Kristin Ruhle: "I went to BFD and thought the lineup was great, the music was fun - what there was of it! They tried to cram too many bands into too few hours. Hats off to Green Day for literally stealing the show and hogging the stage! (Too bad it came at the expense of some of the other acts, e.g. Toad the Wet Sprocket.) The Green Day T-shirts were also a steal at $15 (some of the other bands wanted $20 plus for a 'generic' shirt! And the Pretenders shirt sucked - for $23 I'd rather have more colorful artwork, thank you!) - no wonder the souvenir booths ran out of 'em!"

Jeff Lefferts: "I really liked the 'solo bass' section of Green Day - everything but the bass was really quiet. When the sound finally kicked in, the bass was buried (an exception to the otherwise good sound)."

SPIN: "A few days before, I'd seen the band play "BFD," a modern-rock showcase hosted by San Francisco radio station Live 105 at the Shoreline Amphitheatere. On that rarest of Bay Area days, a 100-degree scorcher, Green Day appeared third on the bill, at 3:30 in the afternoon, after a dazed and heat-struck Beck. The amphitheatre, which seats about 20,000, quickly went from half-empty to almost full - much like when Pearl Jam played second at Lollapalooza there in 1992. The crowd wasn't punk in the least - over the course of a nine-hour day I spotted one guy in an MDC shirt and felt sorry for him - but its enthusiasm for Green Day exceeded anything the other ten bands playing could have hoped for. Before too long the high school kids, piled onto the lawn in back, were moshing like water over a sandbank. And who could blame them. There's something that can't be equaled about seeing people almost exactly your own age getting to be real live rock stars. The members of Green Day have become rock stars in an eyeblink; their third album, Dookie (the first for Warner Bros. after two on the indie label Lookout), has risen to No. 31 on the Billboard album chart after MTV Buzz Bin airplay for the video "Longview." At Shoreline, Green Day played the part to perfection, headbutting the microphone, shredding flowers, darting around in shorts like a baby AC/DC, tossing out snotty banter ('I hope you guys are beating the fuck out of each other and go home with fucking bruises,' said Billie Joe), and just plain acting as if throwing out loud rock music on a hot day was what life was all about. During 'Longview,' a song about masturbating bored in front of the television, Billie Joe had whipped out his dick and shaken it around during the line, 'I'm feeling like a dog in heat.' Later, during a day when bands were playing half-hour sets and then retreating with mechanical bows, Green Day refused to come offstage. Maybe it was problems with the sound, or maybe Green Day just isn't happy without a little conflict. It did feel a bit rote, hearing the band vamp while roadies whispered threatening things into Billie Joe's ear, and the singer suggested to the crowd, 'Now that they're angry at us, we could rip out the seats.' Still, even coming off a grueling European tour, with no day off in between, Green Day's enthusiasm gave an empty show its only feeling of common purpose."