’s skill for selling their songs and connecting with an audience.

During the Saviors track “Bobby Sox,” a fan in the second row waved a bisexual flag in fervent recognition of the song’s love-who-you-want themes. For “Father to a Son,” echoes were present of Armstrong’s son’s opening band, Ultra Q. Acknowledging the upcoming election that nobody wants to think about, during “Letterbomb,” Billie interjected, “Whose finger do you want to be on the nuclear bomb?!”

These sorts of things might come off as corny if they weren’t so authentic and sincere. Singing the final lines of the West Contra Costa anthem “Jesus of Suburbia,” about running away from the pain of a broken home, Billie appeared to briefly lose his voice; it was soon apparent that he was instead choking back tears.

This is how you do it, Green Day said on Tuesday. Write songs about your turbulent life, find a supportive circle, stick with your convictions, play damn loud and sing even louder to anyone who’ll listen, in every city around the world, record an unrivaled catalog of songs, and then, when you’re too famous to do so, play at the Fillmore anyway, this place where you once saw the Replacements and the Church as a teenager and got stoned off a stranger’s joint, and get out there on stage and scream from the monitors and leap unimaginably high into the air and play like your life depends on it because somewhere, out in the crowd, is another 15-year-old kid with disapproving parents who doesn’t fit in at school, and who needs the same thing you needed when you were baptized into the gospel of rock ‘n’ roll liberation.

After the show, out on the Fillmore overcrossing above Geary, was living proof of those types of kids: Mary Jane Mafia, a Green Day tribute band from Fremont playing a pop-up show of covers like “Walking Contradiction” and “2,000 Light Years Away” on the sidewalk to a dancing group of onlookers and a few bemused cops.

See, they didn’t get in. They didn’t get to hear Green Day play new songs that have no business being as good as they are, like the brutally honest “Dilemma,” or jump in the pit for “St. Jimmy,” or sing along for the zillionth time to encore “Basket Case.” But what Green Day does is a thread, one that weaves from the Clash to the Replacements to Operation Ivy and onward to a thousand bands on sidewalks and in garages around the world.

So yeah — it was a show, but it was also a lineage. I really wish you coulda seen it.