On Thursday night, Billie Joe Armstrong joined his fellow Green Day members to open FireAid, setting off the nearly six-hour benefit with a three-song tribute to those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. It was Green Day operating like Green Day typically does these days: massive shows on massive platforms, not entirely out of the ordinary, this time for a good cause.
If there’s one thing the devastating LA wildfires brought to light, it’s a sense of the underlying community coursing through the city, the unspoken camaraderie of collective grief and support. It’s often hard to spot. Big philanthropic gestures typically go accounted for — FireAid raised $60 million in donations even before the event began — but it’s those smaller acts of kindness that bring humanity into focus during a time when it’s easy to wonder what’s left of it.
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Thus, Armstrong compacted the stadium-sized scale of Green Day to West Hollywood’s famed Troubadour on Friday evening for an LA wildfire relief concert with his side band the Coverups, a rotating cast of characters that this time included vocalist/guitarist Jason White, bassist Bill Schneider and drummer Chris Dugan. Typically, the Coverups play like a garage band of dads operating at the highest professional level, jukeboxing everything from the Clash and Misfits to Bowie and the Replacements. And that’s largely what it was throughout the two-hour show, only filtered through a philanthropic lens.
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Indeed, the Coverups brought 500 attendees together to do what they do best: use music a vehicle for unity. The band, established in 2018 and sporadically active with one-off shows, ran through selections from a typical set — Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69,” Sweet’s “Fox on the Run,” Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” — with a few new ones thrown in the mix (Soul Asylum’s “Sometime to Return,” Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”).
But amid a skeletal Grammy week that’s normally overflowing with industry events, it was a tasteful way to give back, with proceeds going to the Altadena Boys and Altadena Girls. “Our spirits are rising, I love it,” Armstrong told the crowd between covers of the Strokes’ “Last Nite” and the Longshots’ “Love Is for Losers.”
The show was with its moments. Armstrong’s son Jakob Danger assisted on guitar on a Replacements cover of “Color Me Impressed,” as did Sugarcult’s Marko DeSantis for a rendition of Ramones’ “Rockaway Beach,” with Armstrong telling the crowd about how DeSantis lost his home in the fire but managed to find his wife’s wedding ring amid the rubble. White paused to encourage attendees to buy merch, with all proceeds going to the Altadena organizations.
Banter was overall kept to a minimum, though Armstrong shared some advice about the current state of the world in a brief address. “Keep your mental health and keep your wits about you,” he said. “The whole thing with social media, you see all these things and the anxiety level just goes high and high. Expect that for a long time, it’s just going to happen. Pick and choose what’s going to freak you the fuck out. And also pick and choose your friends. You don’t need a friend group, you just need a couple of people that love you.”
By the show’s end, Armstrong and company played out on “Sometime to Return” for a second time. Its lyrics rang true, a resonating theme if you will: “Ride into town and look around, get up and do something / No time to choose it, do it do it do it do it.”
