Excerpts published as part of staff coverage of Innings Festival in Phoenix New Times on Mar. 1, 2023

The 2023 Innings Festival brought two days of music and baseball to Tempe Beach Park. Some big names were on this year’s bill, including Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, Southern rock/blues legends The Black Crowes, and nerd rock favorites Weezer.

Here are recaps of some of the weekend’s sets.

Andrew McMahon in The Wilderness

Andrew McMahon wants you to know he’s been around the block. After performing Jack’s Mannequin’s “The Mixed Tape,” the 40-year-old singer-songwriter reminded the Innings crowd that he’s spent more than half his life performing and releasing music.

“I’m a lifer,” he says.

Despite McMahon’s generally polished presentation, one of the standout moments from the set came via mistake. “I fucked up. I fucked my whole band up,” he laughs after misreading the setlist and performing his Something Corporate track “I Woke Up in a Car” right after his newest single “Laying on the Hood of Your Car.” The former is a 21-year-old track about the tumult of touring, and in one lyric, the song references flights connecting in Arizona, much to the delight of his Tempe audience.

With elementary and cheerful songwriting, McMahon casts a wide net. On either side of me, a 40-something in a Blink-182 shirt and a young “Cecilia and the Satellite” superfan sang along. On stage, McMahon is jittery, standing more often than he sits to play his grand piano, covered in colorful, encouraging slogans and nods to his Dear Jack Foundation charity. During “Synesthesia,” he wandered through the crowd with a colorful parachute straight out of grade school gym class. Belting the song’s final chorus, he stood on the barricade, delivering each line with the charm of a Southern California youth pastor. Given McMahon’s 2005 acute lymphoblastic leukemia diagnosis and 25-year touring gauntlet, his relentless optimism on stage is more magnetic and endearing than most of his radio pop rock peers.

The Offspring

I don’t know if Innings Festival, in all of its five-year run, has ever seen a mosh pit. I don’t know if I, in all of my 21-year run, have ever seen a mosh pit instigated by a band fronted by a 57-year-old lead singer. There were mosh pits on Saturday. Scarce and fleeting, but the crowd opened up in front of the Home Plate Stage for The Offspring.

The sound at Innings’ main stage didn’t do the Orange County rock band any favors. From my perch 50 yards back, the vocals drifted between muted and jarring during the band’s hour-long set. Aesthetically, The Offspring looked like they were plucked straight out of the band’s peak. Frontman Dexter Holland rocked bleached hair and thick black sunglasses; guitarist Noodles sported a vibrant and beachy button-up. But musically, the band isn’t suited to perform their ’90s grunge pop singles with the same efficiency they once did. Holland’s voice cracked at the start of “Bad Habit” and by the song’s end, he was visibly out of breath.

Their stage banter wasn’t exactly smooth, either. A Step Brothers reference here, some wordplay about the band’s vulgarity there. Don’t get me wrong — The Offspring’s brashness certainly adds to their charisma but it’s most effective without acknowledgment. Ultimately, the band’s self-awareness and depth of ubiquitous hits made it easy to overlook a bit of slop. A four-song closing sequence of “Why Don’t You Get a Job,” “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy),” “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid,” and “Self Esteem” was enough to satisfy the hordes of skull-clad Steve Stiflers in attendance. Myself, too.

Green Day

Punk rock stardom is strange. Oxymoronic, even. But yet here Green Day is, almost 30 years after Dookie, finding a way to make it work. It’s hard to earnestly sing lyrics about political apathy and consumerism on a stage sponsored by Verizon, but Green Day proved themselves capable of overcoming that dichotomy on Saturday.

Before the band even took the stage, there was a 10-minute prelude featuring Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” a signature pink bunny mascot, and a video montage of past Green Day performances. It was clear from the jump that the band can juggle the ego of being headlining rockstars while maintaining their original punk hooliganism.

Maybe it’s Billie Joe Armstrong’s perennially wide-eyed expression, seemingly in awe of his own prestige and power over the crowd. At any moment, Armstrong is keen on conducting an orchestra of oohs and ahhs. Or maybe it’s drummer Tré Cool, the band’s thunderous conductor with too much swagger for the back of the stage. Either way, Green Day has kept a whimsy that sets them apart from their peers, but what truly made the band must-see entertainment on Saturday was the setlist, a 21-song gauntlet with no pauses for even the casual fan.

The show opened with hit singles “American Idiot” and “Holiday,” both capped by pyrotechnics. At one point, “Brain Stew,” “St. Jimmy” and “When I Come Around” are played in sequence. It’s all hits and no misses, weaved together with an appropriate amount of stage gimmicks. There’s a saxophone solo with a nod to “Careless Whisper” and a cover of “Shout” by the Isley Brothers. During “King for a Day,” Armstrong’s ska punk anthem about gender fluidity, he dons a crown. A young fan took the stage to sing the last chorus of “Know Your Enemy,” while another fan shredded power chords on a cover of Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge.”

“You can keep the guitar,” said Armstrong, as the fan was whisked backstage, mouth still agape.

Green Day moved through its setlist at breakneck speed, hit after hit bleeding into one another. Even placements for Green Day ballads like “Wake Me Up When September Ends” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” felt suitable. The only pacing issues came when the band snuck in their radio soft rock smash “21 Guns,” an obvious sonic outlier between harder tracks like “Minority” and “Waiting.”

As any good headlining act should, the band saved its best moment for the conclusion. After opening with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the pinnacle of rock opera, Green Day finished with an epic of their own — “Jesus of Suburbia.” The night ended in the only way that felt right: 30 seconds of fireworks, Tré Cool smashing the daylights out of his drum set, and Armstrong alone on the stage, eulogizing with an acoustic performance of “Good Riddance.”

“I hope you had the time of your life,” the song goes. Based on the football field-sized herd of fans still transfixed on the empty stage, it looked like Armstrong wasn’t the only one who did. 

Mt. Joy

When Philadelphia’s Mt. Joy took the stage, opening their Innings performance with 2022’s “Lemon Tree,” their attire and song selection gave fans an idea of what kind of virtuosity they should expect. On one side of the stage, lead singer Matt Quinn rocked a sweater and a classically stained acoustic guitar. On the other, guitarist Sam Cooper flexed a reflective, metallic red and gold 1969 Fender Jaguar. Equal parts electric blues and contemporary folk-pop, Mt. Joy was seemingly built for the main Innings stage, and their eclectic performance was undoubtedly one of the festival’s highlights.

Throughout their hourlong set, the band proved their rock ‘n’ roll repertoire for anybody unfamiliar. Cooper smoothly fluttered on a guitar riff and endlessly accelerated on a solo during “Let Loose.” Closer “Silver Lining” was contagious and everyone in the band seemed to get a chance to solo at some point, including drummer Sotiris Eliopoulos, who held the attention of the crowd for minutes on end with just his set and a banana-shaped rattler. By the end, Mt. Joy checked the boxes for their hippie street cred — a song about political tensions (“Sheep”), a long-winded jam session and a song about getting high at a restaurant (“Julia”) all played in sequence. Hell, the titular lyric on their second biggest track is “Jesus drives an astrovan.” That’s enough to probably get an invite to an inevitable Woodstock reboot. 

The Head and The Heart

It was a bittersweet performance for The Head and The Heart at Innings, as the band performed with founding member Josiah Johnson for the first time in almost eight years. Johnson was called upon to fill in for band members Charity Rose Thielen and Matt Gervais, who are married and expecting their second child. The change wasn’t seamless, as Johnson and the band’s other founding member, Jonathan Russell, didn’t instantly connect on harmonies the way they once might have. Missing Thielen’s vocals left a hole in their signature sound, and the band didn’t seem to match the energy of poppier songs like “All We Ever Knew” and “Missed Connection.” The stoic stage chemistry ultimately left their folk pop la-las and da-da-das feeling hollow.

However, there was something special about seeing Johnson reunite with the band to perform the best of the group’s early work. The Seattle group’s sound has drifted ever closer to pop in the last decade, so Sunday night felt like a time capsule of The Head and The Heart from years past. Johnson’s evidently joyful nostalgia combined with Russell’s stability added emotional vigor to songs like set closer “Rivers and Roads,” an acoustic hit from the band’s debut album, which deals heavily with themes of change and departure. Its predecessor on the record, “Down In The Valley,” deservedly earned the set’s loudest applause. The performance wasn’t always smooth and Thielen’s absence was noticeable, but it felt significantly wholesome to see Johnson on stage with the band again.