Audience participation reaches its height when it’s time to play ‘Knowledge’, a song originally by East Bay legends Operation Ivy. It’s the opening track from OpIvy’s sole album, Energy, released in 1989 on Lookout. The album went on to sell over half a million copies, a remarkable achievement for an independent label, then or now, and especially so considering that it’s been promoted almost exclusively by word of mouth. Energy’s record release party was held May 28, 1989 at the equally legendary Berkeley venue 924 Gilman. You could easily fit a few clubs the size of Gilman on the stage Green Day now occupies at SBC Park. Green Day opened for OpIvy that night in 1989; in fact it was their first show at Gilman playing as “Green Day”, having only recently changed their name from Sweet Children. The Lookouts, Tré’s band before he joined Green Day, played the same show.
Green Day covered ‘Knowledge’ on their second EP, Slappy, released in 1990. Nowadays, in a spirit of all-inclusiveness, they pull up kids from the audience to play the song. First, the band plays through the song, then Billie Joe announces, “Now, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re going to do something that’s never been done here in San Francisco at SBC Park, ever! We want to start a band on stage, right now! So we need three volunteers.” Naturally, everyone clamours to have the opportunity, but Billie Joe grills the prospective players intensely. “Do you know how to play drums?” he asks a young man in the crowd tonight. “Swear to God? How long have you been playing for? Seven years? Right, get your ass up here, let’s go!” The new drummer scrambles up and gets behind the kit, with Tré watching over him, smacking him in the head each time he tries to do a fancy fill; “We got a show boater here tonight!” exclaims Billie Joe. Then a young woman is chosen to play bass; “This one’s for the ladies — get your ass up here!” says Billie Joe. The drummer and bass player get their parts down, to an approving, “All right! We’re making history!” from Billie Joe. Rounding out the new band is a young man with a mohawk, who, on taking the stage, hugs Billie Joe, then pulls a guitar pick off Billie Joe’s mic stand; Billie Joe pulls him back and gives him a big kiss on the mouth in return, and the young man literally leaps for joy. Billie Joe then urges the bassist and guitarist to the front, where they let rip and strike all the classic rock-star poses while Billie Joe runs around the stage singing the lead vocal. “That was the greatest band we’ve ever had up here, ever!” he says afterwards. Then he calls the guitarist back; “Hey you! Come here! What are you doing? What’s your name? Javier? Where are from, Javier? You’re from Peru? That’s awesome. Javier, you get to keep the guitar.” Javier holds the guitar up in delight. “Now get your ass off my fucking stage!” Billie Joe thunders in mock anger. He then directs the drummer to do a stage dive. As Tré plays a drum roll and Mike thumps his bass, Billie Joe leads the crowd in shouting, “Jump! Jump! Jump!” The drummer gears himself up, then executes a perfect dive into the crowd.
The celebratory mood continues with Billie Joe donning a crown for ‘King For A Day’, a giddy celebration of cross-dressing. The rest of the players also don funny hats, and a wizard puppet pops up on stage and dances on top of some gear. It wouldn’t be a Green Day show if Billie Joe didn’t bare his bottom at least once, and it happens during this song, as he turns around, tugs his trousers down a bit and wiggles his bum for the audience’s amusement. The rock’n’roll standard, ‘Shout’, proves to be just as much of a rave-up, and during the “little bit softer” part of the song, Billie Joe crouches down lower and lower until he’s actually laying face down on the stage. A stage hand comes over and puts the fallen crown back on Billie Joe’s head, along with a robe, and Billie Joe rolls on his back and begins singing another standard, Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’, before leaping up and continuing with ‘Shout’.
The elegiac ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ is dedicated to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which brought disastrous floods to the American South, decimating the city of New Orleans in particular, in late August. The entire stadium is alight with the flicker of cigarette lighters and glowing cell phones that the crowd holds up, mirrored by the firey sparks raining down over the stage. The main set ends with ‘Minority’, but considering the wild crowd response, you know there will be an encore and so there is. The band returns and starts up with ‘Maria’, one of the new tracks recorded for International Superhits. ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’, the group’s biggest commercial hit to date, is yet another sing-along, as so much of the set has been for this audience. Most bands would probably be content to end their show on the grandiose note struck by the cover of Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’, which sees a hail of green, red, and white confetti falling down on the crowd, some of whom pick up the slips of paper as souvenirs. But Green Day has yet another ace up their sleeve. Billie Joe returns to the stage bearing an acoustic guitar and a spotlight picks him out as he sings what’s become the signature closing song for the band, ‘Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)’.And to further top things off, at the song’s conclusion a spectacular fireworks display fills the sky. The crowd, previously elated, is now utterly ecstatic.
“Thank you for the best fucking night of my life!” says Billie Joe at the show’s end. It’s a sentiment Robin Paterson comes close to sharing. “Being my very first real concert, I pretty much thought it was the best thing ever,” she says. “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say it was a ten.”
Seventeen years before, Billie Joe and Mike played their first show to an audience of about 30. There weren’t any stage lights, let alone confetti, flame pots, overhead video screens, or giant banners. But the desire to connect with the audience was much the same, along with the passion of the band’s delivery and the sheer, unadulterated joy of simply making music. By that standard, perhaps the distance between Rod’s Hickory Pit and SBC Park isn’t that great after all.
CHAPTER 1
Stranded In Suburbia
“When you were a child, did you know this [performing] was what you were going to do?”
“Either that or be a Safeway truck driver.”
— Billie Joe to the San Francisco Chronicle, November 19, 1995
Across the bay from San Francisco lies a sprawling collection of towns that stretch up and reach around to the southeastern side of San Pablo Bay, from Oakland (a bonafide city, with its population of 400,000), to Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, Richmond, San Pablo, El Sobrante, Pinole, Hercules, Rodeo, and Crockett, where the Carquinez Bridge then takes you north to Vallejo. Rodeo (pronounced Ro-DAY-oh), founded in 1890 by the Union Stock Yard Company as a meat-packing centre, has a population of 11,000, a size that no doubt helps the local Chamber of Commerce assure potential residents that “the small-town atmosphere that characterised Rodeo around the turn of the [20th] century still exists today.”
And it was here that Billie Joe Armstrong would spend the first 18 years of his life. Born on February 17, 1972, Billie Joe was Andy and Ollie Armstrong’s sixth child. He followed Allen (who was 22 years older), David, Marcy, Holly, and Anna. Oil refineries had long since replaced meat-packing as the area’s primary industry. “The whole area from Richmond over to about Pittsburg [California] is all oil refinery areas,” says John Goar, who taught math and science at the local high school, John Swett, in the Eighties. “That really has an impact on the community. The cancer rate in that corridor is four times the national average. Just about everybody had someone in their family who has cancer. And I learned that it was really inappropriate to breech that subject, at least it was that way when I was there. It was so personal and painful; people know the air that they breathe is giving them cancer, but they didn’t want to talk about it, they wanted to shut it out.” Years later, Billie Joe would recall how students from his elementary school were often sent home after getting headaches from breathing the fumes of the refineries, which were alarmingly close by.
Andy earned a living as a truck driver. Ollie supplemented the family’s income by working as a waitress, especially when Andy and his fellow Teamsters went on strike.
“It seemed like he was on strike, holding signs up in front of Safeway every other month,” Billie Joe later said. Ollie had dropped out of school to help her family pay the bills. Now, with a family of her own, she continued working to help make ends meet.
Both parents had a strong interest in music. Andy played drums in local jazz bands for 20 years and had a fondness for artists like Frank Sinatra. “That sort of stuff was like the classics to me, where a lot of people thought it was just corny,” Billie Joe later told Lawrence Livermore, who founded the label Green Day would first record for, Lookout. “They didn’t know what that stuff was about at all … I got asked to do a version of ‘Witchcraft’ for the Oceans 11 soundtrack and I was like, ‘I know “Witchcraft”. I’ve known it my entire life.’” (Unfortunately, he didn’t end up recording the song.) Ollie was a fan of country-and-western in general and Hank Williams and Elvis Presley in particular, which her young son picked up on; Billie Joe’s first album purchase was Presley’s classic Sun Sessions.
Being the youngest of six children also aided in Billie Joe’s musical education, as his older siblings had their own tastes, ranging from The Beatles to Bruce Springsteen to R.E.M. So though the first music Billie Joe would play was heavy metal, and then punk, underneath it all he had a solid grounding in the strength of a good, catchy melody. When asked by Rolling Stone for a list of his Top 10 albums in 2000, it was evenly split between classic acts like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, and Bob Dylan, and later punk/alternative acts like The Ramones, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Replacements, and Nirvana.
Billie Joe’s own interest in music and performing was quick to emerge. As a youngster, he would sing along with the performers on TV, using a fireplace poker in place of a mic stand. And at age four he had a stint of formal music education when he began taking piano lessons at the Fiat Music Company, a music store located at the Pinole Valley Shopping Center in nearby Pinole, where Billie Joe’s three sisters had also taken lessons.
The music store was run by James Fiatarone and his wife Marie-Louise, who taught piano and voice. The couple was immediately impressed by Billie Joe’s potential star quality, aided in no small part by a decided adorability factor. “He has a style of communicating with his hands and head like Al Jolson or Frank Sinatra,” James told a local reporter. “I felt he was like a teddy bear and a puppy who could sing like an angel.” Marie-Louise was equally enthusiastic. “I’ve had singers as young as three years old, but none with the charisma and love he has,” she said. “To me, he’s like a Renaissance angel, like a cherub in a Michelangelo painting.”
The Fiatarones were also aspiring songwriters, and eventually took Billie Joe to San Francisco to record a song they’d written, ‘Look For Love’, accompanied by his sister Holly and some of their other pupils. The 2:11 song starts off with Billie Joe’s count-in, then a light-hearted musical backing begins, as Billie Joe chirpily informs the listener that the solution to all of life’s woes is — what else? — to look for love, a sentiment echoed by a female back-up chorus who sing the song’s title no less than 44 times. When the track was released as a single in 1977 on the Fiatarones own Fiat Records label, the B-side would feature a short interview with the young singer. “How do you like being a recording artist?” a perky female voice prompts. “I love it!” replies Billie Joe. “Would you like to sing to people in other countries?” “Yes. I love people everywhere!” “Well, I’m sure that this song will reach people all over the world through your record, Billie Joe,” the interviewer says approvingly. The interview ends with Billie Joe’s request for fan mail — “and please send me your picture!” Twenty-four years later, a snippet from the interview would be chosen to open International Superhits.
‘Look For Love’ was promoted on local TV and write-ups appeared in area newspapers. “Billie Joe Armstrong, 5, Might Be On His Way To Top,” predicted one writer, who quoted James as saying, “Shirley Temple came at a time of the Depression when our country needed her sweetness. These are almost the same kind of times and I think the world is ready for this kind of feeling.” Eight-hundred singles were pressed and packaged in a plain white sleeve. Sheet music was also available, at $1.25 a copy; the pink-tinted cover features a picture of Billie Joe, wearing jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the song’s title, sitting on a bench in front of a piano. His gaze is that of a child who’s been told to smile but won’t; his round, slightly pudgy face is framed by a full head of bushy hair. Today the single can be found for sale on line for up to $1,000.
Billie Joe continued performing as a child, singing at veterans hospitals and other community centres. “My parents wanted my time to be occupied and music seemed like the most natural thing that came to me,” he explained. Though frustrated in his initial attempts to play the “piece of shit” acoustic guitar laying around the house, that changed when he was given his own guitar, a Fernandes Stratocaster. The Fernandes was a cheap copy of the Fender Stratocaster, and the first-issue of the guitar resulted in Fernandes being sued by Fender, as the copy was too exact. Some accounts have Billie Joe’s father buying the instrument for his son; other accounts say it was his mother. However he acquired the guitar, it quickly became his prized possession and he nicknamed it “Blue”. The Fernandes remained Billie Joe’s signature guitar through the recording of Insomniac and he occasionally uses the guitar today (“Though it looks more green than blue now,” he told Guitar World), and has had a number of replicas of it made as well.
Something else equally life-changing happened to Billie Joe around the same time; Andy Armstrong died of cancer of the esophagus when Billie Joe was 10. Ollie was forced to increase her waitress duties and money became so tight that gift giving at Christmastime was curtailed in the Armstrong household. “We just learned to accept it,” he later told Launch.com. “We just had fun. My family knows how to party, so it was no big deal, you know?”
Ollie’s subsequent remarriage to a man none of her children liked added to the unhappy atmosphere that Billie Joe’s sister Anna later described to Rolling Stone as “dysfunctional”. “There was a lot of fighting amongst the siblings, a lot of hitting,” she said, a view Billie Joe himself corroborated in other interviews. But it also provided the creative spark for the first song Billie Joe would write, at age 14, the aptly-named ‘Why Do You Want Him?’ later recorded on Green Day’s Slappy EP.
But Billie Joe’s tenth year was also rounded out by meeting a fellow aspiring musician with whom he formed his longest-lasting artistic collaboration to date: Mike Dirnt. Mike had his own set of challenges to deal with while growing up. He was born Michael Ryan Pritchard on May 4, 1972, to a mother whose use of heroin led to his being put up for adoption six weeks after his birth. He was eventually adopted and moved to Rodeo with his new family, but the family divorced in 1979. Mike first lived with his adoptive father, but eventually returned to his adoptive mother. He later estimated he’d moved seven times by the time he was 15. When his mother remarried, he too would come into conflict with his new stepfather, though ironically the two would become closer when the marriage split up. He was also occasionally bothered by chest pains and panic attacks he was initially told were the result of problems with his heart.
Mike had dabbled in piano at home before moving on to guitar and eventually bass after he realised the instrument would make him stand out more in a group of guitarists. He taught himself to play on “a total piece of shit” his mother acquired from a pawn shop. He also took a few guitar lessons, but preferred to learn on his own, jamming with friends or sitting in anywhere he could, learning a variety of musical styles, including jazz. “I’ve always been into melody, and the bass seemed like an easier way for me to get to those melodies,” he later told Bass Player. “I didn’t have to finesse it as much as I did when I played guitar.” Years later, Mike would design his own signature model bass for Fender, the Mike Dirnt Precision Bass, modeled after Fender’s ’51 P-Bass.
Despite the poor quality of his first instrument, Mi
ke’s bass “made the right sounds,” and Billie Joe and Mike soon developed a passion for practise. “Billie and I would just plug into the same amp and play all night,” said Mike. “We played and practised because that’s all there was to do. We weren’t good at sports. I’m not a big guy, so what’s my way to look cool and maybe impress some girls? I’m going to play bass! And it was cool. It was something that we could call our own.”
Mike later told Spin that on first meeting Billie Joe, “we didn’t like each other because we were both class clowns,” but their joint interest in music quickly led to their forming a fast friendship. And as the two moved into Carquinez Middle School, their musical horizons began broadening as well. Billie Joe made the acquaintance of two brothers, Matt and Eric, who came to Rodeo every weekend to visit their divorced father, who lived on the same street as Billie Joe. The brothers were also keen music fans and introduced him to metal bands like Def Leppard, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, and AC/DC. Years later, Billie Joe would still delight in dropping a signature riff from one of his early idols in between songs at Green Day shows, as at one show in 1998, when ‘Welcome To Paradise’ led into Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’, which then segued into AC/DC’s ‘Back In Black’. He quickly shared his new discoveries with Mike. “I remember Billie pulling out Van Halen’s Diver Down and playing it for me,” Mike later recalled. “I’d never heard Van Halen before, and I was like, ‘Whoa!’”
When the brothers discovered punk, they again shared the music with Billie Joe, and several of the punk acts would go on to be key influences for both Billie Joe and Green Day. There was Generation X, whose song ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ Billie Joe later credited with kindling his desire to start a band. There were The Ramones, who Billie Joe first saw in their 1979 cult film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, later proclaiming them, “the perfect rock band.” And then there were The Sex Pistols, whose short career thrust punk fully into the mainstream spotlight for a brief period in the late Seventies. On first hearing ‘Holidays In The Sun’, Billie Joe recalled to Rolling Stone that “the guitar came roaring through like thunder. By the time [lead singer John] Lydon’s vocal came in, I definitely wanted to destroy my past and create something new for myself … Anytime that I’m trying to create something, I always refer to The Sex Pistols, because it shows you what the possibilities are as far as music.” Of the group’s sole album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols, he said, “It punched a huge hole in everything that was bullshit about rock music, and everything that was going wrong with the world, too. No one else has had that kind of impact with one album … It’s just an amazing thing that no one’s been able to live up to.”
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