Good Morning America(n Idiot)

Today I woke up at 5am and made it over to Central Park's Summerstage for the free Green Day concert for Good Morning America. For 6am, there were a lot of kids there. Perhaps this generation is caffeinated into oblivion, or perhaps "free" means a lot more to them in this recession, but when I was their age you would be hard pressed to find more than a hand full of kids willing to wake up that early, even for a concert. I am not a huge fan of Green Day, however, I used to love their music during the Dookie and Nimrod eras. Perhaps it was because I was younger then and now those tunes still hold a fond place in my heart, but it was worth making the trek out for a chance to hear them. What I got instead was songs from the last two albums, the newest of which (21st Century Breakdown) is a chart topper at the moment. While I wouldn't call their new material bad, it is not something that I would go out of my way to listen to...yet on this fine morning, I did. There was plenty of downtime for the Good Morning America segments, but Green Day did give a 4 song "sound check." That would have been been great, but they ended up playing all those same songs again later. If anything, they could have at least given the older people in the crowd some of their older jams for the sound check. Well, let me get into some of the photos:


As I pointed out on Twitter, at least half the people in attendance were holding up some sort of recording device for most of the performances. This ranged from cellphone cameras, to digital cameras, to video cameras (which were forbidden, but nobody was checking at the entrance).


This guy was recording the who entire thing. I saw him playing with his phone while recording with the other hand a few times, but I don't think he actually looked at the concert except through the video camera even once.




They brought up this little girl to dance to one of the songs. I could hear the jealous hissing of the teenyboppers around me. Though there were lot of "awws" too.


If that last one didn't make the girls in the crowd jealous enough, they brought up this girl to sing a full verse. I heard the catty comments the whole way out the park after that one.



Overall, Green Day performed their songs well and were great with audience participation. All too often you see successful bands/musicians that completely ignore the audience and it was good to seem them staying in tune to the crowd. The audience on the other hand could use some work. After seeing the pictures I posted, you may call me a hypocrite, but people need to chill out with the recording devices. It is fine to take some photos here and there but when you are trying too hard to capture the moment digitally, you are failing to enjoy the moment in real-time. I will leave you with a little snippet of the crowd singing.