Location:
UMass Amherst, Mullins Center in Amherst, USA
Date:
November 28, 1994
Notes:
Recordings from this show can be found [url=http://www.greendaycommunity.org/topic/87135-19941128-u-mass-mullins-center-amherst-massachusetts-usa/]here[/url]
Kevin O'Hare: "Perhaps the funniest rock concert I've ever seen, one that I originally described as 'an evening of bawdy decadence, as if ancient Romans had besieged Coach Cal’s palace.' Things reached a peak when a shirtless, 300-plus-pound male fan joined the band on stage to sing a horrifically off-key cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 'Sweet Home Alabama'. When the band and the crowd begged for a stage dive, the rotund fellow willingly obliged nearly obliterating dozens in the crowd when he flew from the stage, and the audience collapsed like dominoes. Miraculously, all survived."
"Despite the semi-harsh chording, Green Day is, essentially, a friendly band. The group began with a 'Smoke on the Water' riff, played a snippet of Twisted Sister's 'We're Not Gonna Take It' and invited this obese, shirtless guy up on stage and had him sing a bit from Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Sweet Home Alabama' before encouraging a stage dive into the pit. (The guy made it.) The band played the hits - 'Welcome to Paradise,' 'Longview,' 'Basket Case' - but they also jerked around a lot. No song is so important that it necessarily merits a straight run-through. [Billie Joe] might just want to lie on his back on a speaker and noodle his guitar. He and bassist Mike Dirnt are Beavis and Butt-head slightly grown-up motormouths. Billie's idea of bonding? 'How many stupid people are here tonight?' Showmanship? A trouser drop with a 'All right, Massachusetts police, take a look!' call. When some fools fired up cigarette lighters he railed, 'What do you think this is, Bon Jovi? Stone Temple Pilots?'"
Hartford Courant: "The big time has not curtailed the bratty exuberance of Green Day. Now at the tail end of its Dookie tour, which was playing clubs like the Sting in New Britain only four months ago, the punk rock trio from Oakland, Calif., has tightened and focused its approach for its sudden series of arena shows, such as the one Monday at the University of Massachusetts Mullins Center in Amherst. Ripping through most of the songs from its 3 million-selling major label debut, also named "Dookie", Green Day rippled with intensity and redoubled its force. As thousands rushed over barricades to the general admission floor rippling with moshers, the band tossed off the anthems 'Longview', 'Basket Case' and 'Welcome to Paradise' early in the set as if they haven't become milestones in the remarkable success story of punk rock. Sometime in the set (an hour with two encores), things started breaking down, as you would expect in a Green Day show - the last one in Massachusetts ended with a riot at the Boston Hatch Shell. Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong, 22, his hair sticking out in platinum dreadlocks, started dropping his pants. Drummer Tre Cool, who turns 22 next week, stepped down from his riser to play guitar on a little ditty about strange things he does by himself. The clothes from the moshers kept flying up - a jacket knocked down the microphone of bassist Mike Dirnt, 22. When a balled-up T-shirt stuck at the head of Armstrong's guitar, he kept on playing without pause. And when the group insisted that an overweight, shirtless mosher join them on stage - to sing Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Sweet Home Alabama', which he didn't know - it was clear the band was there to have as much fun as the crowd. Green Day's relentless, impassioned sound is a perfect echo of punk circa 1978, with harmonies, melodies, songs of despair and disillusion - and energy to burn. Today, the kind of approach started by the Buzzcocks or the Undertones sounds even better thanks to the huge, young audiences. Once most of 'Dookie' and a lot of the craziness was past, the band dipped back into its two other, lesser known independent albums, '39/Smooth' and 'Kerplunk!', for songs such as '2,000 Light Years Away' (not the Rolling Stones song) and 'Christie Road'. As in their club gigs, Green Day harkened back to its indie past by bringing along lesser-known bands, in this case a pair of punk power trios with poppy and insurrectionist approaches. Waterdog started things off with a set that included a dedication 'to the late, great Jeffrey Dahmer'. Pansy Division challenged the macho, mostly male moshpit with its very gay politics, a challenge that the group, throwing cups stageward, apparently wasn't ready to handle."
