It was, everyone agreed, a lovely idea: a free concert, in a beautiful location, sponsored by a popular alt. rock radio station, to welcome university students back to Boston for the start of a new college year... what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, as it turned out.
The first inkling that the evening of September 9, 1994 might not go to plan occurred when it became obvious that the event organisers had somewhat underestimated the popularity of the band playing their WFNX-branded show at the Hatch Shell, the striking outdoor theatre best known for hosting the Boston Pops Orchestra. To be fair, when they booked the band in question, perhaps around February 1994 when their major label debut album Dookie charted at number 141 on the Billboard 200, anticipating a crowd of around 5,000 may have seemed like a reasonable assessment. But between that date, and the Welcome Back Weekend... show on the Esplanade, Green Day had played one of the most memorable sets at the televised Woodstock 2 festival, and their popularity was soaring daily, with the album's second single, Basket Case, topping the Billboard Modern Rock Chart in August '94, and holding that number one position for five weeks. As a result, an estimated 65-70,000 people descended upon the site, and tensions were already inflamed between crushed concert goers and the clearly-overwhelmed Massachusetts State Troopers on crowd control duties long before Billie Joe Armstrong cranked out the opening riff of show opener Welcome To Paradise. So it probably didn't help matters when, observing scuffles breaking out in front of him, Armstrong changed the lyric "Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me" to "Sometimes I hate the fucking police."
