Livermore was impressed by the quality of the bands playing Gilman, and soon decided to expand Lookout’s roster with them. “At the time I thought I’d be lucky to break even and that if I was wildly successful I might be able to sell a thousand 7-inch EPs for each band,” he says. One of Lookout’s first success stories would be Operation Ivy, whose existence would only span two years and a handful of recordings, but who were a major component of the Gilman scene, an influence on many (including Green Day), and whose sole album, Energy, would eventually sell over half a million copies, largely by word-of-mouth alone.
Most of the band’s members were all veterans of the East Bay scene. Vocalist Jesse Michaels had performed with Crimpshrine, as well as drumming for a few metal bands in Pennsylvania. Guitarist “Lint” (Tim Armstrong, no relation to Billie Joe) and bassist Matt McCall (whose real surname was Freeman; “McCall” was taken from a character in the TV detective series The Equalizer) had played together in Basic Radio; Armstrong had also played bass in Crimpshrine. They brought in Dave Mello to round out the band’s lineup, and “basically taught him how to play drums,” in the words of OpIvy’s online bio. The name, taken from nuclear weapons testing operations of the Forties, had also been previously used by the band Isocracy. After a warm-up show in Mello’s garage, OpIvy made their debut at Gilman.
OpIvy’s music was a lively ska-punk mix, inspired by an early Eighties Berkeley band called The Uptones. “They were probably the first ska band in America,” says Michaels, “and they all went to Berkeley High School. One night the local movie theatre showed the film Dance Craze [a 1980 documentary about British ska bands]. It was a very memorable night. The whole theatre erupted, and people were literally dancing in the aisles. So everybody knew about ska here and most of the highschool age rock groups had at least some ska influence. So it was very natural for Tim and I, who were both into ska, to write those type of songs together, in addition to the punk songs. Since we were in an atmosphere of hardcore-type music at that time, we naturally kicked the tempo up until it had a kind of punk-rock energy. Anyway, these things happen naturally and are the result of group energy. All new forms are developed through good luck and magic.”
Livermore, a friend of Tim Armstrong’s, was overwhelmed on first seeing OpIvy and immediately suggested that the group record for his label. But before that agreement could get off the ground, OpIvy’s first recorded appearance came on a double EP compilation MaximumRockNRoll released later that year, Turn It Around. OpIvy’s contributions would be the songs ‘Officer’ and ‘I Got No’, recorded with engineer Kevin Army, who would go on to work with many other Lookout bands.
“Every punk scene has an engineer that defines its sound,” says Michaels. “In LA there was Spot [who produced many artists for the SST label], in D.C. there was Don Zientera, and there were also specific engineers in Boston, Chicago, and New York that recorded everybody’s records in the early days. This is because back then, there were fewer qualified engineers who understood punk, so there was often just one guy in town who could really get it right. Another reason is that an influx of energy in an artistic community always co-arises in all fields — in other words, if you suddenly have a bunch of remarkable musicians, you will also suddenly have a remarkable publicist, remarkable writers, remarkable managers, remarkable engineers, etc. This is the nature of group artistic phenomena. Kevin Army was the guy for Berkeley. He had a unique, trashy — in the good sense — sound that seemed to make bad bands sound good and good bands sound great.”
On learning the Mr. T Experience had already put out a record themselves, Livermore picked Portman’s brain for details. “I knew Larry from this radio show that I did at KALX, the UC Berkeley station,” Portman explains, “and he always used to call up and come visit, and I remember him asking, ‘How did you do it?’ And I said we recorded with this guy, Kevin Army, at this cheap studio, and we told him where the pressing plant was, and then he did his band, The Lookouts, in the same way, and that was what became his first record, Lookout #1. Our second record was on Rough Trade, and we were working on the third one, and Larry was trying to talk me into doing it on his new label instead of Rough Trade, and I remember thinking that there’s no way that anything this guy’s gonna do is gonna go anywhere, and Rough Trade’s a real company. Of course, Rough Trade US went out of business almost as soon as that record was released, so then we basically had to go and say, ‘Okay Larry, will you still do our record?’ And he did, but it was a little bit embarrassing.” The group’s first record on the label would be the single ‘So Long, Sucker’/‘Zero’, released in 1989, followed by the album Making Things With Light in 1990, which featured the song ‘Danny Partridge Got Busted’, about the arrest of Danny Bonaduce, one-time star of TV’s The Partridge Family, for cocaine possession.
OpIvy had finally put out their own record on Lookout in early 1988, the six-track EP Hectic, which was Lookout’s third release. (The band initially tried recording at Gilman, but couldn’t get the right sound and ended up recording at Oakland studio Dangerous Rhythm, again with Kevin Army.) “Not that many people wanted to put out our albums at the time, mainly just Lookout,” says Michaels. “There were less labels back then because at that time, punk records didn’t make much money. So it was an obvious choice to go with Lookout. I remember that Matt and Tim had some ambitions of signing with Slash which was an LA punk label that was in bed with the majors. I am really glad that didn’t happen because we would have been fucked on that sinking ship.”
1988 was also the year Yohannan’s group quit running Gilman, and a new group of organisers took over. Gilman survived the transition, and continues today. There were those who felt at that point that the club’s best days were behind them, and the glory years were over. But as Frank Portman points out, such views are too limited to encompass the sweep of what Gilman represented. “There’s two ways to go in summing up the experience of the Berkeley rock scene and Gilman,” he says. “One tack people take is where they describe it as a golden age, where milk and honey were flowing like wine, and there were gold nuggets that you picked up right off the street, and I’ve heard people do that. And then, I think more in line with how people in bands felt at the time, there’s a cynical kind of an attitude, which is I guess what I have.
“But it all boils down to there being something kind of special about San Francisco, the Bay Area, Berkeley in general,” he continues. “Irritating as it can be, because everybody’s got these crazy pretensions. They started a rock club geared towards a more interesting direction than they sometimes ended up taking, interesting in the fact that there was a little less self-censorship on the part of some of the people involved. There was a time when you could go there, and you wouldn’t know what kind of craziness you would see. A lot of it was extremely juvenile and extremely lame, but at least it was happening. And I say that as a positive thing.”
Billie Joe later credited his involvement with the music scene swirling around Gilman as having “saved me from living in a refinery town all my life.” He first ventured to Gilman with his sister Anna, and soon he and Mike (who later said “Gilman was my high school”) were regularly attending shows, and not only at Gilman. “In the late Eighties, there were a lot of shows all over the Bay Area in garages, backyards, clubs such as The Berkeley Square, and also neighbourhood community centres,” says Jesse Michaels. “I would say there was about a show a week, although not necessarily in Berkeley.” Such low-scale shows were also more likely to be all-ages and cheap (or, in the case of private parties, free), making them all the more accessible to two 15-year-olds. Billie Joe and Mike also ventured into Berkeley, checking out the wealth of record shops, bookshops, and used-clothing stores lining Telegraph Avenue, the busy shopping thoroughfare that runs south from the UC Berkeley campus, beginning across the street from Sproul Plaza (prominently featured in the 1968 film, The Graduate), where you can still find vendors hawking tie-dye T-shirts as if it were the height of the Sixties. And Billie Joe go
t his first close-up look at slam dancing when he went into San Francisco to see a show by Bloodrage and Transgressor at the club On Broadway; though trying to keep out of the way, a skinhead still managed to jump on top of him.
But Gilman would be the primary hangout for the two, and for the first two years of the club’s existence, before they began ascending the stage themselves, they received an intense introduction to the burgeoning East Bay music scene and punk culture. “Going to Gilman, and seeing how militant the politics were about racism and sexism, that was the first time I’d thought about some of that stuff,” Billie Joe later told Lawrence Livermore.
After making their debut at the club on May 17, OpIvy generally played once a month at Gilman, and the band became particular favourites of Mike and Billie Joe. Crimpshrine (whose bassist, Pete Rypins, was a special favourite of Mike’s), Mr. T Experience, Sewer Trout, Neurosis, and Corrupted Morals (whom Billie Joe would later play with) were other bands that caught their eye. And both of their future drummers were in bands that played Gilman regularly; John Kiffmeyer, Jr. from Isocracy and Tré Cool in The Lookouts.
Billie Joe and Mike were becoming even closer as a result of Mike having left his home, and eventually moving in with Billie Joe’s family. He got part-time jobs in restaurants to help pay the rent, while still finding time to make music and keep up with his school work (as Billie Joe was becoming less and less interested in his formal education). The two finally took their efforts to the next level by forming a band, Sweet Children, bringing in Kiffmeyer, a few years older than Billie Joe and Mike (and who frequently worked under the name Al Sobrante, a play on the name of his hometown, El Sobrante), on drums. They soon acquired a PA system by pilfering the equipment from a friend known to leave a side door of his house unlocked.
The band even had their own theme song, ‘Sweet Children’, which would be recorded during the summer of 1990. The song opens with a blast of guitar, then takes off at a brisk pace and ends in just over a minute-and-a-half. The lyric, which looks back in fondness at the antics of the titular children, has a curious nostalgia, given that the group’s members hadn’t left their own childhoods behind that long ago. And though there are hints of fondness for heavy metal in the guitar and bass interplay, it’s the underlying pop catchiness of the song that really captures the attention. The strong pop influence made them stand out from the more hardcore element associated with Gilman, but even so, they managed to land a gig at the club soon after they began playing public shows.
The band made their public debut at the restaurant where Billie Joe’s mother worked, Rod’s Hickory Pit, located at 199 Lincoln Rd. W. in Vallejo, just across the Carquinez Strait from Rodeo, and accessible via the Carquinez Bridge. The year of that first show has frequently been given as 1987. However, on Green Day’s fall tour in 2005, Armstrong told the audience at their October 17 show at Dayton, Ohio’s Nutter Center that the date happened to be 17 years to the day since they’d played their first show — which would make it October 17, 1988, when Billie Joe and Mike were in eleventh grade. Livermore also remembers first seeing them in the fall of 1988, “maybe November … [and] they’d only played maybe three or four shows at most before that.” Billie Joe had previously appeared at the restaurant on his own, entertaining senior citizens in the banquet room. The restaurant’s owner, Richard Cotton, later described him as a “good kid” to San Francisco magazine in 2004. The article also estimated that an audience of about 30 people saw the performance.
And that was a good five or six times the amount of people in attendance when Lawrence Livermore first saw the band, at what he describes as “a fiasco of a highschool party that Tré had organised. It was in some cabin way up in the mountains with no electricity, just a generator. And the kid whose cabin it was didn’t even bother showing up, so we had to break in. Sweet Children played by candlelight for five kids, and as I’ve said many times — because it was the thought that came into my mind at the time — they played as if they were The Beatles at Shea Stadium.”
Livermore was not only impressed by the band’s charisma and songs, but also by their willingness to make a roundtrip drive of some 300 miles on a stormy night merely to play at a house party for no money. “It was obvious that they just really loved playing music,” he says. “And in my experience, that was one of the key ingredients for a successful band. I decided then and there that I wanted to do a record with them. However, at the time, I didn’t really expect to sell a lot of records; in fact, I thought I might even lose a bit of money because I guessed that their songs might be a bit too poppy for the punk kids who were Lookout’s usual audience. But by that time I’d had enough success with the earlier records I’d put out that I figured I could afford to take a chance on these guys. Punk or not, the songs were so great that they needed to be recorded and heard.” Within six months, the band would release their first record.
On November 26, Sweet Children made their debut at Gilman, sharing the bill with Twitch, Raskul, and Altered Ego. Frank Portman believes this may well have been the first time he saw the band. “I thought they were pretty cool,” he says. “They were young kids and they were playing in the right place for being young kids. But they were not, at that time, all that exceptional. It’s not like you saw them and your head just spun around, and it was like, ‘Whoa, this changes everything!’ like some people say when they saw The Sex Pistols. Obviously, as they played more and got better, it became clear that people really liked them and that they had something. But the whole point of that scene was people just like that getting on stage and playing music like that, really. I remember thinking, ‘oh, this is another pretty cool band of young kids.’ But as they started to play more and get more popular, they became a lot of people’s favourite local band pretty quickly, because they were good; they put on a fun show, and they had catchy songs, and all the usual reasons why you like to listen to bands.”
Murray Bowles recalls Sweet Children as being, “Pretty poppy and happy, and often playing with bands that weren’t! That was cool. That made them stand out. If you were going to Gilman shows all the time, or listening to punk rock all the time, it was a large departure. It all sounded so different, but it was real easy to suddenly like it just because it was so different. Because it was good.”
In early 1989, Sweet Children entered San Francisco’s Art of Ears studio to record their debut release, co-produced with Andy Ernst, who’d previously produced another Lookout band, Corrupted Morals, and would later work with the bands AFI, The Groovie Ghoulies, and Screeching Weasel (whose logo Mike would tattoo on his right arm). “We were excited!” Mike recalled to Bass Guitar. “It was like, God, we’re going into the studio and we’re actually gonna make a record! This is like, unbelievable!” The 4-track 7-inch EP, said to have been recorded in seven hours, was eventually entitled 1,000 Hours, and released as Lookout #17 that April. The description of the record on the label’s website read, perhaps a bit defensively, “These songs are about girls and love, so if either of those subjects make you feel creepy, be warned. This is what got all the kids pogo-dancing to Green Day at the punk rock show. Too pop? So what!” Livermore also admits, “I thought that because the music was so poppy, it might have a hard time finding acceptance with the punk rockers who mostly bought Lookout releases. And it did sell slowly at first; it took six months or so before it seemed to start catching on.”
Girls and love were indeed the sole themes of 1,000 Hours, though “thwarted love” would be a more accurate description, as in three of the four songs the singer is separated from the object of his desire (or, as in ‘Only Of You’, too tongue-tied to tell her of his feelings). Billie Joe himself later dismissed the title song as being “sappy”. The music is an energetic power-pop, delivered almost breathlessly, as if Billie Joe wants to hurry through the numbers before losing his nerve in confessing his love, with Mike’s harmonies adding a further melodic edge. If a listener knew nothing about the band, they might not immediately cite punk as one of the
group’s great loves and influences. The Sixties pop of the British Invasion or the Eighties-style power-pop of groups like The Romantics would be a more likely (and not entirely inaccurate) guess.
The EP’s release coincided with the group’s decision to change their name from Sweet Children to Green Day, causing Lawrence Livermore some consternation, as the band had already built their reputation under the Sweet Children moniker. But the change made sense, for “Sweet Children” only underscored the band members’ youth, and would more likely be a name they’d quickly outgrow (one anecdote claimed an early show was actually interrupted when Billie Joe’s mother called and demanded he come home to finish his chores).There also happened to be another local band with the similar-sounding name Sweet Baby. The band’s new name was variously attributed to a reference the Muppet Ernie had made in an episode of the children’s TV show Sesame Street or a slang term for a day spent smoking marijuana, admittedly one of the group’s favourite pastimes. (In years to come, numerous articles about the group would bear the headline, “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” taken from a song sung by another Muppet on Sesame Street, Kermit the Frog.) The initial record sleeve was green, with the band’s name and the record’s title in black, and when Livermore ran out of green paper while xeroxing, he switched to pink paper; the band members themselves helped fold the sleeves.
As was typical of many independent labels, the record was pressed in a variety of colours; according to the website greendaydiscography.com, there were 600 copies on green vinyl, 200 each on purple and red, and 100 each on clear and yellow. (“It’s also on blue vinyl, but I don’t know how many were pressed,” says the website.) A second pressing had a sheet of “bilt-in leerics”, which noted that while Billie Joe was the primary lyricist, Mike had also contributed lyrics to ‘The One I Want’; the music was credited to the entire band. The jokey credits on the back cover identified the band members as “Billy [sic]: Guitar, Hat,” “Mike: Bass, Hair,” and “John: Drums, Bus.” The credits were perhaps in reference to the picture of the band on the back cover (taken by Murray Bowles) which shows Billie Joe’s bushy hair barely contained by the baseball cap he’s wearing backwards, and Mike hanging upside down by his knees from a railing, his long hair stretching to the pavement. “Thank you! We’ll play anywhere,” the “leeric” sheet said optimistically.
Green Day Page 5