(guest blogged by Howie Klein)

Last year, John and I were lucky enough to be at the People For the American Way awards ceremony when Green Day was given the Spirit of Liberty Award. I even got to present it to them. While I was backstage with the band, the lead singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, told me about how powerfully moved he had been a few weeks earlier when the band toured New Orleans and saw the unfathomable magnitide of the disaster there.

This week Billie and his wife Adrienne packed up their two sons, Joey and Jakob, and headed down to the 9th Ward to work as volunteers with Habitat for Humanity. An independent Green Day fan site is covering their progress down there every day. I had the privilege of working with Green Day when I was at Reprise Records and I always knew these were the kind of parents Billie and Adrienne would be. I don't have a copy of their latest (unreleased) song, a cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero," but here's another Green Day cover, a live version of Queen's We Are The Champions," done at an Aids benefit concert in Berlin in 2004.