Green Day returned to the stage over the weekend, performing its first concert since frontman Billie Joe Armstrong's stint in rehab.
According to Rolling Stone, the band played a sold-out, 2-hour show on Sunday at the Fox Theater in Pomona, Calif. The concert was reportedly the first of four warm-up shows that the band will play before kick-starting its arena tour in late March.
Green Day had previously postponed the start of its 2013 world tour after Armstrong's "meltdown" onstage during a concert at Las Vegas' iHeartRadio Music Festival in September. According to an Associated Press report at the time, the Green Day frontman launched into a profanity-filled rant and smashed his guitar on stage at the festival. A couple of days later, the band's rep announced that Armstrong would be headed to rehab for substance abuse.
“I remember tiny things,” Armstrong recently told Rolling Stone of the iHeartRadio show. “The next morning, I woke up. I asked [my wife] Adrienne, ‘How bad was it?’ She said, ‘It’s bad.’ I called my manager. He said, ‘You’re getting on a plane, going back to Oakland and going into rehab immediately.’”
According to the music website Consequence of Sound, Green Day played a lot of older material at its concert on Sunday -- specifically favorites such as "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "Holiday" from 2004's "American Idiot," as well as punk classics including "She" and "Basket Case" from the band's 1994 album "Dookie." (Watch a snippet of the band's Fox Theater show above.)
As the band embarks on its world tour, the musicians are expected to present new material from last year's three-album series ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tre!
After shows in Tempe, Ariz., and El Paso, Texas, this week, the band is expected to perform at the Moody Theater at the SXSW festival in Austin on Friday.