Green Day has gotten a lot of adulation recently ’round these parts. It’s not every band that produces my personally definitive song from the last 30 years. This praise might not stop for another 24 hours or so, what with today’s story and tonight’s unexpected surprise performance of American Idiot (the Broadway show) that I will soon find myself seeing which will feature Billie Joe himself as St. Jimmy. Consider tomorrow’s review of that Part 2, and this recollection, Part 1.

Let me fill in the anecdotal gap between those early Green Day memories and that second Green Day concert I saw, the one at Giants Stadium. This was back in 2004. September. Life was pure potential back then: I had not yet turned twenty-three, which just seems impossible. I was already living with my buddy Adam in the East Village, having moved into our shoebox in time for July 4th. I had traded in my stodgy yet peaceful life in New Rochelle for a certainly more exciting one in New York City. I was still going to Fordham, my last semester of classwork before preparing for the comprehensive exam the following spring. Being in school and being able to swing not having to work and not yet having worked and devoting your life exclusively to the things you find interesting is a wonderful and enviable position to be in at twenty-two. What was to come was still malleable: Not having taken that first adult step hadn’t yet collapsed any possibilities for me. It was perfect. It was a dream, but it was perfect.

Eh, mostly. I’d say my generation’s biggest concerns beyond our immediate personal needs were the ongoing war and the upcoming election. We all know how those would turn out. And the election itself turned out as it did beginning on my twenty-third birthday. Regardless, that’s a wonderful age, still young but also arguably mid-twenties. Even then, only a couple of months later, it seemed the future was beginning to hammer itself out. I was conspicuously older, and with the election having been decided as it was, we could all start imagining the future, as good or bad as we wanted to make it in our minds. But that’s the thing: We were forced to be thinking ahead. We could consider life four years down the road, if vaguely. September wasn’t like that. It was still all buildup then, all anticipation. It was like a neverending Christmas Eve in which the excitement would never have occasion to end. It was enjoying the journey more than the destination, living in the moment and choosing the present rather than considering the letdown after the certain but temporary joy of opening the gifts.

American Idiot dovetailed seamlessly into these goings-on. Here were these guys, these theretofore perpetually young, enthusiastic, bratty guys that we hadn’t heard much from over the previous four years, about to make a glorious, impactful return. They were necessarily older, as people get, but even if they brought us more of the same, musically and emotionally, they’d be in an interesting new position, speaking to us and for us while not exactly being a part of us, agewise. They could sing about the young and young adults, as they always had, but with a perspective that they’d never had before, and that in a way we might not have been able to see ourselves. Yet beyond all that mushy stuff was a band reborn, angry as hell, offering up battle cries left and right. If anyone could put into words and music what needed to be said and felt at that moment, it would be the band we all knew and loved and trusted ten years earlier. It was all the more powerful that they’d virtually disappeared, and that Warning was a different tack for them. Their resurgence absolutely made me recognize how good it was to be young, but old enough then to conceivably make an actual and important difference in the world.

Under these auspicious circumstances, a record release show might as well play itself and it’d be impressive. But it was better than that. I’d heard about it from my friend Jason: Green Day would play four club dates, in New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Los Angeles. And they’d play the New York date at Irving Plaza on the day the album would come out. And tickets went on sale Friday, September 17th. With no classes that day, I dutifully stayed over a different friend’s place the night before, right by Union Square, ostensibly so I’d be up in time to get on line. And I was: the line was only half a block long and was about to wrap around the corner by the time I got there with no music to listen to and no book to read. But I made some calls and I waited. And I overheard some kids talking about the album, that it was getting great word of mouth, that it would among other things be layered with harmony. I didn’t know what I’d be getting into.

Tuesday, September 21. I had class that afternoon but made a trip to it must have been the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, to buy what I was looking forward to but also so I’d be able to recognize some of the songs for the show that night. I bought the CD, unwrapped it, loaded it into my portable CD player, and headed up to Grand Central to catch my train – only I was so distracted and possibly shaking, I took the wrong train and was at Astor Place when the four opening chords of “Jesus of Suburbia” chimed in. The day at Fordham was a blur, though I do remember listening to the CD right outside of Dealy. On that day of days it was more about getting as familiar as possible with the music than appreciating the nuance, but be not mistaken, I couldn’t have been more excited for the music.

Jason and I got to Irving Plaza when it wasn’t so crowded. We were maybe thirty feet from the stage, a little bit to our right of center. Remember, I had never seen the band before so while that week of buildup was incredible, the decade of buildup was just unwieldy. But just like that the house lights dimmed and we all cheered and the band came on halfway through the introduction of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, their characteristic silhouettes giving themselves away. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing or was about to hear, I almost couldn’t process it, and didn’t care, because for the next hour and a half or so, this “glorified record release” show, in Billie Joe’s words, would easily grapple its way to the very top of my concertgoing pantheon, never to be challenged. They played American Idiot straight through and came out for an encore, too, playing “Longview,” “Brain Stew/Jaded,” “Minority” and for the Queen fan in me, “We Are The Champions.” Unbelievable. There are no other words.

With each and every song I was of two minds: Aware of this time in my life, in all of our lives, trying to respect the timeliness of this all; but as importantly, for damn sure, I was enjoying seeing this great band, this favorite modern band of mine, for the first time, playing this great music a short way away from me. The future, the rest of our lives, as much as we all sang along about it, was some foreign thing, some hypothetical beast existing somewhere else, and only so in our imaginations. That night, the dawning was all.