Good Charlotte played their 15th show at Lupo’s Heart Break Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island last Friday.
Providence was just one of the stops for the band who are playing their first national tour in six years. The tour, “Youth Authority,” is promoting their sixth studio record by the same name. The band is well known for their early 2000s pop punk music, and they want to make sure everyone knows that pop punk is not dead.
To go along with their ‘pop punk is not dead’ statement, they had three pretty well known pop punk openers. Big Jesus opened up the show followed by Four Year Strong, another early 2000s band whose name is well known in the alternative world. The Story So Far was the last opener and left the crowd excited for Good Charlotte.
Made up by brothers Benji and Joel Madden, Good Charlotte, started making music together at a young age. Later, as adults, they went on to form the band officially in 1996. Joel is the lead vocalist while Benji plays lead guitars and helps out on vocals. Paul Thomas, who plays bass for the band, has been with them since the beginning. They changed drummers three times before finding their current drummer in 2005, Dean Butterworth, and they added a rhythm guitarist, Billy Martin, in the late ’90s to complete the current makeup of the band many alternative fans have come to know and love.
The crowd, mostly college students and older – the ones who grew up with Good Charlotte – were incredibly loud when the band took the stage, kicking the show off with a 2002 favorite, “The Anthem.” The band’s setlist spanned almost every studio album they have, going back and forth from their older and newer material. Songs included crowd favorites such as “Girls & Boys” and “Dance Floor Anthem.”
Good Charlotte kept the energy up, indulging the crowd with not only music that they loved but also stories of the band’s past. They even attempted a new Internet craze, the mannequin challenge, in which everyone strikes a pose and stays still, while a camera man goes through and records it all. The crowd was happy to participate in the experiment – pausing their crowd surfing and sitting on shoulders to make it come to life.
It was also a family affair, as the band said, having their mother in the crowd as well as the wives and kids of the band members. People could see the little kids on side stage enjoying the show as much as the crowd was.
The band played a total of 17 songs, and put their encore into their set. Instead of going off stage, they dimmed the lights for the moment before coming back full force for their final four songs, finishing off the high energy show with a Good Charlotte classic “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.” They didn’t leave the stage without promising that they are planning to come back on another tour in early 2017.
Good Charlotte has eight more shows left on their tour that ends on Nov. 23 in Dallas, Texas.