Green Day announces surprise Monday night gig at the Echoplex
Get your credit cards and clicker fingers ready: San Francisco punk rock band Green Dayannounced a surprise Los Angeles gig at the Echoplex in Echo Park for Monday night, and tickets go on sale at 10 a.m.
The trio of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool are teasing their forthcoming triumvirate of new albums, “Uno,” “Dos” and “Tre,” which are coming starting in September. The 700-capacity basement club in Echo Park is only a little bigger than the Coconut Teaszer in Hollywood, where in one early 1990 L.A. gig, Green Day headlined a notable bill that also included No Use for a Name, Down by Law, Popdefect and Hunger Farm.
Since then, they’ve had quite a journey. One of the best and most adventurous of the 1990s American punk rock explosion, Green Day is most well known to the general public, ironically, for the mid-’00s Broadway smash/hit album “American Idiot,” and its 1994 breakthrough single, “Dookie.” Over the past 24 years, the Bay Area-born group has carved a solid and uniquely Green Day-ian career arc, one that at nearly every turn has pushed at the edges where punk, pop, rock and every combination thereof, collides.
With the three forthcoming studio albums, Green Day’s returning with a lot of material, and are doing so by teasing the releases, which will come out in two-month intervals starting with “Uno” on Sept. 25, with quickie video clips, teaser songs, social media, and, now, a surprise show in the entertainment capital of America.
Is it worth the trouble dealing with the potential chaos of one of the world’s biggest bands squeezing into a low-ceiling, jam-packed space? Speaking as someone lucky enough to witness Nine Inch Nails’ retirement gig at the Echo Park mainstay in 2009, the answer is a definitive yes, especially if the band beefs up the inhouse sound system a notch or 11. (Note to Green Day’s sound man: Call Trent Reznor this morning and pick his brain on how he and his engineers mixed for the room. That was one of the best sounding concerts I’ve ever attended, and would love to hear it replicated.)
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