It’s the boulevard of broken dreams for Raider Nation, as it was announced yesterday that the Oakland team is relocating to Las Vegas for the 2019-2020 season. The East Bay rockers took the announcement to heart.
According to Billboard, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong was onstage at a Detroit concert when he clowned team owner Mark Davis, calling him a “goddamn pumpkin pie hair,” (borrowing a Dumb and Dumber reference). and continuing on to say “we come from the ‘Detroit of California’ — only we no longer have a football team. F–k Las Vegas!”
This isn’t the first time Armstrong has voiced his not-so-subtle opinion on the Raider’s move. When Green Day played UC Theatre in Berkeley in October of last year, he riffed about how Raider Nation would look making their way through the desert to Sin City, saying it’d be like “Mad Max, looking for gasoline and killing each other.”
Ironically, the “American Idiot” band plays Las Vegas on April 7th for their North American tour. They’ll continue the tour through Australia and New Zealand starting April 30, then perform a European festival June 4 in the Netherlands, and will return to the Oakland Oracle Arena on August 5.
Photos By Sven-Sebastian Sajak (Sven0705) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link and “Mark Davis” by Zennie Abraham via Flickr, CC 2.0