The RP kid who blew away Green Day

Rolling Stone doesn’t know 16-year-old Kamran Imran’s name. Even so, the magazine’s online edition is praising the Rancho Cotate junior’s impromptu guitar performance in Seattle the other night with the red-hot band, Green Day.

Kamran went to the kickoff concert of Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown tour with his mom, Terri. He was inches from the KeyArena stage when the raging East Bay pop-punk band’s Billie Joe Armstrong singled him out and asked him if he can play the guitar and if he can play Jesus of Suburbia.

Yes! shouted Kamran, who’s taken lessons locally for three years from Mark Benjamin. So Armstrong brought Kamran onto stage and handed him his favorite guitar.

Nothing unusual so far. Armstrong often invites fans up to sing or play. But by numerous accounts — including Rolling Stone’s — the kid from Rohnert Park aced the nine-minute medley and thoroughly wowed his mother and the other 17,000 people in the house.

“He did very, very well,” Seattle Times reviewer Marian Liu told me Monday. “He impressed Green Day.”

Kamran said, “Nine minutes on stage, it was crazy.”

His performance is on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bi0Up1yOXY). The band sent him home with drumsticks and some guitar picks and permanent memories.

But first, when the song ended, drummer Tré Cool led him backstage and gave him what he needed most right then.

“He poured me a glass of orange soda,” Kamran said. “My mouth was drier than it had ever been.”

For the first time, I went to one Independence Day celebration on the Third and another on the Fourth.

Wow. The reborn fireworks shows in Windsor and at the county fairgrounds in Santa Rosa both were fabulous — family friendly, extremely well-attended and pyrotechnically thrilling.

“I know there were over 10,000 people, there had to be,” said David Hagele, a leader of the Santa Rosa Red, White and Boom. He said the sponsoring Active 20-30 Club and Santa Rosa police and fire associa-

tions will cover the costs and will have money left over for 20/30 to buy school clothes for low-income kids.

“I can’t wait ‘til next year,” he said.

says Doug Christian, a leader of the Windsor fireworks show that wouldn’t have happened if Harkey Construction, the Windsor High Boosters, town councilman Steve Allen and some key sponsors hadn’t stepped up.

“Next year we want to do it bigger and better,” Christian said. He said the WHSboosters made money from Friday’s fireworks show, though he doesn’t yet know how much.

Christian, who works for Harkey Construction, said he’ll go to the Town Council soon to say the firm would like to sponsor next year’s fireworks show. Harkey would join forces with a Windsor community group that can’t be identified until the partnership is a done deal.

Brian Molsberry was 16 and attending Piner High when he went to work at the Larkfield grocery store his grandparents, Milt and Tress Molsberry, opened in 1959.

Brian started out as a courtesy clerk. He said one of the greatest parts of the job was working with his great-grandmother, who did the books, and with his siblings and most of the rest of his family.

As the original Molsberry Market turns 50, Brian is still there, still working with brothers and co-owners Joe and Dean and other kin.

Brian doesn’t expect to be working when the market turns 100, but he hopes to go in then and find that everybody there still is family or feels like they are.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.