Details
Location:
City Gardens in Trenton, NJ
Date:
January 17, 1993
Other Acts:
Shades Apart, Headstrong
Notes:
- Michael Dolan: "My old buddies were on the back cover of "Dookie" holding an Ernie puppet, from a show at City Gardens in Trenton."
- Ken Salerno: "Billie's head was about to explode. He was so pissed at me for helping kids onstage to dive. A real 'punk rawker'. ...Billie was actually pissed at me. Because a few stage divers were comin' up near me and launchin' off the monitors over my head. Guess he wanted to stop them? Yeah, right..."
- notJames: "Back in '93, I saw Green Day at the old City Gardens in Trenton. Low ceiling, dead of winter, slush everywhere on the floor. A fight broke out just to the left of the stage, and in the middle of the song, Billie Joe took off his guitar, jumped in the middle, and kicked the shit out of the kid that started the whole thing."
- Radio Riot #20: "I saw Green Day again. They were ok. They were pretty tight, and the club was packed. I've never seen so many girls at one show in my life. I got some issues of Sour Mash, a damned
I good zine. Shades Apart were selling thin one sided shirts for $12. Green Day got a bit boring after a while, but I'd go see 'em again."
- Jamie Davis: "By this time, in '93, people were just… it was a different crowd. Me and Kyle, (Ed. - who’s black, which does have something to do with the story) were driving up there, and we see the people lined up. This is how you could tell it was a different crowd. Any other time we would line up and wrap around the building or to that back parking lot. This was the only show most of these people had been to, so the line went straight back, out into the street. They didn’t even know how to line up! We drive up, me and Kyle, and we’re blasting Skrewdriver and sieg-heiling people as we went past… as a joke. We cleared the line. We just drove right through it. There were girls and thirty-year-old emo kids diving to get out of the way, looking back at this black guy sieg-heiling."
- Timmy Chunks: "Headstrong actually opened that show. At the time I was singing for them. I was also working at City Gardens, and Randy asked if we wanted to open for Green Day. At that point I had only heard the name of the band. I had never heard them. When you’re in a band and someone asks you if you want to play a show, you play it. It doesn’t matter who it is. So I told Randy, yeah, we definitely wanted to play it. We showed up, we went on and did our show. The place was packed. Afterwards, Mike Dirnt comes up and says, 'Hey, great show guys!' and gives me a shirt. I thought it was really cool, and I said, 'Thanks!' They go on stage, the place is packed, and my jaw dropped. I was like, 'How come I haven't heard these guys?!' I could not believe how amazing they were. I had no idea."
- Randy Now: "Billie Joe said into the mic, 'We've never played for so many people before!' He told me this was their first show ever with monitors! Tre Cool kissed me on the cheek after they sold, like, $3000 in t-shirts. Up until then they did $400-$500 tops, and that was probably back home in California. These were five-dollar t-shirts! And then the band appropriately, or inappropriately, trashed the dressing room. That’s when I knew they were going to be big, after they trashed the dressing room. The shitheads!"
- Mike Dirnt: "The night we sold out City Gardens, and we realized we could sell out a place that held over a thousand people. When we went back home to Berkeley, we seriously sat down and started talking about where do we go from here?"
- Wikipedia: "In live recordings from Green Day's first show ever at City Gardens, Billie Joe Armstrong can be heard exclaiming, 'This is the biggest crowd that we have ever played in front of,' and, 'we've never had monitors before,' and after the first Green Day concert at City Gardens, drummer Tre Cool kisses promoter Randy Now on the cheek due to them making literally quadruple their original guarantee and their total merchandise sales at that one venue topping four figures for the first time in their career. They left City Gardens by trashing the dressing room as a 'rite of rock and roll passage' or a 'badge-of-honor and victory', thinking they were The Who. Another interesting trivia fact with Green Day and City Gardens is after Green Day's first appearance at the club, and having traveled cross country from California, punk rock agent Andy Somers got wind of this career-changing concert performance in Jersey from this band out of California, and phoned from his Hollywood agency office City Gardens promoter Randy Now, asking him, 'Hey, Randy. Andy here. What's this Green Day band all about?' and gave Somers the phone contact information which he used to pursue Green Day to become one of his clients, which they did. This started a relationship that would lead Green Day to be one of the headlining acts at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock entitled 'Woodstock '94' (or Mudstock due to Green Day starting a mud fight with the audience that spiraled out of control)."
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