The stadium staff point us in the direction of “The Dugout,” which I mistake as a euphemism for a press/VIP area but turns out, in fact, to be the actual visitors’ dugout off the diamond’s third base line, where we emerge through a tunnel and up the steps onto an infield that’s closed off to everyone else. Out in center field, where the stage is, Green Day’s opener The Smashing Pumpkins play “Cherub Rock.” You can feel Ken soaking in the enormity of the moment, high off more than weed (but also weed). He’s never been in the actual crowd at a concert before, and he’s never been to a baseball game.
We’re led to a roped-off section perhaps a hundred feet away from center stage. The sun has set and Ken is lowkey, only rolling with me, his body man, his security guard, and his publicist, but he’s still occasionally recognized by venue security, by fans both in the section and passing by who apparently have caught wind that their hometown hero is here. He’s friendly and patient with everyone, shakes every hand and poses for every selfie.
Green Day comes out and starts playing. They’re seasoned pros, DIY regional NorCal rockers turned national arena thoroughbreds with a pyrotechnic, immaculately designed and run multi-media stage show that is clearly worth millions in production value. Ken waves water bottles, fist pumps, jumps around, takes videos on his phone, never looks bored or unengaged. At one point I ask him what he’d do with a crowd of this size and with a grin, he tells me, “Wall of Death” which I have to Google and am alternately charmed and terrified by. The highlight is when they play his favorite song, “Jesus of Suburbia”, and he genuinely freaks out, occasionally singing along with their nine minute epic.
As Ken rages, I’m watching Billie Joe Armstrong as he’s ripping power chords for this moshing Sarlacc pit—slightly different in demographic than the crowd at Terminal 5, but not so different in energy and temperament. His posture would look familiar to anyone who grew up watching MTV in the 90s and 2000s—hunched over his guitar, all jutting knees and jugular veins, his body forming a lapidary crusted inward-curl that looks less like a 52-year-old punk holding a guitar than like an electric guitar that has grown a 52-year-old punk it drags across the ocean floor and uses as shelter and protection from predators.
And Billie Joe is screaming at the crowd and the crowd is screaming back at him, a naked, aching wail—for our exes and the random partners and substances and money and dumb shit we try to replace them with, and all the rage and joy these placebos provoke—that unites Ken Carson and Billie Joe Armstrong and Anthony Keidis and Kathleen Hanna and Billy Corgan and Lil Uzi Vert and Davey Havok in a primal sound beyond words. It reminds me of a moment earlier, hanging on the lip of the dugout, when I ask Ken what he has learned from Green Day, how their music impacts his. He says, “Their attitude made it easier for me to be myself. They were already on some ‘fuck the world’ shit. I feel like I’m the same.”
