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Pinhead Gunpowder Turns Back the Clock in Detroit
Billie Joe Armstrong traded stadiums for St. Andrew’s Hall, and a sold-out room of longtime Green Day fans got raw, unpolished East Bay punk up close.
Written by LJ Portnoy and Mark Portnoy
Photography by LJ Portnoy
Green Day has packed Comerica Park twice in recent years, in 2021 and again in 2024. On Saturday night, Billie Joe Armstrong was standing on the stage at St. Andrew’s Hall in front of a sold-out crowd of roughly a thousand fans. Pinhead Gunpowder doesn’t come around often, and Detroit knew it.
Who Is Pinhead Gunpowder?
If you know Billie Joe but not this band, you’re not alone. Pinhead Gunpowder formed in the early ’90s and came out of the same Berkeley punk scene that raised Green Day. Billie Joe plays guitar and sings. Behind the kit is Aaron Cometbus, who handles drums and lyrics, and he’s the primary writer of the band’s songs.
Cometbus is an East Bay legend in his own right: he publishes the Cometbus fanzine and has played in bands like Crimpshrine and Cleveland Bound Death Sentence. Bill Schneider holds down bass and vocals. Jason White rounds out the lineup on guitar and vocals, and Green Day fans will recognize him: he’s been part of Green Day’s touring and recording band for over two decades.
The band started with a different lineup. Original guitarist and vocalist Sarah Kirsch left the band, and White took her place. Kirsch passed away in 2012, and her place in the band’s history still matters. Even the name has a punk origin story: it comes from a brand of “high octane” green tea that Cometbus found while dumpster diving.
The band never chased the spotlight. Its members treated it as a break from their main bands, with no pressure and no real touring, just a chance to be a garage band again. That made each release feel like an event: the compilation Jump Salty, the Carry the Banner EP, Goodbye Ellston Avenue, Shoot the Moon, and 2008’s West Side Highway 7". Then, in 2024, they came back with Unt, their first new music in 16 years. That brings us to Detroit, and a room full of people who never thought they’d get this chance.
The Openers
Detroit’s own The Idiot Kids kicked things off with a hometown set, followed by Night Shop, who has been holding down support on the band’s East Coast and Midwest dates. Both set up a night built on guitars, grit, and no-frills punk.
Pinhead Gunpowder: Straight Out of a Time Machine
We’ve been Green Day listeners since 2005, and we’ll be honest: we came for Billie Joe. We left with a new appreciation for Pinhead Gunpowder.
The band opened with “Asheville” and went straight into “Life During Wartime.” The sound is a direct line back to early Green Day, roughly the 1994 to 2004 era: raw, unpolished, and loud in all the right ways. Where Green Day has grown into a stadium-sized, polished machine, Pinhead Gunpowder keeps it scrappy and authentic. Nothing about it feels overproduced. It feels like punk the way it started, in small rooms with people who love it.
The crowd skewed a little older, and most of the room were Green Day fans who’d waited years to see Billie Joe somewhere this close. Watching him walk onstage in a room this size felt like stepping into a time machine. For a lot of people in that room, us included, that was the whole night.
A 29-Song Marathon
Pinhead Gunpowder didn’t treat this as a quick side-project set. The night ran 29 songs deep and pulled from across the catalog, including “Reach for the Bottle,” “Before the Accident,” and “Losers of the Year.” Along the way, the band covered Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Do You Know Where You’re Going To,” broke into a quick “Happy Birthday,” and teased “Second Street” before “On the Ave.”
Our favorite detail closed out the night. The band played “Unt” a second time, because Billie Joe had flubbed it earlier in the set. A stadium band would never. A punk band in a thousand-cap room absolutely would, and that’s the whole point.
An Awe-Struck Moment
Some shoots are just work, and some are surreal. We grew up with Billie Joe on our walls, and on Saturday he was right in front of us. We were the ones creating the images that, years ago, would have been the poster on that wall.
It was mesmerizing. For about ten seconds, we just stood there, dazed, before remembering we had a job to do. Full-circle moments don’t get much fuller than that.
Long Live the Side Project
Pinhead Gunpowder is a rare chance to see one of punk’s most beloved side projects in a room small enough to feel personal. If you grew up on Dookie, Insomniac, or American Idiot, or just love punk that isn’t polished, catch them whenever they surface. Shows like this don’t happen often.
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