Triple Crown

An everyday player in baseball wins the triple crown by leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. Rock stars win the triple crown by putting out the best album, the best single, and mounting the best tour in a given year. Green Day has done it. I grant I don't attend nearly the number of concerts I used to, but I can't remember an experience quite like the one I had Saturday night at Cobo Hall. Everyone knows that when a band plays songs off the new album at a concert you can see lines of people headed down the steps toward the bathrooms and the beer concessions. The crowd at the Green Day show not only stayed put during the songs off of American Idiot, they sang along. The band, obviously encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive response to the new material, tore through pretty much every song a fan could want to hear as well as covers of "We Are the Champions" and "Shout." This was a blistering rock show that would have done Dewey Finn proud.