Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  Sweet Children played their last show under that name on April Fool’s Day at Gilman. The next time they played at Gilman, as Green Day, was May 28, the first — and last — time they would open for OpIvy. The members of Green Day had seen OpIvy on a number of occasions by then, and OpIvy was familiar with the band formerly known as Sweet Children. “They used to practise at Gilman Street, I think,” says Jesse Michaels, “or maybe they were recording a demo there. Anyway, I saw them playing there on off-hours for some reason. I thought they were a very good pop/college rock band in the spirit of Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum. They didn’t strike me as being a punk band, but I was really into pop at that time and I thought they were really good; I told them, ‘You guys are fucking great.’ We always got along very well, and still do, although they are out in the stratosphere somewhere these days.

  “What has always made them stand out is their musicianship and their superb melodies,” Michaels continues. “Billie Joe is an unbelievably solid guitar player. A lot of kids think he is not all that great simply because he avoids solos and plays relatively simple parts. They don’t know what they are talking about. He’s a machine. He can also play all sorts of flash shit, but he has good taste so he doesn’t. He’s the salt of the earth. Everybody loves Billie because he is real, and charming, and an all-around nice person. He is troubled at times like every artist, but he never lets it interfere with how he treats the people around him. He loves to have a good time and his sense of humour has never diminished in the slightest.” Michaels has equally fond memories of Mike, whom he calls a “very good spirited, nice guy, always had a joke, always clowning around. I mean always! Sometimes he drove people crazy. But later, after all the shit they went through, he became a more serious fellow. I think he has really come into himself as a person and is a very good-hearted guy. He knows how to deal with all the shit they deal with and he also knows how to protect his own personal identity. A good bloke.”

  The May 28 show was especially eventful, as it was the record-release party for OpIvy’s album Energy. But it was also one of the band’s final shows. “I quit the band because at that time we absolutely could not get along and I was living a miserable life of anger and frustration,” says Michaels. “No band is worth waking up pissed off every day. Now I have a healthy relationship with all the members of the old group and I am very glad that I made a decision and moved on with my life before things got really out of hand.” The club was packed for the show, which also featured Surrogate Brains, Crimpshrine, and The Lookouts on the bill. Livermore told writer Gina Arnold the show “was like a punk Woodstock — and I was at the real Woodstock, so I should know.” Though it’s been reported that the Gilman date was the band’s last show, Michaels says the real last show was the next day, at a party at the house of a friend known as Eggplant (who also put out the ’zine Absolute Zippo, that Billie Joe would later contribute to). “It was a much better show than the Gilman show which was terrifically overcrowded and fucked up,” he says. “The Gilman show was good too, but just too hot. The backyard party that followed was much more in the true underground spirit of the band.” The later CD release of Energy would also feature the tracks from the band’s Hectic EP, as well as the tracks that had appeared on Turn It Around. Each band member went on to play in other groups, Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman most notably in Rancid.

  OpIvy had been something of a house band for Gilman; now that they had vacated the stage, it was Green Day’s turn to rise to prominence. Livermore remembers realising the band’s potential while watching a show at Gilman “with no more than 100 kids or so, maybe in 1989,” he says. “Somebody brought some dry ice to the show and laid it at the band’s feet as they played. Then someone put a milk crate onstage and Mike stood on top of it while another kid shone a flashlight up toward his face as if it were a spotlight. They were playing, of course, the song ‘Dry Ice’ [from 1,000 Hours] and though it was meant to be a pisstake on the usual arena-rock format, I suddenly thought, ‘You know, these guys could be rock stars for real.’”

  The group sought out gigs wherever they could find them. On July 15, they made a 50-mile trek to Davis to play a “benefit” show the band Necromancy was holding to raise money to record their album (though the gig was advertised as being free). The show, which also featured the band Phallucy, was held in the city’s public Community Park, and the posters conspicuously warned, “NO DRUGS, NO ALCOHOL, NO RACISM, NO VIOLENCE.” The number of those in attendance wasn’t a huge concern; if a show drew only a few people — as frequently happened, since the band members were under 21 and thus couldn’t play the more lucrative bar circuit — the band could still have fun hanging out with their friends. And if they couldn’t drink legally, they nonetheless had little difficulty getting their hands on alcohol. On first meeting them, Ben Weasel, lead singer and guitarist of Screeching Weasel, who also recorded for Lookout, initially wrote off Billie Joe and Mike as “idiots” due to their constant indulgence in alcohol and pot. And at an early show in the small town of Garberville, the band members’ drunkenness was such that they had difficulty holding on to their instruments — though the show was still considered a success (Billie Joe’s fondness for pot had also led to him being nicknamed “Two Dollar Bill” — the price he charged for joints).

  But at this stage, Green Day gigs weren’t enough to keep the group fully occupied. Billie occasionally could be found playing with Corrupted Morals and Blatz, and Mike joined Crummy Musicians as a vocalist. Mike also moved out of the Armstrong house and lived in a warehouse in Oakland at the corner of 7th Street and Peralta Street, a dreary, industrial area, not far from the West Oakland BART* station and adjacent to the large Union Pacific Railroad yard. Billie Joe eventually moved in with Mike, and the environment provided the inspiration for the high-spirited, coming-of-age letter home, ‘Welcome To Paradise’.

  At the end of December, Green Day entered Art of Ears to start recording their debut album, again co-producing with Andy Ernst. The album was a typical quick-and-dirty indie recording, spread over five days (22 hours, according to the album’s liner notes), commencing December 29 at 4:30 pm and ending on January 2 at midnight. Recording was mostly live, with a few overdubs; Billie Joe and Mike often recorded their vocals simultaneously, in the interest of saving time. Estimates for the total cost ranged between $600 and $700.

  The 10 tracks that made up the album were both tighter and bristled with more confidence than the tracks on 1,000 Hours, showing how much the band had progressed in a few months. “When the first record came out I thought, ‘Pretty good, cute,’” says Jesse Michaels. “When the second one came out I thought, ‘I wish I was in this band.’” The primary topic was again unrequited love, most obviously seen in a title like ‘Don’t Leave Me’, and yearning for an unobtainable object of desire was also the focus of songs like ‘At The Library’, ‘Disappearing Boy , and ‘The Judge’s Daughter’. Yet some other ideas were also poking up through the crunchy guitar riffing. Both ‘I Was There’ (with lyrics by Kiffmeyer) and ‘16’ take a bittersweet look back at one’s youth — again, perhaps surprising statements from a group that could reasonably still be considered “youths” themselves. And ‘Road To Acceptance’ has the perennial outcast expressing regret about his outsider status. (Billie Joe later said the song’s theme was inspired by racism.) And then there’s the band’s new “theme song”, ‘Green Day’, which Billie Joe identified as being “about staring up at the ceiling thinking of a girl, being stoned.”

  Aside from the slower tempo’d ‘Rest’, the album’s pace was upbeat; as Lookout’s description of the album offered, “Green Day explodes onto the scene with a bright-as-hell burst of pop inspiration. This shit will blow your head off, and your headless corpse will dance nonetheless.” Yet the cover, designed by Michaels, struck a curiously solemn note, featuring a soft-focus black-and-white shot of a young woman walking through a graveyard. The back cover had three live shots of the band taken by Murray Bowles at Gilman, and cartoo
n-style drawings by Michaels of monster faces, safety pins, keys, and a box of matches with “Club 924” on its cover, along with a martini glass — an ironic tweak at Gilman’s no alcohol policy. The lyric sheet featured what purported to be a letter from I.R.S. Records expressing interest in the group (“We think you’re the hottest group out of the bay area since the Dead Kennedy’s! [sic]”), along with two replies, a polite one from Kiffmeyer (“Lawrence Livermore and Lookout Records have treated us very well and even though we are not bound to them legaly [sic] they’re our friends and that is pretty important to us”) and a more contentious one from Livermore (“You wish you could get somebody as hot as Green Day for your cheesy washed-up label”). But the I.R.S. letter had been fabricated after Kiffmeyer found some of the company’s stationery in a dumpster. “About two years later I.R.S. got wind of it and sent threatening letters,” says Livermore. “But it was all settled by an apology on our part.” When later packaged as a CD, the album also included songs from the 1,000 Hours and Slappy EPs, along with the track ‘I Want To Be Alone’, which had appeared on the 1990 Flipside magazine compilation The Big One; it was duly renamed 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours. The I.R.S. letter and responses were not reproduced in the artwork.

  39/Smooth was released in February 1990, the same month that Billie Joe decided to drop out of high school, a week before the album’s release, and two days before his eighteenth birthday. He’d been attending Pinole Valley High where his attendance had been so infrequent, when he went round to his teachers to have them sign his drop-out papers, they didn’t know who he was. Music was now his sole focus in life. Mike — determined to graduate — stuck it out and eventually received his high school diploma. (Tré also dropped out of high school during his sophomore year but later received his GED.)

  Flush with the excitement of releasing their debut album, Green Day headed back into Art of Ears on April 20 and recorded another batch of tracks for their next record, the EP Slappy, which came out soon after. On the record they paid homage to OpIvy by covering ‘Knowledge’, the opening track on the band’s Energy album, but where the original had raced along before coming to a halt at 1:42, Green Day’s version loped at a relaxed pace, clocking in at 2:20. The EP also included ‘Why Do You Want Him?’, ostensibly directed toward Billie Joe’s mother in response to her marrying his much-disliked step-father, but written broadly enough that anyone could relate to the sentiment. ‘Paper Lanterns’ is another lament to lost love, while ‘409 In Your Coffeemaker’ finds the narrator contemplating another failed relationship while in a self-confessed daze, perhaps as the result of a “green day.” (Billie Joe later said the song was “about how much I hate school.”) As usual, the more melancholy sentiments are undercut by the bright, even chipper, musical backing.

  In addition to being pressed on the usual assortment of coloured vinyl, the EP was packaged in a sleeve featuring a close-up head shot of a bulldog named Mickey, but who, according to the liner notes written by Aaron Elliott (aka Aaron Cometbus, creator of the Cometbus ’zine and a musician himself), had been nicknamed “Slappy” by a friend (Jason Relva, drummer in the band Pennywise). The liner notes, entitled “Green Day Bits”, also featured such items of trivia as, “People used to mistake Mike for Axl Rose” and “John has been known to do a naked rain dance when he’s drunk too much cheap beer,” as well as name-checking various friends and associates.

  On May 5, Green Day played Gilman on a bill with Starvation Army, Public Humiliation, Voo Doo Glow Skulls, and Los Angeles band L7, making their first appearance at the venue. L7 was one of a new breed of all-female hard rock/alternative bands (that also included such groups as Babes In Toyland, from Minneapolis; Seven Year Bitch, from Seattle; and The Lunachicks, from New York City), and had previously played in Berkeley. “L7 were no strangers to the Bay Area,” says Jennifer Finch, the group’s bassist. “The challenge about being in L7 was that LA really didn’t have a scene that supported what L7 was doing, so there was a lot of motivation to get out, first to the Bay Area, and then elsewhere. I was always sort of the punk rocker of L7, and I was always really familiar with the DIY scene that was coming out of Oakland and Berkeley through MaximumRockNRoll and through what was happening at Gilman.”

  But Finch has few specific memories of that first show with Green Day. “Musically, I didn’t really enjoy three-piece bands,” she says. “I grew up with very aggressive, experimental music, and it really wasn’t what they were doing at the time. Now, I love it. I think they developed more, and of course I have. At the time, I just thought of them doing a middle-class kind of punk/pop music, doing it in a more sophisticated way — which now, as an adult, I realise was just good songwriting.” Four years later, the two bands would be sharing a much bigger stage together, when both were on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour.

  Five days after the Gilman show, the band played an outdoor show at Pinole Valley High School. The occasion was Foreign Foods Day, a daylong event at which school clubs sold their versions of foreign foods and local bands played. A video of the event shows Green Day playing on a walkway in front of one of the school’s buildings as disinterested students walk behind them. Though the day is sunny, Billie Joe wears a light jacket over his white T-shirt for much of the two-set show, his blonde hair stuffed under a backwards-turned baseball cap; Mike has on a long-sleeved reddish shirt. Despite the scattered applause (“Hey, come up,” Billie Joe urges the audience at one point, Mike adding, “Pretend it’s Gilman!”), the performance is enthusiastic. Mike duck-walks, Chuck Berry-style, during the opening number, ‘Going To Pasalacqua’, and Billie Joe falls on his back, legs akimbo, at the end of ‘At The Library’ (which they ended up playing twice during the show). ‘The Judge’s Daughter’ was introduced as being “about a chick from this school.” Similarly, ‘Don’t Leave Me’ was introduced as being “about a girl who dumped me in the seventh grade,” prompting an, “Oh, poor baby!” from the audience. As if wishing to drive the bad memory out of his system, Billie Joe leaps into the air at the song’s beginning, and Mike indulges in a furious bit of duck-walking.

  The following month the group went on their first US tour, having booked the 45 dates themselves. The contract the band sent out to the venues that had booked them was both deferential in its requests (“We are asking for $100, more if you can spare it. This is not a guarantee, we are only asking”) and careful to prioritise (“More important than money is food and a place to stay. We have one vegetarian and four guys who will eat just about anything”), as well as pointing out, “We are not a straightedge band, so don’t be afraid to offer us a beer.” Still, underlying the surface politeness was the more pointed observation, “You do not have to give us any of these things, of course we don’t have to tune before we play either.”

  The tour, which began on June 19, took the group up the west coast to Canada, back into the US, and across the country to the east coast, down into Florida, up through the Midwest, and finally back to California. Aaron Elliott went on the tour serving as a roadie and wrote a humourous account of the trip in Cometbus #25, with dots on a map of the US indicating where specific events had taken place, such as a visit to the Olympia Beer brewery in Tumwater, Washington (“Free samples! Yum!”), a failed attempt to stop at the corner of 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue in New York City (then a notorious pick up spot for male hustlers, immortalised in The Ramones song ‘53rd and 3rd’), and a stop at the hotel in Washington, D.C. where the so-called “Plumbers” waited prior to burglarising the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel across the street. There were also occasional notes on the shows (“Played with skinhead Jimi Hendrix cover band. Not much fun”) and informational tidbits like Billie Joe needing medical attention “for really bad poison ivy” and Mike breaking his bass in half (after it fell when his guitar strap broke).

  The shows were not always well attended, but the experience was invaluable for a band trying to gain further exposure. With Lookout having little money available for
promotion, word about the band’s record was largely spread through the few reviews it received in alternative ’zines. The band quickly learned that self-reliance was the key to surviving life on the road. At their first stop in Arcata, California, they arrived to find that a venue hadn’t been secured for them to play at; they wound up performing in someone’s living room. They boosted their meager income by buying cheap T-shirts at local stores, screen-printing their logo on them in someone’s backyard, and then selling them at shows, charging a reduced fee for fans who brought their own shirts. They also adopted a flexible approach to shows that would serve them well over the years; “The day of our first tour we threw away our set lists and said, ‘Let’s not use them ever again,’” said Mike.

  Two other notable events also occurred on the tour. After a show in Minnesota, Billie Joe struck up a conversation with a young woman named Adrienne Nesser, then a manager at a Pier 1 Imports outlet in Mankato. “I was one of only ten people at a Green Day gig and me and Billie ended up hitting it off,” she later wrote for a fan website. Nesser eventually moved to California and became Billie Joe’s wife.