[11-13-97 Thurs] "The store couldn't handle it," Green Day's Tre Cool said, smiling, after the band's appearance Tuesday night. Green Day certainly left their mark at the concert/appearance at a New York Tower Records store. "Let's have a fucking riot!" frontman Billie Joe Armstrong encouraged the fans gathered at the Manhattan Tower Records store Tuesday night for an in-store performance. "It's your prerogative -- you can do anything you want," Armstrong added. "'Cause you're not at Tower Records, you're at a Green Day concert!" Armstrong then got out a can of spray paint and wrote on the walls with it, and then body surfed on top of the crowd over to the window, where he also spray painted "Nimrod" (the band's latest album), and "Fuck You." He then pulled down his pants and mooned the crowd gathered outside the store. He also showered the CD racks with beer and water.
Many more fans turned out for the event, but only 500 made it in the store before they ran out of room. The store's management claims that although the fans did some damage, the band was responsible for most of it. "Almost all the damage was done by the band," said store manager Hedi Kim. "This must have been totally planned." The band's performance was mostly of older songs off of Insomniac and Dookie, and a few off of Nimrod. After Green Day performed, a store manager had to wrestle a 200-pound monitor away from Billie Joe, who tried to throw it over the staircase landing where the band played. He was able to hurl Tre Cool's bass drum from the second floor down onto record racks on the ground floor, where it then lay in pieces.
Kim, the manager, estimated that a few hundred CDs worth between $4,000 and $7,000 were damaged, and also many store fixtures and displays. Kim said that all of this will be paid by the band's label, Warner Bros. After this, the band did not do their planned autograph session, probably because of the damage they caused.
The manager was asked if the band would be invited into the store again. She said, "Never... They may be in the cut-out bin in the near future anyway." Wednesday morning the store opened its doors as usual, after a cleaning crew finished sweeping up. but Green Day left their mark: "Fuck You" and "Nimrod" was still spray-painted on the windows and walls. Billie Joe later said that the point of the band's trashing of the store was to spice up the kind of appearance that can be less than thrilling. "It was just good fun. Those things (in-stores) give you the perfect opportunity to make a complete fool of yourself."
Green Day - November 13, 1997
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