by Marc Spitz
In late 2001, Green Day shocked many older fans by announcing that they would be joining Blink on a co-headlining arena tour in the coming year. Dubbed “Pop Disaster,” it would be a “shared bill” with the younger band headlining in certain markets and Green Day topping in others. Although they were far outselling Green Day at this point in their careers, the notion of Blink-182 headlining over Green Day was somewhat akin to Frank Sinatra Jr. headlining over Frank Sinatra.
“We really wanted to be part of an event,” Armstrong told USA Today early in the new year, with typical honesty. “We figured putting the two biggest pop punk bands on the planet together was definitely going to be an event.”
“A band like Blink-182 is nowhere near as genuine, original, or talented as Green Day,” Gina Arnold wrote in the Sonoma County Independent that fall. “But when a band is surrounded by imitators, it’s easy to lose sight of it in the crowd.”
“Green Day have a strong economic model,” Courtney Love theorizes, “and so people are going to come and flood the market. That’s why they’re one of those bands that have a million and one copycats. Lots of baby Green Days. There are lots of baby Nirvanas too. And they all kind of suck. If Nirvana had stuck around, with Kurt’s level of ambition, which I personally know to have been vast, I think he would have seen some peaks and valleys as well, with his attitude and making In Utero. He would have had to get down to it and try.”
Pop Disaster was all about trying, swallowing some pride, and reminding the old fans (and demonstrating for the new) who started this pop-punk thing (well, after the Dickies and the Descendents, anyway).
“Green Day were a huge influence for us when we very first started, for sure,” ex–Blink-182 member Mark Hoppus says today. “And they definitely paved the way for punk bands being played on the radio, for punk bands getting signed to major labels, for punk bands getting exposure and just people being aware of that style of music, you know? It was with them that I think mainstream America started to take notice once again. It’s all cyclical, you know? Through the history of punk rock, there have been bands that have really caught the attention of mainstream America. But you know, it goes in cycles, and for the early nineties it was definitely Green Day and Offspring that were instrumental in focusing mainstream America’s attention on this style of music. I don’t know how the tour came together. We just wanted to play with Green Day.”
Rob Cavallo, still their A-and-R man and friend, agreed that launching the Pop Disaster tour was a good career move, if not a sustained ego boost.
“They knew that if you said ’Hey, punk band!’ they were not necessarily the first group you thought of anymore,” Cavallo admits. “But meanwhile, they knew they’d started it, and they were like, ’What the hell? This isn’t right!’ So the tour was actually a plan that we all came up with together. We knew that their live show is their strength. Basically the idea was to blow Blink-182 off the stage every night.”
Green Day blew Blink-182 off the stage at every stop of the Pop Disaster tour. The band always wanted to be a perennial, like The Beatles, The Who, The Clash, the Ramones, and other legends they idolized. The threat of being relegated to a certain era along with the likes of Third Eye Blind lit a fire underneath them, and onstage, the band showed a hunger they hadn’t demonstrated since touring with Bad Religion pre-Dookie. It was here that the pyro that would later be used to great effect on the American Idiot tour was first experimented with (Blink had no pyro, you see).
“I think it was a chance for them to relive their days of just being in a van,” says Chris Cote of Pop Disaster support act Kut U Up. “I think it was a stressful time because it’s a co-headlining tour; there’s definitely egos between bands and they want to outdo each other. There’s just pressures there. I think maybe it just brought out the fuck-it attitude.”
Such an attitude would be vital in the coming months. In November 2001, after a contentious election with allegations of voter fraud, Al Gore, winner of the popular vote, conceded to George W. Bush, winner of the electoral vote. Bush, a born-again Christian, right-wing conservative, sent a collective shiver through the punk community, which had grown somewhat complacent in the relatively safe and prosperous Clinton era.
On September 11, 2001, the bands had just returned home from the successful Warped Tour, which found them flying all over the country, in some kind of extended, giddy state of regression. Watching those airplanes slam into the towers in New York City instantly erased any of those feelings.
“I think after September 11, I took a step back,” Armstrong told USA Today three years later. “As an artist, you get kinda like hesitant, thinking, ’I don’t want to speak too soon. I know something’s going to come out of this, but right now I have to process things because it just seems so unreal.’ “
However, as Bush led the country to war (first with the Taliban in Afghanistan that fall in an effort to capture Osama Bin Laden, and then with Iraq, which seemed to many to have nothing to do with September 11 and didn’t pose an immediate threat to the United States after being sanctioned and left in a weak state after the bombings of the first Gulf war), the band could only watch it all from home. You didn’t have to be a paranoid Bay Area new radical to view it all as some kind of a premeditated ruse to secure oil supplies and line the pockets of Halliburton, vice president Dick Cheney’s corporate interest. The members of Green Day were among those Americans shocked and outraged by the series of events. They knew they had the ear of millions of fans worldwide. Maybe less than before, but still enough to warrant some kind of statement. Others had been speaking out: Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow. Armstrong, for a time, anyway, was not among the loudest of the dissenters. It wasn’t apathy so much as it was a state of dumbstruck outrage. The band did post an anti-war petition on their official Web site, but otherwise seemed hesitant to revolt. This proved itself to be a common reaction among the generation of kids for whom he’d just spent the year playing. Armstrong monitored his CNN, like many Americans, and slowly filled up with anger to a point where something would boil over inside him, that could not be self-suppressed.
“Punks were still politically active under Clinton,” says Aubin Paul, an editor at Punknews.org, a politically minded punk info hub. “But Bush has managed to slowly unify the left, which had been infighting for some time. A lot of bands who were relatively apolitical like Green Day were motivated by what they saw as an unconscionable situation. I’d say it went from a 5 to a 10 within a few short years. If you listen to the music released during the Reagan or Thatcher eras compared to the material released under Clinton, there is a bleakness and desperation there. Under Clinton, there were problems, certainly, but the sheer number of truly frightening issues under Bush had to wake people up.”
“We all joked about when Bush got elected,” Fat Mike laughs. “How it’s gonna make punk rock good for four years.” “The first time I ever heard Billie or Mike talking much about politics was long after Dookie, maybe around the late nineties, and even then it was more along the lines of general bitching about the government,” Lawrence Livermore says. “The kind of thing you always hear in the Bay Area. I can only surmise that maybe as they grew older and gained stature in the public eye, they felt it was incumbent on them to take a greater role in the world at large.”
On February 17, 2002, Billie Joe Armstrong turned thirty. The milestone was largely a happy one, celebrated with family and friends, although the kind of partying that the band were used to had slowed down a little over the years. “They matured,” says Bob Gruen. “It wasn’t all about just being drunk and seeing what party they could have that night. People in their thirties should grow up and by the time you’re forty you should know how to live your life and not be getting drunk like a teenager every night. People think that to be in rock ’n’ roll you have to be a teenager forever. And you don’t. You can enjoy the rock ’n’ roll, enjoy the music, and grow up. And have a family and have a life. I think you’re more interesting if you do. Y
ou know, if you just stay nineteen forever, it doesn’t look so good on a thirty-year-old, you know? But a loyal wife and a couple of loving kids does look very good on a thirty-year-old.”
Still, what does a thirty-year-old punk have to say about life in suburbia? And with the war going on, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to think that anyone would care? Always one to pour his feelings into a tune and then work it up so that it didn’t feel leaden, Armstrong began his third decade by tentatively writing songs in a more reflective vein. The music and lyrics were slow to come. Frustrated, and wary that his creative block was causing domestic tension, he decamped to New York City alone. No band. No family.
“I went to New York for a little while,” he relates today. “I told Adrienne ’If I don’t do this, then I’m going to get really resentful. I just know I am, and you’re going to resent me for being resentful. It’s just going to be a double-edged sword.’ And she said, ’Yeah, I know.’ I think that’s pretty much it. And she’s been really understanding that I really need to do this.” Armstrong, his hair bleached blonde, took very little with him: a leather jacket, a guitar. He rented a small apartment downtown and inserted himself in the East Village rock scene that surrounded bars like Niagra and Black and White and Hi-Fi. He spent his days, however, alone, walking, thinking about his life, the war, and his music.
“Being alone for me, I feel like it’s a very safe environment,” he said. “There’s no one there to judge me or what I’m doing. It’s just me, and that’s when I get all my powerful stuff.”
“When he went to New York, I didn’t see him, but I knew some people he hung out with,” says friend and filmmaker John Roecker. “Billie Joe is a walker. When he’s pensive, he’ll take these long walks. So he’d be on his cell phone and be walking, walking, walking, and he goes, ’OK, I’m in a really bad area.’”
“He said to me, ’Jesse, I’m a little blocked up writing wise, and I want to go to New York and get some inspiration and they set up a studio, a loft for me. And I’m gonna come in and write,’” Jesse Malin (co-owner of the Niagra bar) says. “We went out a few nights. The thing is that New York is an easy place in which not to be creative, to slack off, see people, and kinda get into a party mode. I know him and Ryan Adams hooked up and he ended up singing on Ryan’s record. I thought, ’I gotta introduce these two guys.’ They’re both good friends of mine and great writers, and you know, they hit it off for a good while. And I don’t know really what his full experience was but I know it didn’t last too long here and suddenly I didn’t hear from him for a while.”
“A lot of people talk about that time and probably some of the ideas for what became songs for American Idiot were germinating during that period,” says Gruen, who also hung out with Armstrong during this time. All-night, substance-fueled jam sessions were not uncommon in the makeshift studio of Hi-Fi’s basement. “Ryan was drinking a lot,” Gruen laughs. “I don’t think Billie had really come to New York to be that drunk and so he went home. Ryan’s got his ups and downs and I don’t think it was the inspiration he was looking for. And so he went home within a couple weeks.”
Armstrong took a bit of the sozzled New York sojourn back to the Bay Area with him. On the early morning of January 5, 2003, cops pulled his BMW over for speeding and administered a sobriety test. When he failed, he was arrested on DUI charges, briefly detained, then released on $1,200 bail.
Although Armstrong never made a big to-do about his fame and was described by police as “cooperative” he was recognized and, soon, the embarrassing affair was all over the new wires. It’d been a while since Green Day had enjoyed a hit single, and scandal, no matter how small, is no real substitute for staying in the public eye thanks to your work.
Chapter Ten
CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS
Green Day reconvened once again in Oakland in the summer of 2003 and struggled to finish album number seven, tentatively entitled Cigarettes and Valentines. The new songs were harder than the folkier Warning tracks: quick-tempoed punk rock that harkened back to Kerplunk! and Insomniac. “I feel like the last record is so complete that to try to take over where that one left off would be kind of futile,” Dirnt said at the time. “We’ve had a nice break from making hard and fast music and it’s made us want to do it again.”
It had been more than two years since Warning and the stopgap release of International Superhits!, a best-of (featuring two new songs from the Warning era, “Pop Rocks and Coke” and the pop-punk workout “Maria,” culled from unreleased tapes). Plans were made to issue the new record in the summer but once again, fate, in the form of tragedy, would intervene in their lives. Nobody will discuss just how the master tapes of Cigarettes and Valentines went missing. If you ask the band or their crew, there’s a moment of “I can’t talk about this” silence on the other end of the line. The vanishing master tapes for what would have been Green Day’s complete seventh album are not only something they will not discuss, but also a subject that raises the dander of anyone associated with recorded music.
“It was not taken from here,” studio owner John Lucasey stresses. “Everybody’s fuckin’ writing that it was taken from here. It was not. I mean they took their drives with them at the time. There was nothing that was ever stolen from here. There are safes, everything, you know? Surveillance, safes, I mean there’s multiple steel doors that you would have to get through too and stuff.”
Lucasey was, however, one of the few people outside the Green Day circle to actually hear the record before it disappeared. “I don’t think a lot of people have ever heard it besides the band and maybe whoever took it,” he laughs. “It was cool. It was a punk album, that’s for sure. I think it was pretty hard-hitting stuff. Yeah. And that’s about all I remember about it. It wasn’t American Idiot.”
The band had the funds to re-record the songs, of course. This was no new group with a limited recording budget. But the fact that they didn’t says more about what was on the missing tapes than anything else, and unfortunately throws some harsh light on the ever-widening cracks that were emerging in what had once seemed like lifelong bonds. Armstrong had been frustrated with Dirnt and Cool’s subtle criticisms of his work. The band had become a bit passive aggressive in dealing with one another. Rather than pick up from the start, maybe it would be easier to simply break up. Call it a career. After all, it didn’t seem like anybody besides their most loyal fans would miss them. Armstrong would forge a solo career and finally live down the success of Dookie and the bratty image that seemed permanent. He could act his age.
They consulted, as they always did when business was troubling, with Cavallo, who asked them if they honestly felt that Cigarettes and Valentines was irreplaceable. Was it their best work? After searching themselves, they admitted that it was not. “I think part of them knew that maybe it wasn’t when they called me,” Cavallo says today.
It was decided by all that they would not act on anything just yet. The band and Cavallo convened and discussed their options. They decided that they were going to take another three months and continue writing. They also discussed the differences that had grown among them over the years. The small but unspoken moments of annoyance that can fester within any creative unit were flushed out. It was a Northern California–style “rap session,” with Cavallo playing the role of the moderator. As New Age–flakey as it sounds, the results were liberating. The band left their Oakland studios the next day.
It was then that the masked “Europeans” moved in.
“The Network recorded here,” Lucasey laughs. “They were in Studio B. Dude, all I know is that they had some crazy ass accents. The Network were really some fucked up, strange people.”
Green Day are not the Network. The Network are not Green Day. That said, the advent of the anonymous, Euro-synth quintet (who are not Green Day) was the catalyst that allowed Green Day (who are not the Network) to get over themselves and eventually record the best music of their career. An amalgam of New Wave both great (Devo, Sparks, Kraftw
erk) and terrible (every German band that isn’t Kraftwerk), the Network, according to their official bio (released by Adeline Records, the label co-founded by Billie Joe Armstrong, who is not Fink, the Network’s leader) are as follows:
Fink, the band’s leader, who allegedly financed the album using money he made off the sale of a top-secret nuclear device. Van Gough, a Belgian who lost his nose during an Everest expedition. The Snoo, a former Mexican wrestler. Captain Underpants, a stuttering former Olympian. And Z, an Icelandic hitchhiker.
Money Money 20/20, released in the fall of 2003, features a cover of the Misfits’ comic-core classic “Teenagers from Mars” and more lyrics about sex-starved robots than any other record released that year (or any year, with the possible exception of 1983). The record is a novelty, albeit one that genuinely rocks (even incognito, the Green Day quality control remains . . . coincidentally, of course). Even though they weren’t, you could see how a band like Green Day, in their position, could be liberated by the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and the fun the Network (whoever they are) must have been having playing tracks like “Hungry Supermodels,” “X-ray Hamburger,” and “Transistors Gone Wild.” Life during war time, possible crypto-fascists in the White House . . . a vacation in outer space is just the tonic.
The Network made their live debut at The Key Club on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood on November 22, 2003. The soldout event amounted to a New Wave dance party full of celebs (Vincent Gallo; members of No Doubt; and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park), sirens, lasers, and irony thicker than the smoke from the dry ice machine.
“There’s lots of rumors about Green Day being the Network and it is preposterous,” Armstrong, who happened to be in the crowd, cracked. “The only thing we have in common is we both want death to mediocrity in music today and we are all members of the Church of Lushology.”