Green Day’s 2004 album hit American pop culture like a train, putting much of the country’s marginalized sense of angst under post-9/11 politics front and center. And who better to act out that righteous furor in the brilliant stage adaptation than the teens of today, who’ve only added to their list of grievances with the status quo? The legendary CMT San Jose’s all-teen cast tackles the Tony-award winning punk rock opera from July 17-25. Featuring songs from the titular album, the follow-up, 21st Century Breakdown, and beyond, American Idiot straddles the line to appeal to Broadway stans and haters alike.

American Idiot
Opens Sat, Various Times, $25
CMT Creative Arts Center, San Jose

These days it wouldn’t be so surprising to hear My Chemical Romance raining softly down from overhead speakers at your local Nordstroms. But before punk was fully incorporated into the Great Corporate American Songbook, a trio of scuzzy East Bay kids in their 20s paved the way with a multi-platinum album called Dookie. It’s been 25 years since Green Day released their pop-punk masterpiece. Now, another Bay Area power-pop trio, Pounders, plans to pay tribute to Billy, Tré and Mike by covering Green Day’s seminal 1994 album in its entirety.

Green Day Tribute
Fri, 8pm, $15
Art Boutiki, San Jose

According to Dave Parasite, his band the Parasites were one of about three pop-punk bands in all New Jersey in the late ’80s. “There wasn’t even enough to have a four band pop-punk show,” he says.

Things turned around in 1992, when Parasite moved to Berkeley to be part of the bubbling pop-punk scene that would eventually give birth to Green Day. He reformed the band with all new members and jumped right into the East Bay scene like it was his hometown.

“I saw which way the wind was blowing,” Parasite says. “I moved across the country and it was the best decision I ever made for the band.”

Parasite had a label friend in Berkeley that set this new band up for him. He even booked several shows before Parasite arrived in town. Right off the bat, they were playing with NOFX, the Mr. T Experience, Green Day and a bunch of other noteworthy bands. As the scene got bigger, so did the Parasites, but they also would suffer a backlash from the punk community when pop-punk went mainstream—even though they were never mainstream.

“When Green Day hit, we were a band that sounded like them, from the same town, it couldn’t have been better,” Parasite says. “When the punk people went against Green Day, they also went against us. That’s how it was.”

But they didn’t sound exactly like Green Day or the other East Bay pop-punk bands. Yes, they played fast, energetic pop songs, but they broke the Ramones’ three chord mold and added a lot of subtle, complex changes and structural oddities, taking elements from ’70s power-pop groups like Cheap Trick and the Beat.

“I don’t want to be a Ramones-core band,” Parasite says. “It’s like you got to move on from that. I never know what I’m playing and I actually make up weird chords I can’t find on the chord charts.”

If anything, Parasite attempted to model his band after the Descendants, even if it’s not immediately apparent. “I’ve always just been trying to write Descendants’ songs, but I’m not them so I don’t sound like them,” Parasite says.

While most of the other ’90s pop-punk bands have broken up, the Parasites have plodded along, touring and releasing material on a consistent basis. They have a total of 10 albums and 22 singles under their belt. Other than Parasite, who plays guitar and sings lead vocals, the members change frequently. Current members David Delarosa (guitar), Jason Duarte (bass) and John Perrin (drums) have all been in the band between two months and a year-and-a-half.

When the Parasites tour these days, the turnouts are hit and miss. But even at poorly attended shows, Parasite often meets at least one kid that is obsessed with the Parasites and has waited for years to see them play.

“That happens all the time. It shows that I didn’t waste my time that much,” Parasite says.

The Parasites play at Cafe Stritch in San Jose on Thursday September 5 at 11pm. Free admission.

American Idiot, the musical based on the Green Day concept album of the same name, opened last night at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts with flashy, sneering energy and a whole lot of youthful angst, but not too much beyond that. And maybe that’s okay.

The show charts the lives of Johnny, Will, and Tunny, three disaffected dudes attempting to escape what seems to them the ultimate prison: comfortable suburban life. Johnny and Tunny set off for the big city with big dreams, while Will stays behind with his accidentally pregnant girlfriend.

When the adventure turns out not to be the solution to all their problems, Johnny turns to heroin and Tunny joins the army. Eventually, after kicking the habit and losing a leg respectively, all three are reunited back in the ‘burbs, with no clear future ahead of them.

Many of us have been there: everything in your short teen life sucks and your parents just don’t understand. An interesting time of life surely, but the show presents everything with maximal energy and not much depth.

It’s hard to tell what’s taken seriously and what’s being skewered. Is “American Idiot” an indictment of Hot Topic privileged punk or a celebration? How seriously does adolescent angst deserve to be taken?

Early on in the performance Johnny claims the money for his city bus ticket came from robbing his local convenience store, but then admits he stole it from his mom’s purse before finally confessing she just lent him the money. It’s a funny moment, and we see the distance between what Johnny wants to be and what he really is. But these moments of self-awareness are few and far between. We get only sketchy narrative arcs for each character and not much development along the way.

Not to say the show isn’t entertaining. The set is suitably over-stimulating with dingy city walls covered in glowing TVs constantly changing channels. With impressive acrobatic dance moves and boundless energy, the show’s young cast (all non-Equity, most fresh out of school) tears their way through the show’s short 90 minutes, hardly pausing to take a breath. The show sticks almost exactly to the original album, only adding in a couple new songs and connecting it all with brief snippets of dialogue.

Alex Nee, a Palo Alto native, plays an admirable lead as Johnny, but Casey O’Farrell stands out as a soulful Will. Despite spending most of the show smoking weed on the couch, Will emerges the most interesting and engaging character. His rendition of “Novacaine” is one of the highlights of the show.

It’s a shame the female characters get such short shrift, because the women behind them emerge as the stand out vocal performers. The three stereotyped female leads (only one of which gets an actual name) serve mostly to assuage the males’ angst, but the women go far with little they’re given. Kennedy Caughell’s Heather shines on songs like “Too Much Too Soon” and she joins Alyssa DiPalma and Jenna Rubaii to belt out beautiful harmonies for “21 Guns.”

A rock opera it truly is, and opera goes all in for the music, not always depth. However, one can’t help but wonder what the show could’ve been with a little more focus and a little less flash.

The members of San Jose pop-punk band Stickup Kid look more like average college kids than rock stars, yet they could very well be the next band to break out of Silicon Valley and achieve national success.

Even though most of the members are only a few years removed from high school, they are on the verge of releasing their second full-length album after a surprise opportunity to open for Green Day last month during one of SXSW’s marquee performances.
The last-minute invite required the band to drop everything and embark on a 30-hour nonstop drive from the Bay Area to Texas. It was a welcome chance for national attention, but big things were already brewing for Stickup Kid.

The band emerged in 2009 as a group of friends, mostly with the intention of hanging out and having fun. While most of guys were high schoolers—drummer Cameron MacBain, the youngest, was 15 years old—bass player Jonathan McMaster was 21 and was the band’s primary songwriter. Within months of their inception, Stickup Kid booked its first tour—and haven’t stopped touring since.

In 2012, they got a record deal with Adeline Records, the Oakland-based label co-owned by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong that has released records by AFI, Emily’s Army, the Living End, the Frustrators and vinyl editions of Green Day albums. So far, the relationship with the label has been a perfect fit.

“It’s more like a community rather than a dictatorship,” says singer Tony Geravesh. “They’re there to help us, but they’re never there to control anything.”

Adeline first released Nothing About Me in June 2012, which Stickup Kid had already finished, and were preparing to put out independently. The EP did well enough that Adeline wanted to do a full-length record.

While the EP featured mostly straightforward, fast pop-punk, Stickup Kid’s new material for the album is more eclectic, drawing influences from indie rock and showing a wider range with tempo. Part of the change was prompted by Geravesh and guitarist Bo McDowell taking over songwriting duties. While the band was taking a break, the duo attempted to write a few songs and quickly turned out some 40 demos.

“Once we got started, it was hard to stop,” Geravesh says. “It’s pretty addicting.”

The five members of Stickup Kid, which also includes second guitarist Curtis Wallace, whittled the demos down to 18 songs, recorded them, and are currently mixing and picking 12 or 13 for the new album. No release date is set, but everyone is hoping it will be sometime this summer.

“The label has a plan,” Geravesh says. “They have the whole nine yards set up. Hopefully, once we put out the record, then more of the benefits of the label will start shining through.”

Whether or not fame is the result of this record isn’t the biggest concern for Stickup Kid.

“Our whole goal when we started the band was just to make friends,” Geravesh explains. “I don’t look at it like we have fans. I look at it like they’re people I can talk to; people I can relate with, because the only reason I started going to shows was because I wanted to find people I can fit in with. I figure if those kids are coming to fit in, I can fit in with them.”

Stickup Kid
San Jose Rock Shop
Saturday April 13 6pm $8

Krupted Peasant Farmerz, better known as KPF, is now one of San Jose’s most famous punk bands, with a cult following that spans the globe. But when the band broke up in the ’90s, guitarist Rob Fraser had no idea that would be the case.

It was only after the band was gone, says Fraser, that he started to see the impact they’d made.

“People would write us from all over the world,” he says.

Fraser went on to a long line of bands—Apeface, Angry for Life, Joe Q. Citizen, Boar Hunter, and more—but none have made an impression on the punk world the way KPF did. Still, neither Rob nor his brother Dave, who wrote the songs and sang lead, can be blamed for not realizing everything they had going for them at the time. When the band played its first show in 1989, Dave was still in high school, and Rob was barely out of it.

“We were kids,” remembers Rob. “We were setting up shows at halls and pizza parlors.”

What KPF did so well was bridge the old-school hardcore bands like Dead Kennedys and Reagan Youth that were out to tear down the status quo with the new-school bands like NoFX and Green Day that broke punk rock into the mainstream by bringing a pop sound to the genre.

They could be funny and snide, but even a two-minute slice of punk lunacy like “Cowz Humping” had a point.

“That was almost a vegetarian song,” says Rob. “There was always a political undertone.”

In 1992, KPF appeared on the first compilation from Lookout Records, best known as the launching pad for Green Day. Titled Can of Pork, the double album had a tortured development—it took a year and half to produce—but went on to be one of the most famous compilations in punk history.

“That probably got us the most fans,” says Rob.

KPF contributed “Piano Song From Hell,” a song which actually features no piano, but instead refers to the fact that Dave wrote all of his songs on the piano first before adapting them for the band—just one of the quirky elements that made KPF unique.

Another was the guitar harmonies that came from Rob’s metal background. In fact, KPF had an unusual sound for an American punk band.

“It was a European punk sound,” says Rob. He remembers discovering Swedish and German punk bands for the first time at the KFJC record swap, and what an effect the international punk scene had on KPF. They would go on to be one of the few South Bay punk bands to tour outside of the U.S.

In 1993, Dave left the band. It’s been so long now that Rob can’t even remember what triggered the split. But in retrospect, he doubts he would have kept the band going for five more years, if he could do it again.

“I think it lost some of its integrity at that point,” he says.