Green Day showers Spectrum with T-shirts, toilet paper, irresistible tunes

With the last two Green Day albums - 2004's politically charged and Grammy-winning American Idiot and this year's full-fledged rock-opera 21st Century Breakdown - Billie Joe Armstrong has completed his transition from snot-nosed punk-rock smart-aleck to highly ambitious super-serious rock auteur.

But as amply demonstrated last night at the Wachovia Spectrum by Green Day's highly entertaining 2½ hour show, complete with flash pots exploding and water guns shooting, Armstrong remains closely in touch with his inner 15-year-old even as he increasingly takes after his classic-rock ancestors.

Before the band took the stage to the strains of The Ramones' "Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio?" (and after a mock-drunken roadie in a bunny costume showed off his dance moves to tunes by Michael Jackson and the Village People), the pre-show music included songs by The Clash, Twisted Sister - and tellingly, The Who's "My Generation."

The last was most appropriate because in the songs that he's written this decade, Armstrong, 37, who was accompanied by bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool (plus three auxiliary musicians), has followed the lead of Pete Townshend in coming up with punchy, guitar-driven songs that aim to capture the rage and confusion of youth while taking on larger issues of grown-up alienation.

Many of those songs, like 21st Century's "East Jesus Nowhere" - which the singer-guitarist prefaced with the words "You will see how Godless of a nation we have become" - American Idiot's "Jesus of Suburbia," carry the weight of their own pomp and circumstance, not to mention the influence of faux-operatic predecessors like Queen.

And it goes without saying that the multi-platinum aging punks in Green Day circa 2009 are a mass of contradictions.

"I don't want to live in the modern world!" Armstrong howled in "American Eulogy," while his multi-generational fans at the Verizon- and BlackBerry-sponsored tour were bombarded with a dazzling array of urban apocalyptic images on a tres cool state-of-the-art video screen behind him.

But the Northern California band was never in danger of suffocating on its own seriousness. For starters, Armstrong is a relentlessly shameless showman. He shouted out the name of the city he was playing in a hundred times if he said it once (and he was careful to pay attention to New Jersey, too).

At various points, he donned police cap and feather boa, used a T-shirt gun to fire merchandise into the second deck, and employed a retrofitted leaf blower to shower the crowd with toilet paper. Confetti filled the air at the close of "Minority," and indoor fireworks cascaded over the band during "21 Guns."

Armstrong took the idea of user-generated content to the extreme, repeatedly bring audience members on stage to share the workload. Three fans each took a verse to "Longview," the still-thrilling ode to boredom for 1994's Dookie.

And "Jesus of Suburbia" was enlivened by the mightily impressive singing and guitar-playing talents of Derek Hensinger, 22, of Macungie, Pa., who made the most of it when Armstrong had him pulled out the crowd. ("It was phenomenal," Hensinger - who was not a plant, and is in a band called Bang Diesel - said in an interview afterwards. "They're the band that got me started playing music.")

To be sure, there was much fun to be had in Armstrong's punk-derived populism, persistent use of naughty language and tireless crowd-pleasing efforts, which included a Springsteenesque medley that began with "King For A Day" from 1997's Nimrod, that morphed into the Isley Brothers' "Shout" and the Penguins' "Earth Angel," followed by bits of The Jackson Five's "I'll Be There," and Ben E. King's "Stand By Me."

All of that onstage pizzazz - and lyric-driven message mongering - would have been for naught if Green Day didn't deliver musically. Which they did, whether it was with the power-chord crunch of "Brain Stew," the echoey football chant singalong of "Are We the Waiting," or the lone-man-on-acoustic-guitar, sentimental strum of the prom-theme closer "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)."

Dirnt and Cool are a vise-tight rhythm section. And while the auxiliary players added power and a smidgeon of subtlety, the principal attraction of the mature, high-minded Green Day remains the same as it was in its juvenile delinquent incarnation:

Armstrong's songs are so catchy, you can't get them out of your head.

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "In the Mix," at http://http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inthemix.