Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  By now, there were plenty of North American punk acts to discover as well, such as Vancouver, B.C.’s DOA; TSOL, from Long Beach in Southern California; and, closer to home, San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys. (Jello Biafra, the outspoken lead singer of The Dead Kennedys had made a memorable bid for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, coming in a surprising fourth.)

  So, though both Billie Joe and Mike initially worked hard at perfecting their heavy-metal riffing, they also maintained an active interest in punk and later indie/alternative acts. Billie Joe later credited his sister Anna’s interest in “more artsy stuff,” as helping to develop his own musical tastes. “That became the biggest influence to me, that bridged that gap from heavy metal to punk,” he explained. One group he discovered through his sister was The Replacements, after she brought home the group’s debut album, Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash. (The Replacements were also one of the first bands Billie Joe saw in concert.) Hüsker Dü also made an impression, and Billie Joe cited their last album Warehouse: Songs And Stories as a favourite in Kerrang! “For early Green Day, Hüsker Dü is the band we really tried to model ourselves after,” he said. Mike also developed broad tastes in music, telling an interviewer in 2001, “I listen to everything from Iggy Pop to Blondie to Etta James.”

  Originally, metal and punk had been practically warring camps, but as the Eighties progressed, younger, less doctrinaire fans readily conceded there were elements of the music that they liked in both genres. As Nirvana’s bassist Krist Novoselic put it in his memoir, Of Grunge And Government, “I’d hear punks refuting the old guard — they cast Seventies rock bands away as though they were false prophets. Even though I was a believer in punk, how could I reject the music that gave me so much joy? Where would the world be without Black Sabbath?” Other musical influences Billie Joe and Mike have cited over the years have ranged from Sixties British Invasion groups like The Beatles, The Who, and The Kinks to Seventies-era Queen and the soundtracks of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Jesus Christ Superstar. (Billie Joe would later have the logo from the Jesus Christ Superstar album tattooed on his right arm.) In short, music fully consumed the two, and when they weren’t practising, they were listening to records or making mix tapes. By eighth grade, before moving on to high school, they decided to get even more serious. They played only original material, meaning that their early shows — when bands most frequently play covers in order to fill out their set — instead featured only their own songs. At first, Billie Joe had fallen into the common trap of simply rewriting songs he’d already heard, but he quickly began finding his own voice. Soon, the two had come up with their first song, the prophetically titled ‘Best Thing In Town’, which they would finally record in 1990.

  In the fall of 1986 Billie Joe entered John Swett High School in nearby Crockett, where enrollment averages around 650 students a year. “Crockett is really the only small town in the Bay Area,” says Goar. “It’s one of those everybody-knows-everybody type of places. A very old town, a lot of old families. There’s a small town feel to the place which you never find anywhere else in the Bay Area, because all the cities are so big.”

  “Both Crockett and Rodeo are close-knit communities,” agrees Ken Leslie, who was Billie Joe’s band teacher at Swett. “Especially Crockett. It’s smaller and sometimes seems to be right out of the Fifties. The old families of the area include large Italian and Portuguese families. Some families have had up to four generations graduate from the school — the first graduating class was in 1927. The school population was fairly diverse, both ethnically and economically, in the Eighties, and even more so now. The atmosphere has always been pretty good. The school has been a large part of the lives of many people in these towns.”

  The school itself was “an old three-story brick building,” says Goar. “The gym was just a little cracker box. Student enrollment was small for a high school. It was in the single A league in student athletics, and we’d have to travel long distances to find another school that was also a single A league school. I did some coaching, and there were a lot of long bus trips, because every other high school in the Bay Area was larger and we really didn’t want to compete with them; we wanted to play against a school that was somewhere near our own size.”

  Steve Peters, a friend of Billie Joe’s older brother David, is today John Swett’s principal, and remembers Billie Joe’s days at Swett. “The girls adored his blonde curly hair,” he says, “and he was actually a very good athlete, in both baseball and football. But he was always interested in music.” Goar even remembers Billie Joe being on the junior varsity football team in ninth grade; “For some reason I think that he was number six, but I really don’t know where that information is coming from.”

  Two of Billie Joe’s sisters had been involved in the school’s band program, and Billie Joe initially followed in their steps by signing up for Beginning Band, as a drummer. Leslie remembers Billie Joe’s sister Holly in particular as “quite a good clarinet player,” but Billie Joe was less enthusiastic, despite Leslie’s insistence that “the band at John Swett had always had a really good reputation of being the organisation to be in. There was no such thing as a band nerd at our school!”

  “He was a nice enough kid,” Leslie recalls, “but he was one of those kids that never really showed up much. I don’t know if he was bored with it, because the kid’s obviously a very talented musician, and what we were doing might’ve just bored him out of his skull. Because you’ve got a class of 15 or 20 beginning musicians, and especially at the beginning part of the year, you’ve got to go really slow; ‘Three Blind Mice’ in the Beginning Band class with the clarinets and the trumpets and one trombone player probably wasn’t really exciting to him.”

  Billie Joe admitted as much himself in later years. “I probably could have done the work if I applied myself,” he told Lawrence Livermore in recalling his school days, “but I just was not interested at all.” And he told journalist Alec Foege, “I fucking spent the worst years of my life in high school. It held me back from doing what I wanted to do.” Mike was also unhappy at his schools. “We went to school in the suburbs,” he told Alter/Native. “It was really shitty … Then I went to a school that was somewhat more alternative. But there were still a lot of shitheads and everything.” He also felt constricted by his immediate environment, coupled with a strong desire to rise above it. “In the Bay Area a lot of people do a lot of speed and a lot of drugs,” he said in the same interview. “And they just sit around and they’d rather work shitty nine-to-five jobs and waste out. Instead of actually getting out there and doing what they would rather be doing. Their only limitation is that they’re in this suburban subculture.” Even as teenagers, for Mike and Billie Joe, music was something they were already firmly dedicated to and determined to stick with, regardless of their chances of success. “People always ask, ‘What would you be doing if you weren’t playing music right now?’” Mike said in 2001. “Well, we’d probably be playing music right now. We all recognised that this is definitely what we do best and that this is what we want to do.”

  Nonetheless, even in an environment Billie Joe described as “the most unscenic place on the planet,” he managed to find material for future songs. ‘Tight Wad Hill’, for example, later recorded for Insomniac, describes the hillside that overlooks the high school playing field, where those who didn’t want to pay to see sporting events could watch for free. It was also a hangout for drug users, “tweakers … crank victims and stuff,” fuelled on the locally made methamphetamine.

  Billie Joe also ended up in Goar’s pre-algebra math class. “It probably wasn’t one of his favourite classes,” says Goar. “Homework completion was an issue. But he knew where he was going already. I mean, most kids his age are into music or athletics, one of those long-shot type of professions. But I don’t think they were as sure about it as Billie Joe probably was. He probably had it in his mind that’s what he was going to do, and if you know you’re going to be a professional musician,
what’s pre-algebra?”

  Nonetheless, “He and I got along pretty well,” Goar says. “I treated him with dignity and respect; I didn’t judge him based on his grades or his attendance or anything like that. I kind of do that with students, I think that it’s important. He and I liked each other. Not too many kids do I remember from that many years ago. But I do remember Billie Joe. He wasn’t goofy. He wasn’t a mean guy. He got along with people. It’s hard to imagine a 13-year-old version of him, but he had a lot of charisma. I think that’s what has made him as big as he is, just the way he can command a crowd. That was evident back then.”

  Goar also says he remembers Billie Joe’s band, then called Sweet Children, performing at the school talent show in the spring of 1987. “It was a competition and his band took second place,” Goar says. “The group that beat him was a group of cheerleader girls doing kind of a dance routine. Billie Joe was incredibly upset by that. Didn’t think it was fair, thought it was rigged. He felt so deeply about it. He takes a lot of pride in what he does, and to be beat by a bunch of cheerleader dancers wasn’t what he liked.” If Goar’s memory is correct, this would pre-date what’s generally been accepted as Sweet Children’s first show, in the fall of 1988 at Rod’s Hickory Pit.

  Billie Joe later invited Goar to see another show. “It was a gig way up a couple of counties north, at somebody’s house,” he says. “It was a free show type of thing. It would have been a strange thing for me to go to, I wouldn’t have known anybody there. It was 50 miles away and my wife was pregnant with our first child at the time, so I didn’t go. I kick myself today for that.”

  Both Leslie and Goar had noticed Billie Joe’s increasing number of absences, which usually resulted in a visit to the office of the vice principal, Jack Turner. “If you were a bad kid, Jack Turner was someone you’d have to deal with,” says Goar. “He was in charge of discipline at the school. And I suspect that Billie Joe missed school quite often. I bet his attendance wasn’t as good as it needed to be. He would be gone for long blocks of time.” He’d already stopped coming to band class completely. “I was disappointed,” says Leslie, “but it was just one of those things — well, it’s not his bag, so, okay fine, go on to the next kid. Though I remembered his sisters and thought, ‘They were nice girls, too bad their brother didn’t stick with it.’”

  Billie Joe ultimately transferred to Pinole Valley High (where Mike was also a student) during his sophomore year, possibly due to recurring attendance problems, and later dropped out of school for good. “I knew he was having problems in other classes and so on,” says Leslie. “Then I heard that he had left our school. And when I heard he dropped out of school, I was like, ‘Geez, that’s too bad. What’s gonna happen to him?’ Then, boom, here he is, world famous!”

  Green Day’s breakthrough success in 1994 was as much a surprise to Leslie as it was to many, though from a different perspective. “I was really humbled, to be honest with you,” he says. “Here I had been a music educator, and I never saw that in him. It’s like, ‘Holy smokes, I blew that call.’ Knowing how hard it is to make it in professional music, it’s heartwarming that he did it because I knew him. But it’s also a little embarrassing to me because I didn’t realise what there was there. I didn’t see it. I don’t know what that says about me, but that’s a plain fact.”

  Goar didn’t immediately link Green Day with his former student until he saw Billie Joe’s name, and, “Finally the connection hit. I saw the name Billie Joe Armstrong, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I know that name!’” Goar had by then moved to Washington state and tried contacting Billie Joe, mailing him Christmas cards. “They probably never made it to him,” he admits. “He’s got to be a person that hundreds and thousands of people want to see, they all want a piece of him.” But he now sees Green Day’s shows when they play the Pacific Northwest, first seeing them in October 1995 at the Seattle Center Arena. In a story for greenday.net, the official fan website, he wrote of the show, “Someone threw a shoe at Billie Joe and he got pissed off and cut the set short. I liked the Nimrod tour a lot more. My wife and I saw Green Day play a small club (DV8) on December 2, 1997 and the show kicked ass. Green Day just wasn’t made to play arena shows.” And one of his favourite songs is ‘Stuart And The Ave.’, from Insomniac, “because it talks about the neighbourhood where I was when I was in college” — that is, Berkeley.

  Goar’s youngest daughter is a Green Day fan, and Goar uses his one-time association with Billie Joe to reach out to his students. “Music is a passion of mine,” he says. “I’ve seen more than 450 concerts in my day. There’s a lot of music posters up in my room. I’ve got a couple of Green Day posters. It helps to be able to tell the kids that I taught Billie Joe. That’s always a way to kind of get in with them, make a connection. Especially with your hard-core Green Day fans. Which there are a lot of.”

  And at the end of his piece for greenday.net, Goar writes, “Hey, Billie Joe — I bet none of your other teachers have asked for a backstage pass. Next time you come to Seattle — what do you say? I’d like to party with a rock star — and a former student!”

  Leslie now teaches journalism at John Swett and students don’t hesitate to ask him about his most-famous pupil. His son is also a Green Day fan. “He just loves them,” says Leslie. “He’s got all their CDs, and so I’ve heard some of the stuff, and the lyrics are quite good. I’m not into that style of music, but when you just take the lyrics as a form of poetry or something, it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!’

  “Everybody would tell Billie Joe, ‘Geez, you know, if you don’t come to school you’re not going to amount to anything.’ He sure proved a lot of people wrong,” Leslie concludes. “You got to hand it to the kid. He did it all on his own, he’s a self-made guy. Everybody should be proud of him for that. It’s really a success story. And if anybody were to ask me who he could credit with his success, I’d say himself.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Gilman Days

  “Thanks for booking Green Day. This is Green Day’s first tour and we hope it will be fun.”

  — Green Day’s first touring contract

  Less than 15 miles from the halls of John Swett High School, a new venture in Berkeley was coming together that would prove to be remarkably influential in Billie Joe and Mike’s musical development: the Gilman Street Project, or as the club is more commonly know, Gilman. The club was well situated to fill a growing need on the part of musicians and music fans in the East Bay, who had been hungering for a different kind of rock venue. For though a college town like Berkeley — home to the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) — had its share of upstart bands, clubs that regularly catered to new music (and not an endless string of cover bands) were few and far between. Nor were San Francisco clubs necessarily welcoming to groups from what was derisively referred to by the city’s residents as “East Berlin”, due to the East Bay’s perceived drabness.

  As a result, young bands constantly on the lookout for places to perform would often find themselves in non-traditional music venues, ranging from abandoned warehouses to art galleries and even pizza joints. “There was this one pizza place where we used to put on shows, Own’s Pizza in Berkeley,” remembers Frank Portman, better known as “Dr. Frank”, guitarist and primary songwriter of the Berkeley-based Mr. T Experience. “That was the kernel of what the Gilman St. thing grew out of. Among the core of the people that would put on shows there, that was the beginning of the idea of, well, we do these shows here, we have to find a venue, a club. Every town has people like that; ‘All we need to do is buy this old theatre and then we can run a rock club and book only good bands, it’ll be great!’ And because of the organisational skills of Tim Yohannan, it actually ended up happening, which I think is kind of unusual. And it’s still there.”

  Yohannan was the founder/editor of the in-your-face punk magazine MaximumRockNRoll, and as he explained in a 1996 interview published in the book 924 Gilman, he had been trying to get an all-ages v
enue started for some time. “Sometime during 1985, I decided to get serious about putting a club together and started looking for a location,” he said. “Then I ran into this lunatic named Victor Hayden, who had a similar idea as well … he was the one who actually found the space at 924 Gilman. I was hesitant, but everyone who looked at it thought it was great, and said, ‘We gotta do it.’”

  The space, at the corner of 8th St. and Gilman St. — in the back of a building that was also home to The Caning Shop, a caning-and-wicker store — was less than three miles from the more quaint and scenic downtown Berkeley area, and at that time was a largely industrial area. (These days, the district is listed as the “Gilman St. Shopping Area” on visitor’s maps, and is home to businesses like REI, Walgreen’s, and the Pyramid Alehouse.) A lease was secured in April 1986, and the rest of the year was spent refurbishing the space; a picture of the construction of one of the club’s bathrooms later graced the cover of issue “38½” of the local ’zine Cometbus that celebrated Gilman’s ten year anniversary.