Metroland Online

My mission was to accompany three babes, ages 9, 11 and 12, to their first Big Concert. Good Charlotte, darlings of MTV, were at the Pepsi, and wild horses wouldn’t have kept my posse away. They met and joined their tribe, and they’ll never forget it. They left the show hoarse, deaf, and very, very happy.

Good Charlotte may never fully recover from the diss hurled their way by Chris Rock a few months ago. After a perfunctory performance on the MTV Music Awards (with an ill-advised obligatory drum-smashing at the end), Rock looked into the camera and said “Good Charlotte? More like mediocre Green Day!” Which was mean, unfair, and coming from the guy who made Head of State, well, you really want to talk mediocre?

I look at it this way: They are a guitar band making the Top 40. God bless them.

And they are not burdened by undue angst, anger, paralyzing irony or self-aggrandizement. They’re a lot smarter than they look. Songs are good, too.

Good Charlotte, like, rocked the house um-hum, a smallish (let’s say 4,000) house, but an ecstatic one. The average age was around 16, (not counting all of the parents who, after all, don’t count), and the audience was made up of maybe two-thirds girls. Note to Pepsi Arena: Thank you for selling beer at this show! Brilliant! The words “Daddy, can I have $35 for a sweatshirt?” assume a disarming lilt after a couple cold ones.

The show was full of big hooks, big choruses, lots of lights, and numerous thanks to the crowd. Lead singer Joel Madden told the screaming throng, “Those people at the record company and at radio wouldn’t care about us at all if it wasn’t for you people!” He was right, he was sincere, and he empowered every little girl in the room.

It was a sing-along, punctuated by shrill screams. Midshow, Joel (dressed in black, with a short, red Mohawk, and a bunch of tattoos) and his twin brother Benji (the same, ’cept no Mohawk) sat down and sang a quiet acoustic number. A song of love and devotion. About their Mom. Think what you will, but it takes a lot more balls to sing a song like this than one about the retarded security guards at the mall. Cultural note: During slow mushy songs, holding lighters in the air has been de rigueur for three decades, right? Well, the sharp yellow flames are being replaced by the cool azure glow of cell-phone LCDs, hundreds of which were held high while the Madden twins told Mom that they dug her a lot.

Immediate openers Something Corporate are an interesting bunch indeed. Led by blond charisma-to-burn hyper-emo Andrew McMahon (who played, stomped on, and stood atop an old upright piano), these guys played atmospheric, dirgy, big-beat songs, like Brian Eno with a groove thing, or Coldplay without the pretense. With the right song and a little luck, Something Corporate could hit your radar big time sometime next year. Hope so.

First openers Mest were depressing and disposable. Led by a singer with a huge pointy Mohawk who seemed to think that street cred is measured in the number of times one can say the F-word (example: “Thank you, fucking Albany fuckers!”), Mest misused every overused cliché in the skate-punk canon, and drowned in their own imagined hype.

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