by Marc Spitz
Armstrong, relying on a standard frontman’s trick, would drop out his own vocals, only to hear them picked up by the crowd. At each stop, hearing their own lyrics sung back to them, often right on key and in time, seemed to provide the band with the energy they needed to mount such a production. Several songs, spanning their Warner Brothers career, were added to the set, kicking off, as their superstardom did back in 1994, with “Longview.” Oddly, the Lookout Records–era material was ignored, but the fire the band brought to each venue (literally and figuratively as an almost decadent array of flash pots, concussion bombs, fireworks, and confetti were employed) was that of a hard-working, Econoline-touring, and most important, still young and vital punk rock group.
“American Idiot,” “Holiday,” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” had all been major hit singles, and by the end of the summer, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” was issued as the album’s fourth (“Jesus of Suburbia” would be its fifth and final single and music video). Bayer cast independent film actors Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood as lovers whose lives are destroyed when he, an underprivileged high school kid, enlists for the sake of the financial and college benefits. As the band performs the song, combat set pieces are shot, showing the TRL viewers an idea of what may be befalling people their age in the Gulf.
“It’s the one video that was really politicized, you know?” says Samuel Bayer (who directed clips for all of American Idiot’s singles). “I wanted kids to talk about the war, you know? And I didn’t see MTV pushing kids to talk about it.”
“It dared to show an authentic depiction of how the Iraq war costs young soldiers their limbs and lives,” Michael Moore would later applaud in Rolling Stone. In January of 2005, American Idiot was certified double platinum (it would go on to sell five million copies in America) and nominated for Album and Record of the Year, the two top Grammy categories (it would win Best Rock Album).
Green Day first took punk rock into stadiums in England in the summer of 2005, selling out the 65,000-capacity National Bowl at Milton Keynes, a football stadium outside of London. “People were saying it’s dead,” Schneider says of the concert industry that year. “The Beastie Boys canceled their tour. Big bands like that were struggling. The band were worried. ’Are we gonna show up at Pac Bell Park and have people on the floor only, playing to 10,000 people in a stadium?’”
American stadium shows on both coasts, however, sold out well in advance, as did their two-night stand at the National Bowl at Milton Keynes, outside of London. These would be the biggest shows of the band’s career, putting them in league (as far as box office goes, anyway) with the likes of the perennials: U2, the Stones, and McCartney.
“We were on tour with them when they announced their shows at the Milton Keynes,” says Cyrus Bolooki of support act New Found Glory (who would along with Jimmy Eat World and My Chemical Romance open shows on the two-year-long world tour). “They only put one show on sale, and this was like on a Friday or something. And Monday they come up to us and, I mean Tre came up to me and he’s like, ’Did you hear about what happened with our show?’ I said, ’No.’ He said, ’We sold almost fifty thousand tickets over the weekend.’ And I’m like, ’Wow.’ And just the look on his face and just like, it’s the same exact way that any of us would act if that happened. Like the same way we acted when we found out we were going on tour with Green Day, actually.”
“We played two nights,” Armstrong remembered in our 2005 interview. “Sixty-five thousand people and it wasn’t a festival it was just our show. We’re playing these stadiums that are coming up in the States too. It’s gigantic. But the great feeling about it is knowing that we’re capable of playing [a venue] like that and that we belong there. It’s not like we’re insecure and trying to justify it. It’s been like a seventeen-year career at this point and we’re going into these places knowing that we’ve got these seventeen years backing us up, but we have something new and fresh to offer at the same time.”
“British kids are probably the closest to American kids than any other in the world in every imaginable way,” Imran Ahmed, a contributing editor at England’s New Musical Express weekly, says, explaining American Idiot’s popularity in the land of Tony Blair, dismissed by the Left as Bush’s cross-Atlantic lap dog. “The disillusionment and alienation in this country is so similar. The funny thing about this song is that it talks about America more like a British songwriter would talk about England. This America is really fucked up and shit. It has a ’redneck agenda,’ you get called ’faggot.’ This isn’t the ’American dream’ it’s a fucking nightmare. And if you look at the great British punk bands Sex Pistols, Clash, that’s what they did. They conveyed universal antiestablishment sentiment, usually about how shit Britain was really, in sub three-minute punk songs. I mean you could draw another parallel that Britain’s fall from a position as world power throughout the seventies is being paralleled in the States today. But I leave that to someone else.”
In March of 2005, Corey George, a nine-year-old fan from Wales, awakened from an auto accident–induced coma after his mother played him the American Idiot album for an hour, proving, perhaps in the most literal of all ways, what the band themselves had been proving for nearly two decades: Really good punk rock can indeed save one from a life of pain and suffering. It saved Green Day, and in turn, it saved their fans, both comatose and otherwise.
Through that winter and spring, award season for the entertainment industry, American Idiot was deservedly feted. It received seven Grammy Award nominations, including Album of the Year (they’d win Best Rock Album in 2005, and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” would take the prestigious Record of the Year award the following February). Green Day swept the MTV Video Music Awards, the California Music Awards, and cleaned up at the Kids’ Choice Awards (reinforcing their appeal at the playground, even as they headed toward the big 3-5). Even Spike TV seemed to reward Dirnt for the name-check in “Homecoming.” At each ceremony, they put on suits, neatly applied their kohl, and graciously accepted the praise. It was as if they finally had nothing to prove, after a decade and a half. They looked like glam rock Buddhas at the podium. The once-conflicting sides of their communal personality were now finally coexisting.
“I think that way deep down inside, the truth is that Green Day didn’t actually accept everything that happened to them with Dookie until American Idiot,” Cavallo says. “I think they tried really hard and did a great job of it but the real coming of age and accepting of things happened here. They came full circle and grew the most comfortable in their own skin.”
“When Dookie came out, Smashing Pumpkins were big and Billie would say ’Smashing Pumpkins suck. Billy Corgan, I hate him!’ It was like nobody was good,” says Anna Armstrong Humann. “And now, my brothers asked him, ’You ever meet those Fall Out Boy kids? And he says, ’Oh yeah, they’re real sweet. They’re real good.’ He’ll stop and say, ’Oh, I like them. We’re a hell of a lot better.’ But [this time] he’ll be laughing. He likes everybody now. And he’s really supportive of other bands. He’s not slagging anymore. I guess he sees his role in the history of rock and realizes that he does have a place in it.”
“I appreciate the success a little more than I did back then,” Armstrong agrees. “I didn’t know how to before.”
“This level of fame has been very good to them,” Courtney Love observes. “Billie Joe looks absolutely beautiful. You know how when people get super A-list, their face gets prettier? I think it’s perception. It’s something that happens in your subconscious. But he looks stunning. He looks like a beautiful girl.”
“The Billie Joe Armstrong that I work with now is not the same guy that walked onto the American Idiot set a year ago,” Samuel Bayer says. “Now he’s a rock star. They were famous. They had done big stuff. But it’s transcended that. But he hasn’t changed. And they haven’t changed. They’re three friends who love one another.”
“When I think of my friends, I think of Mike and Tre,” Armstrong h
as said. “I look at Mike and Tre and I think that’s a great couple of people I happen to be in a band with. Those guys are total fucking rock stars.”
The critics and cred measurers will not go away, of course. They were there at Giants Stadium. They will be there when album number eight hits the stores. Cries of “Are they too young?” were no longer appropriate, but cries of “Are they too old” are inevitable. And “Are they punk?” will likely remain a constant even as the band continue to render the question personally irrelevant.
The punk fundamentalist cause was, for example, fueled in late 2005 when the band pulled their back catalog from Lookout Records after a dispute over royalties, prompting those old familiar cries of “Judas, dude!” “After a tremendously successful decade-and-a-half-long relationship with Lookout Records, Green Day is taking the reins of their Lookout albums, 1039/Smoothed-Out Slappy Hours and Kerplunk! as well as their EPs 1000 Hours and Slappy,” a Lookout-released statement said. “There are no details as of yet as to what the band has planned for these great early releases . . . Green Day are an incredible force in music and Lookout Records is proud to have been their first home.”
“All I have to say is, you know, it doesn’t really affect me very much personally,” says Lookout’s Patrick Hynes. “Or in terms of like financially or anything like that. I’m not losing my job or anything like that. But it’s disappointing. I kinda wish things could’ve turned out differently. I think that Lookout made some bad business decisions and they just kinda got caught with the consequences. So I think that Green Day is totally justified in doing what they did. But it still doesn’t, it’s like, eh . . .”
“I feel very bad about that whole business,” Livermore says. “I do feel that Green Day didn’t have much choice in the matter; they couldn’t go on indefinitely putting up with not being paid, or at least I don’t see any reason why they should have to. By not paying the bands on time, Lookout violated one of the most fundamental principles it has always operated by. It’s hard to have sympathy about anything that happened as a result of that.”
The world sufficiently conquered, and their indie masters back in their possession, for better or worse, Green Day are back in Oakland, playing poker and coping with what a source close to the band calls “post-partum depression.” As of the summer 2006 they are building a new studio and plan to begin work on American Idiot’s follow-up in the coming months. There’s also talk of a film version of the “Jesus of Suburbia/St. Jimmy/Whatsername” story line.
“I think there’s been some talk about people wanting to turn it into a movie,” Armstrong says. “I wouldn’t mind seeing something like that happen. There’s one journalist who mentioned that we were taking it to Broadway, and that just seemed really corny. We’re going to Broadway! It would be so Off-Broadway.”
“I’d like to see this thing done on ice,” Mike Dirnt adds. “’American Idiot on Ice’: Blood on the Ice.”
Nobody knows what the new songs will sound like, but it’s a good bet they won’t be in the American Idiot mode. Even as they carry on without the burden of being “Green Day,” the band will likely remain a creative unit that thrives on laying down challenges for themselves. Maybe the record will take them even further away from the three-chord, two-and-a-half-minute punk rock they started playing as teenagers? There’s no need to resort to such things as a fallback anymore, after all. Either way, as long as a new Green Day song exists, punk rockers will go on, if only to loudly grumble about them. The band may still find themselves hurt by some of this. As Jello Biafra pointed out, they are human, and even if you’re a high school dropout, there’s a little bit of that eleventh-grade peer pressure terror in all of us. But being Green Day has ceased to become a choice since American Idiot. It’s now, merely, a fact. Anything else, even punk rock, will always take a back seat.
“Well, you know, for me punk has always been about doing things your own way,” Armstrong said in 2005. “What it represents for me is an ultimate freedom and sense of individuality. Which basically becomes a metaphor for life and the way you want to live it. So as far as Green Day is concerned, I really want the band to form into its own thing and not just try to represent all of what punk rock is, because you then alienate people and you also alienate yourself. It’s about remaining passionate in punk rock but at the same time just really doing your own thing so its not just about writing punk rock music, but writing Green Day music.”
And what’s more punk rock than that, anyway? It’s zen . . . or something. By disavowing punk, they become ever-punker. And the genre moves on, preserved by the very forces that some criticize as a great threat to its survival.
“It’s like in Casablanca at the end when Victor Lazlo is trying to get Humphrey Bogart to agree to let him out of the country,” says Jesse Malin. “He says, ’With you on our side, I know we’ll win. We’ll fight against fascism.’ That’s how I feel. If we have Green Day on our side, we’re alright. We got Henry Rollins too, and he’s tough.”
DISCOGRAPHY
1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours (Lookout Records)
Release Date: April 19, 1991
Track list:
1. “At the Library”
2. “Don’t Leave Me”
3. “I Was There”
4. “Disappearing Boy”
5. “Green Day”
6. “Going to Pasalacqua”
7. “16”
8. “Road to Acceptance”
9. “Rest”
10. “The Judge’s Daughter”
11. “Paper Lanterns”
12. “Why Do You Want Him?”
13. “409 in Your Coffeemaker”
14. “Knowledge”
15. “1,000 Hours”
16. “Dry Ice”
17. “Only of You”
18. “The One That I Want”
19. “I Want to Be Alone”
Produced by Green Day
Kerplunk! (Lookout Records)
Release Date: January 17, 1992
Track List:
1. “2,000 Light Years Away”
2. “One for the Razorbacks”
3. “Welcome to Paradise”
4. “Christie Road”
5. “Private Ale”
6. “Dominated Love Slave”
7. “One of My Lies”
8. “80”
9. “Android”
10. “No One Knows”
11. “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield”
12. “Words I Might Have Ate”
13. “Sweet Children”
14. “Best Thing in Town”
15. “Strangeland”
16. “My Generation”
Produced by Green Day and John Kiffmeyer
Dookie (Reprise Records)
Release Date: February 1, 1994
Track List:
1. “Burnout”
2. “Having a Blast”
3. “Chump”
4. “Longview”
5. “Welcome to Paradise”
6. “Pulling Teeth”
7. “Basket Case”
8. “She”
9. “Sassafras Roots”
10. “When I Come Around”
11. “Coming Clean”
12. “Emenius Sleepus”
13. “In the End”
14. “F.O.D. (Fuck Off and Die)”
15. “All by Myself”
Produced by Green Day and Rob Cavallo
Insomniac (Reprise Records)
Release Date: October 10, 1995
Track List:
1. “Armatage Shanks”
2. “Brat”
3. “Stuck With Me”
4. “Geek Stink Breath”
5. “No Pride”
6. “Bab’s Uvula Who?”
7. “86”
8. “Panic Song”
9. “Stuart and the Ave”
10. “Brain Stew”
11. “Jaded”
12. “Westbound Sign”
13. “Tight Wad Hill”
14. “Walking Contradiction”
Produced by Green Day and Rob Cavallo
Nimrod (Reprise Records)
Release Date: October 14, 1997
Track List
1. “Nice Guys Finish Last”
2. “Hitchin’ a Ride”
3. “The Grouch”
4. “Redundant”
5. “Scattered”
6. “All the Time”
7. “Worry Rock”
8. “Platypus (I Hate You)”
9. “Uptight”
10. “Last Ride In (Instrumental)”
11. “Jinx”
12. “Haushinka”
13. “Walking Alone”
14. “Reject”
15. “Take Back”
16. “King for a Day”
17. “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”
18. “Prosthetic Head”
Produced by Rob Cavallo and Green Day
Warning (Adeline)
Release Date: October 3, 2000
Track List:
1. “Warning”
2. “Blood, Sex, and Booze”
3. “Church on Sunday”
4. “Fashion Victim”
5. “Castaway”
6. “Misery”
7. “Deadbeat Holiday”
8. “Hold On”
9. “Jackass”
10. “Waiting”
11. “Minority”
12. “Macy’s Day Parade”
Produced by Green Day (Rob Cavallo, executive producer)
International Superhits! (compilation)
(Reprise Records)
Release Date: November 13, 2001
Track List:
1. “Maria (new)”
2. “Poprocks & Coke (new)”
3. “Longview”
4. “Welcome to Paradise”
5. “Basket Case”
6. “When I Come Around”
7. “She”
8. “JAR”
9. “Geek Stink Breath”
10. “Brain Stew”
11. “Jaded”
12. “Walking Contradiction”
13. “Stuck with Me”
14. “Hitchin’ a Ride”