Green Day Announce 2024 Tour and Blast Through ‘Dookie’ During ‘Secret’ Las Vegas Show

Mark Gray
·3 min read
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8kYHrgI3 - Credit: Greg Schneider*
8kYHrgI3 - Credit: Greg Schneider*

All of Green Day’s secrets are coming out. On Thursday night, the punk-rock icons not only performed a “secret” show in downtown Las Vegas (they teased it earlier in the week), but also had another surprise up their sleeves: an upcoming U.S. stadium tour with the Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, and the Linda Lindas.

“I have a big announcement. It’s really big. Get your cameras ready,” Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said before trumpeting the tour to the fans at Fremont Country Club, many of whom began lining up in the morning to snag a front-row spot inside the 850-person capacity venue — a far cry from the mammoth venues Green Day will play in 2024.

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While Armstrong and the band debuted a song from their forthcoming album called “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” the evening was much more of an homage to Dookie, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in February.

“It’s not quite the anniversary,” Armstrong acknowledged. “The record came out in February 1994, so in October of 1993, we were just scared shitless.”

Little did they know Dookie would put Green Day on the map and help start a pop-punk revival. The album still holds up incredibly well to this day, and the band wasted no time delving into it during the pop-up concert.

The trio, accompanied by three touring members of the band, strode up to the small stage to the sounds of the Austin Powers theme song and immediately began playing “Burnout,” Dookie’s opening track. In quick succession, they played the rest of the album from start to finish. And, yes, drummer Tré Cool performed “All by Myself,” a “hidden” track on the celebrated album.

After blasting through Dookie — one of Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time — Green Day spent the next hour celebrating their 33-year catalog, often choosing to eschew radio hits and instead opt for deeper cuts. “Stuart and the Ave.,” from 1995, 2004’s “LetterBomb,” 2012’s “Nuclear Family,” and 2020’s “Graffitia” made the set — all favorites among Green Day diehards. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famers even went pre-Dookie in playing “Disappearing Boy” from their first album, 39/Smooth, and “One of My Lies” from 1991’s Kerplunk.

For a band to be able to keep the rambunctious crowd without the help of mainstream songs shows why Green Day still sits among the top of the pop-punk pyramid. After a breakneck 29-song set, Green Day capped off the evening with “Revolution Radio” and cult classic “Homecoming.”

Green Day treated the not-entirely-a-surprise show as a warm-up for this weekend’s When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas, which they co-headline with Blink-182 on Saturday and Sunday. The punk band had teased fans for a week, implying that a secret show was happening but giving out no other information. However, they revealed the details on Wednesday, dropping a banner from the Fremont Country Club that read “Send Out an S.O.S. It’s Getting Serious.” On Thursday, the banner hanging from the roof of the building fittingly read: “Welcome to Paradise.”

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