PINOLE — A commemorative plaque on the wall outside a 7-Eleven might have seemed like a strange way for a small town to honor the globetrotting musical act that hails from it.
But the band that two decades ago recorded “Jesus of Suburbia” — a nine-minute song in which, at one point, the title character describes the convenience store’s parking lot as “the center of the Earth” — is probably best suited to find in it a kind of punk-rock irony.
Green Day will now be immortalized on the plaque and accompanying mural at the retail chain’s Pinole Valley Road storefront, where on Sunday members Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool spray-painted the same messages — that each “was here.”
It’s true: Founding members Dirnt and Armstrong, respectively the band’s bassist and star frontman, attended school down the street at Pinole Valley High, though the singer acknowledged at Sunday’s event that he often ditched class and never got around to graduating.
“There were a lot of great bands… just a lot of music” in Pinole, Armstrong told a crowd of several hundred that had waited for hours in the sun to catch a glimpse of their rock heroes. “We felt like we had a home there.”
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt wave to the fans after receiving a key to the city from mayor Maureen Toms in front of the 7-Eleven convenience store in Pinole, Calif., on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. Green Day fans started lining up almost six hours early to catch a glimpse of the band. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Armstrong, 52, instead focused his late teen years around honing Green Day’s signature melodic garage-rock sound, which eventually helped the band break into the mainstream in 1994 with the album Dookie.
Mayor Maureen Toms presented Green Day with an honorary key to the city, noting the weekend also marked the 20th anniversary of American Idiot, the six-times platinum album that cemented the band’s status as modern rock icons and whose namesake lead single became a counterculture anthem of the Bush era.
“We left town, and then now we’ve come full circle back here in Pinole,” said Armstrong, who also mentioned that some of his family members still live in west Contra Costa County.
The choice of 7-Eleven was not just a callback to Green Day’s suburban roots; it also was intended to cross-promote the corporate chain with the band’s locally based Punk Bunny Coffee company, launched in 2015 and recently rebranded from its old name, Oakland Coffee Works.
Although they didn’t speak for long, the band members stuck around afterward to sign autographs for their fans — a number of whom attended Friday’s sold-out San Francisco show. Green Day’s tour for its latest album, Saviors, will head this week to Seattle, Portland and then San Diego.
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong signs autographs for fans after receiving a key to the city from mayor Maureen Toms in front of the 7-Eleven convenience store in Pinole, Calif., on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. Green Day fans started lining up almost six hours early to catch a glimpse of the band. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
“They were incredible,” said 33-year-old Ernesto Flores, a longtime fan and East Bay native, of the Friday concert. “Billie Joe can really sing and Tré (the drummer) can just make it sound like the record. How many bands can execute a live show like that? I think that’s an underappreciated thing in a lot of music.”
Green Day has consistently credited the East Bay for the development of its creative ethos, and Armstrong even went viral over the weekend for his harsh on-stage criticisms of Oakland A’s owner John Fisher, who intends to relocate the franchise out of town next year.
The group’s local roots seem to have appealed to a younger generation of fans gathered Sunday, including Nicholas Muñoz, an 18-year-old attending Pinole Valley High who said there are still some vestiges of punk-rock culture left in town, despite other genres being far more popular among today’s youth.
Up on the podium, the band’s members agreed.
“Great things can come from anywhere, can come from your mind, from your bedroom, from your friend’s house,” Dirnt told the crowd. “Just believe in yourself.”