An unlikely pairing of bands, bound together by Bay Area roots — Green Day and Counting Crows — will team up next month for a special concert on San Francisco’s Pier 29 on the Embarcadero. The invite-only concert, sponsored by FanDuel and Spotify, will take place on Friday, Feb. 6, a few days before the Super Bowl, which will take place in nearby Santa Clara. The event will feature a special set by an as-yet-unannounced DJ.
Headliners Green Day’s love for the Bay Area is well documented. In 2017, the trio, which has its roots in Rodeo, California and will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year, were heavily involved in the making of the documentary, Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk, for which they served as executive producers. “I always thought, ‘Man, it would be really cool to do a documentary capturing what it was like to be in our scene,’” the group’s frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, told Rolling Stone that year. “But I was always ambivalent, because our scene is so unique; it’s very underground, and people were very protective of that culture. … I felt that, if you’re a Green Day fan, you’re going to find out more about Green Day by hearing these people’s stories, not ours.”
Counting Crows, meanwhile, formed in Berkeley in 1991. They cut their teeth in Bay Area coffeehouses and clubs, according to a 1994 Rolling Stone profile. Last year, the band’s frontman, Adam Duritz, told Rolling Stone that he’d spent a lot of time reflecting on his early days in the area. “I grew up in San Francisco in the Seventies and Eighties, and I was growing up around that culture as a kid, seeing a lot of people who’d come to San Francisco who’d clearly been terrified in their childhoods and now were finding a sort of sense of freedom,” he said. “Those memories about that were really coming to the front when I was writing [the Crows’ 2014 song] ‘Palisades Park’ and some other stuff. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot in recent years.”
The concert serves as a preamble to the Big Game, which will feature Bad Bunny as its halftime performer. On Friday, Bad Bunny released a trailer to tease the gig, promising “the world will dance.”
