Dead reckoning
As we stood on the floor of War Memorial Auditorium Thursday night waiting for The Dead Weather show to begin, our companion—looking at a group of fans fondling their new DW merch—said, "I bet Jack White could sell his poo and people would buy it." Maybe they would, we thought. Maybe. But not before shouting, "Wooooo!!!"

This was a night of much wooing.

Every time the house music reached the end of a song, the audience would cheer. Every time a roadie adjusted an instrument, the audience would cheer. Every time the lights got darker or brighter, or there was the slightest indication that something in the room was different than the moment before, people would cheer. We don't go to many shows where everyone seems so gotdamn excited about everything.

So when Screaming Females took to the stage, it was to a much bigger ovation than the last time we saw them. We can count on one finger the number of bands we've seen open for JEFF the Brotherhood and then, on their subsequent visit to town, for one of Jack White's bands. The Females are peerless in this category, and why not? Singer/guitarist Marisa Paternoster is a powerhouse, and the band reeled through a frenetic set of heavy chords and cascading rhythms hung with psychedelic shreds. They even played Spin favorite "Bell," and in the process won over the crowd (except maybe the two guys behind us).

Shortly after SF left the stage, we got a text saying that Tré Cool and Mike Dirnt of Green Day were in the house, though we never saw them. (Lots of familiar local rock faces, though.) It was around this time that the wooing started to get ridiculous. The band's crew, dressed up in black suits and fedoras, got round after round of breathless, anticipatory applause. All the waiting kept reminding us that we'd skipped dinner. But then, at long last, The Dead Weather made their (public) Nashville debut, to a roar that was absolutely deafening. The giant black curtain behind the stage was yanked down to reveal the band's backdrop, which was, uh, it was...a ghost-y fox head with, uh, some kind of shaft coming out of it, rising into, um, a ghost-y...grasshopper-flower? Or something?

Anyway, the band opened with "60 Feet Tall" and came out blazing. With the crowd nearly apoplectic with glee, Alison Mosshart writhed and snarled and whipped around like some hot zombie drunk on kerosene fumes, eliciting screams when she jumped onto the stage monitor and pointed menacingly at some lucky fans up front who, for all we know, fainted from the attention. Then Mosshart did the craziest rock-show backbend we've ever seen. If you had looked away for a second and missed the beginning of it, you might have thought she'd been cut in half by a laser, and just her legs had been left there, flexing at the knees to keep time.

The band, including an animated Jack Lawrence and multi-tasking Dean Fertita, proceeded to plow through their album's worth of material. Highlights included the lead single, "Hang You From the Heavens," the droning, trance-like "So Far From Your Weapon" and the White/Mosshart duet "Will There Be Enough Water," for which there was much wooing that coincided with Jack White's coming out from behind the drums, with his strapping on a guitar, with his opening his mouth, with his brushing his hair aside and, of course, with his taking a solo. As an eloquent young lady to our right exclaimed: "Jack Whiiiiiiiiite!!!"

There were times when the energy seemed to sag, and an air of bloozy sameyness had us thinking about our empty stomach. ("Cut Like a Buffalo," especially, came off a bit gimmicky in a rap-rock kind of way, which is probably the worst way to be gimmicky.) But there was no denying the intensity in the room, and as we made our way out into the rainy night, we could still hear the occasional "Woo!" echo off the empty downtown buildings.

When they came around
While pre-gaming for our Friday night nostalgia-fest at Sommet Center, we caught a typically unimaginable combo of cowboy-hatted regulars and skinny-tied, stud-belted, prepubescent pop-punkers on Lower Broad. Their mutual perplexity, though entertaining, was just tense enough that we thought it best to down our drinks swiftly and head on over to the arena. After passing scores of youngsters lined up to take pictures beside a giant depiction of Billie Joe Armstrong's face on the Green Day tour bus, we received our mandatory frisking, claimed our tickets at will call, picked up a $9 Miller Lite and headed to our seats as Kaiser Chiefs were kicking off their set.

Kaiser Chiefs were the consummate hype men—warming up the easily excitable crowd and praising Green Day's awesomeness throughout their set—but their urgent style of pop rock wasn't really enough to keep us enthralled. They were something like a British OK Go. Or perhaps a less cool Futureheads. Regardless, many of the kids seemed familiar with the material, and we've certainly seen less worthy openers on arena rock tours.

During the lull before Green Day's set, we noticed that, though the arena appeared to be at capacity, careful inspection revealed that the top tier of seating was curtained off. Still, the place was pretty damn full—there looked to be about 10,000 grandmas, fortysomethings, straight-up children and ladies in leather cowboy hats in attendance.

The moment Green Day took the stage, we understood what our companion meant when he called Billie Joe Armstrong the Bruce Springsteen of pop-punk. In true televangelist/ringleader fashion, Armstrong led the crowd in sing-alongs, brought a 10-year-old onstage to be "saved" and hosed folks down with a Super Soaker. Two auxiliary band members picked up a lot of the sonic slack, allowing Armstrong to primarily focus on vocals and hype, jogging about the stage like a giant-domed Pep Boy. We found it a bit absurd when he launched into a brief diatribe against media—especially considering how much of a media blitz it requires to sell 10,000 tickets and the fact that, well, music is a form of media—but we understand that it's important for these dudes to retain some aesthetic semblance of "punk." Even though the "punk" half of the "pop-punk" moniker doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot anymore.

The first third of Green Day's set consisted mainly of newer material—tunes from American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown punctuated by genuinely jaw-dropping pillars of fire and other gratuitous bits of pyro. But once they started in on songs from Dookie, we remembered just why it was that we'd come. They tore through "When I Come Around," "Longview," "Welcome to Paradise," "Basket Case," "She" and even Kerplunk's "2,000 Light Years Away" with the dynamism that made us like 'em back in '94. Tré Cool was given his moment to shine when he came out front to play "Dominated Love Slave," and the Day busted out feather boas and granny hats for the cross-dressing anthem "King for a Day," which disintegrated into a mini-medley of soul hits including "Shout," "Earth Angel" and "Pretty Woman."

As expected, Armstrong invited an eager young audience member onstage to play guitar on "Jesus of Suburbia" during the first encore, and, while the lucky attendee's tie-dyed, flip-flopped appearance earned him some ridicule from Green Day's frontman, he actually seemed to know the song quite well. From there it was "Minority" and then a three-song stretch of Billie Joe's most popular torch anthems, culminating with everyone's favorite graduation/coming-of-age/sit-com-finale ballad. You know the one. As we poured into the street with $27 worth of Sommet Center beer in our bellies, we came to realize that—while we might have initially decided to go see Green Day with a healthy amount of irony and flippancy about the whole thing—we ended up leaving feeling pretty awesome about our experience. It was something unpredictable, but in the end alright. We totally had the time of our lives.

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