I attended the Green Day concert on Monday at the United Center. It wasn’t just a music concert, it was a full-fledged production. They really put on a show. They had flames and fireworks and everything. And they had this big screen behind them on stage that they would project different images onto for different songs and the images were video, not just stills. It really added to the performance. Billie Joe, the leader singer, had really good stage banter and was good at keeping the audience engaged and an active part of the show. But he did make the audience sing, “Hey oh” after him, one too many times, he could’ve cut down on that.
Different people were pulled up on stage at different times to do different things, which was really fun to watch. They started out by playing songs from 21st Century Breakdown, the first being “21st Century Breakdown”. Right before Christian’s Inferno, Billie Joe invited a child to come up onto the stage to be “saved,” he whispered to him for a minute and then sang the begining of the song over him and right when a huge firework exploded with a bang, the kid fell over backwards and lay there still for the rest of the song, at the end of which he happily ran off and was handed off the stage by security back to his parents. 
Some of the older songs they played were “King for a Day,” “Hitching a Ride,” “Basket Case,” and “Longview,” during which they pulled two different people onstage to sing the song, it was fun, but those people should not give up their day jobs. They played all the hit songs from American Idiot including “Jesus of Suburbia.” Before they started “Jesus of Suburbia” they asked who in the crowd knew how to play it, a boy of about 12 volunteered and they hoisted him on stage and he played the guitar for the song, quite well too. The sound for the show was very good, it was very loud though, I was glad my dad had forced me to take earplugs. All in all it was an experience to remember.
