On September 9, 1994, Green Day took the stage for a free outdoor concert at the Hatch Shell in Boston. The art deco amphitheater and spacious lawn typically hosted more genteel entertainment; the house band was the Boston Pops Orchestra.
But the punk-rock trio - singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tré Cool Bearne out to a roiling sea of adolescent expectation later estimated by police at sixty-five thousand people.
That mass of flannel and baggy shorts turned into a whirlpool of slam-dancing as soon as Green Day pulled the pin on “Welcome to Paradise,” the sardonic opening grenade on their major-label debut, Dookie.
Photography: Michael Zorn