One of my first questions, when I saw the 2022 Outside Lands lineup, was where the legacy acts were. OSL started essentially as a celebration of San Francisco’s rock ’n’ roll legacy, and earlier festivals usually boasted at least one major classic-rock act along the lines of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Steve Winwood, Levon Helm, or Paul Simon. Then I started to do the math: Damn The Torpedoes, Petty’s most beloved album, came out 29 years before his set at the first Outside Lands. Green Day’s Dookie came out 28 years before this one. Funny how time slips away…
At their headlining set, Green Day fully embraced their stature as a classic rock band. The set opened with someone in a rabbit suit dancing to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, one of a small handful of bands in history to achieve the same singalong ubiquity as Billie Joe Armstrong and his East Bay power trio. Once the band came on, they largely ignored their work since 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown, playing the hits and spicing things up with bits of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” and Journey’s “Lights.”
Green Day hasn’t put out much music in the last decade that stands alongside monoliths like Dookie and American Idiot, but three decades of ubiquity has not dimmed their relevance. The alternative rock of the ’90s is one of the most pervasive influences on music across the spectrum, from rappers (Friday headliner Lil Uzi Vert) to pop singers (Twin Peaks-stage performer Rina Sawayama) to avant-gardists (100 gecs, playing Sunday) to the DIY underground (just about any twenty-something guitar band you care to name in the last 10 years). Even now, young Bay Area punk bands like Surprise Privilege and Destroy Boys look to Green Day and their Berkeley home base 924 Gilman as a guiding light. Billie Joe Armstrong looks and sounds more or less the same as he did when he was 21, and he probably will when he’s 70.
Green Day rocked: They played the hits with panache, invited a kid up onstage to fill in on guitar, busted out random jazz interludes, made full use of the 90 minutes they were allotted despite most of their songs lasting only three or four minutes. Armstrong sounded genuinely pumped to be playing in the Bay Area, and if they were just performing their dogged duties as touring workhorses, it didn’t show. It helps that they have great songs: Armstrong can write and sing the hell out of a hook, and I have tremendous respect for his gift even if the tinny and texture-less production of much of Green Day’s music means they’re rarely a band I go out of my way to listen to (this is a gripe I have with a lot of mainstream rock from the ’90s and onward).
I was more aware than ever on Day Two of the dramatic vibe-shift between Land’s End and the other stages. Land’s End is huge and perpetually choked with kicked-up dust, resembling nothing so much as one of those circular “death spirals” ants form when they lose the colony’s pheromone trail. It’s desolate, treeless, and flat, and there’s nowhere to sit and get a good view unless you’re in the VIP section. It’s much easier at Land’s End to get the sense of the festival as a money-processor as much as a celebration of art. Meanwhile, at the Sutro stage, you can lounge happily on a hill and get a great vantage point for acts like Dutch soft-rock bandleader Benny Sings, brain-bending NY-via-Texas jazz pianist Robert Glasper, or Aussie disco act Parcels.
The most comfortable stage I visited was the Music Hub by Toyota, tucked into an inconspicuous nook of the park between the Polo Field and Hellman Hollow. Trees offered shade, and the slope of the hill formed a natural amphitheater around the stage. I saw the wonderful experimental artist L’Rain here, playing a more outré set than her earlier and more song-focused Sutro performance, and the oceanic wall of sound she created with her brawny accompanist brought back a vivid and specific memory for me.
It was of being a high school student and walking in Golden Gate Park at dusk to wear off my weed high before I came home to my parents. I would listen to ambient albums like Gas’s Pop or Fennesz’s Endless Summer during this time, and the park took on sacred significance for me, a vast refuge where I could disappear among the flowers and trees. If not for L’Rain, I might have forgotten I was even in the park. I associate it with a profound sense of peace, and alas, that’s not something that’s always easy to find at Outside Lands.
