Green Day whips through its decades of pop-punk hits at Coachella

Billie Joe Armstrong has invited enough audience members onstage to sing or play guitar with Green Day for a song or two that at this point you figure he’s developed a keen sense for what type of fan is likely to pull off the bit.

But it’s possible the frontman has never called on somebody as confident as the dude he picked Saturday night to help finish Green Day’s headlining performance at the Coachella festival.

Dressed in a black tank top and leather trousers, with a bedazzled belt buckle that glittered under the stage lights — “Ooh, he’s handsome,” Armstrong said as he made his way up from the crowd — the guy swung Armstrong’s guitar strap over his shoulder as though it were his own before coolly strumming the chords from “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” Then Armstrong sang the acoustic ballad while the fan played and mugged for Coachella’s cameras.

“Quit being so professional,” the frontman said with a grin.

It takes one to know one, of course: Nearly 40 years after Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt founded the Bay Area trio in 1987, Green Day is as polished and reliable a rock band as any on the road these days. The group (which also includes drummer Tré Cool, who joined in 1990) whips through its decades of pop-punk hits with speed and precision, even when the size of the venues it visits — last year Green Day toured stadiums to mark anniversaries of 1994’s “Dookie” and 2004’s “American Idiot” — means it has to play to the cheap seats.

Here, as one of the rare rock acts to headline Coachella over the last decade or so, Armstrong and his bandmates knew just how to engage the giant festival crowd with call-and-response routines and crisp video production.

Yet as the group roared through oldies like “Basket Case,” “Holiday,” “Welcome to Paradise,” “Longview” and “Brain Stew,” you never forgot that you were watching a once-scrappy punk trio; Green Day still puts across the charming zeal that powered its mainstream breakthrough in the post-grunge mid-’90s.

Armstrong performs.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

As he’s been doing for years, Armstrong tweaked a lyric about “a redneck agenda” in “American Idiot” to protest “a MAGA agenda”; he also changed a line in “Jesus of Suburbia” to express his concern for “the kids from Palestine.”

Green Day doled out a few new tunes from last year’s “Saviors,” including “Bobby Sox,” which the frontman has described as a kind of queer love song. But for the most part this typically assured performance was about the hits — crafty, passionate, sometimes profane — on which Green Day’s enduring popularity was built.