The other event also took place in Minneapolis, when Green Day was offered the opportunity to record for the St. Paul-based Skene! Records label. Instead of new material, the group decided to record songs from their Sweet Children days; “We just always wanted to be recording,” Mike explained to Guitar Legends. “Since we were still playing those songs … it was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got studio time — let’s record ’em!’” Accordingly, the EP was entitled Sweet Children, thus forever confusing fans who have believed this was the first record the band actually recorded. Along with the title track, the EP included ‘Best Thing In Town’, essentially a love song; the bright ‘Strangeland’; and a cover of The Who’s ‘My Generation’, which was the most straight-forward of the bunch; the ending had the band gradually playing faster and faster, before coming to an abrupt halt. The session also marked the first time Mike switched to a Gibson bass (a Grabber G-3) after his Peavey Patriot had broken. He subsequently used that first Gibson for over 700 shows, until “I finally retired it after about the third time its neck broke.”
Though the total records pressed didn’t exceed a few thousand, the EP ultimately had four separate editions. The first was packaged in a black-and-white sleeve featuring an onstage shot of Mike’s legs. The second was packaged in a black-and-white sleeve with a picture of a beat-up Volkswagen and the cryptic caption, “What do you think Mike …” (a third edition, in a red sleeve, featured the same picture).The sleeve also noted that the record had been “reorded” [sic] “in a few hours with Mac at Mac’s hole in the ground.” The songs were later included on the CD version of the band’s second album, Kerplunk!, after which the EP was reissued in a white sleeve with a small picture of three children on a dock, one of whom has a sign reading, “Future Feminist”. The label was thoughtful enough to put a disclaimer on the cover of the latter edition: “No! This is not a new Green Day 7-inch but the same old SKENE! one that we keep having to repress and hence keep running out of covers for … the music is exactly the same, just in different packaging to keep the people who have to stuff these things into plastic sleeves from getting bored. So keep in mind, catering to collector-scum by paying big $$$ for something because it looks a wee bit different only makes you look like a sap …”
If Green Day returned from their first national tour without much in the way of monetary compensation to show for it, they at least had a sense of accomplishment, especially considering they’d done most of the work themselves. “I didn’t have much of anything to do with the tours apart from occasionally advancing them some money or some records to sell,” Livermore says. In less than two years they’d managed to put out the equivalent of two albums of material, nearly all of it original. They had a solid core of fans in the East Bay area, providing a sturdy base from which to grow, and they’d begun making inroads outside their home territory on their first national tour.
And then John Kiffmeyer decided to leave the band.
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* The region’s mass transit system
CHAPTER 3
Tour Today, Tour Tomorrow
“We were never concerned about success. We were just looking for places to play.”
— Tré to Guitar Legends #81, 2005
The reason behind John Kiffmeyer’s decision to leave Green Day was a perhaps surprising one for a punk-rock band. Instead of the ever-popular “musical differences” excuse, he’d decided to go to college at Humboldt State University in Arcata, a town some 240 miles north of Oakland. What hurt as much as his leaving was that Kiffmeyer’s band mates didn’t hear the news directly from him. As Billie Joe later told Lawrence Livermore in an interview, he’d been walking around with a few friends, including Aaron Elliott, when Kiffmeyer’s departure was mentioned in passing. “And I’m like, ‘John’s leaving? What do mean, John’s leaving?’ And Aaron looked at me and goes, ‘Oh man, he didn’t tell you, did he?’ And I’m like ‘No, he didn’t tell me. Where the fuck is he going?’ That’s how I found out. And I was hurt. It blew me away.”
In addition to their personal disappointment, Kiffmeyer’s leaving could also have easily meant the end of the band; “I didn’t even know if I wanted Green Day to go on after John quit,” Billie Joe told Livermore. Both Billie Joe and Mike had relied on Kiffmeyer’s experience, and he’d also handled much of the band’s business. And though Green Day was steadily making progress, the band was still at the stage of laying the groundwork for a future career, as opposed to furthering an already flourishing one.
Billie Joe also expressed some doubt over how committed Kiffmeyer had been to the band, pointing out that he had opportunities — such as choosing to go to college — that Billie Joe didn’t. As he told Livermore, “I didn’t want to feel like anybody’s side project.” And the “Green Day Bits” insert included with the Slappy EP further hinted at some tension between the members, noting, “Band arguments usually center around Billie Joe being irresponsible, Mike being high-strung, and John being overbearing.”
‘I Was There’, on 39/Smooth has sometimes been read as Kiffmeyer’s reflection on being in Green Day, but in fact, the lyrics take a much more general look back at one’s past — torn between wanting it to last, but ultimately choosing to look ahead toward tomorrow. Kiffmeyer evidently hoped he’d be able to juggle the responsibilities of both the band and his studies by saying he’d continue to play with Green Day when he was on break from college. Billie Joe and Mike initially agreed, but in the end it would prove to be an unworkable arrangement for a band as anxious to progress as Green Day. It also solidified their determination to keep the band going; lacking the safety nets of higher education or a fulltime job, music was now their best — their only — career option.
The two worked briefly with “Dave EC” (Dave Henwood), a drummer for the band Filth, but there was a more suitable candidate waiting in the wings. Billie Joe and Mike already knew Tré Cool from the Gilman scene (where Billie Joe’s first memory of his future drummer was seeing him walk by wearing a plaid suit and a bathing cap), and both their bands shared a record label. Billie Joe had already recorded with Tré Cool the previous July, guesting on guitar and backing vocals on what would be The Lookouts last record, the EP IV. Says Livermore, “We didn’t exactly break up, just sort of gradually drifted away. The three of us were all living in separate places and I’d gone back to college at Berkeley, so nothing was happening with us, and probably wasn’t going to until the next summer at least. Billie invited Tré to jam with them, and they started doing shows together around November. By winter, Tré was officially the new drummer and I guess that was also officially the end of The Lookouts.”
In Freudian terms, Tré would most certainly be the “id” of the group, “the source of primitive instinctive impulses and other drives,” or, in more prosaic terms, the comic relief element of the band … the one most likely to come back with a silly answer during an interview or pull some type of goofy stunt. But Tré’s essential craziness blended into the band well, and though the group’s breakthrough success was still over three years away, the core of the machine that was Green Day was now firmly in place.
Both Billie Joe and Mike were pleased with their new member. “Tré was a better drummer, and he was closer to us in age and mentality,” Mike later told Guitar Legends. There was also a more practical element: “He had a van!” Others familiar with the band also thought Tré was a good fit. “John’s a really great guy, but he used to spend half their set talking,” Frank Portman recalls. “He had a microphone, and it would really get in the way of the show, although he was a great guy and he was funny. But I just remember him making speeches, like in Isocracy, making funny speeches was their whole bag. Green Day’s shows became more traditional rock shows after switching drummers, and also by that time Tré had turned into quite a good drummer. One of the things that semi-professional bands or grassroots, do-it-yourself bands lack is a drummer that can hit the snare drum hard enough so that it actually works. Most bands, you’ll find, have we
ak drummers, or drummers that are out of control. And that was one thing that set Green Day apart; they were able to sound great because of how hard Tré hit the snare.”
Even after Tré was in the band, there was still some lingering tension with Kiffmeyer. Billie Joe remembered Kiffmeyer showing up for a gig in Petaluma Tré was supposed to play and sitting in himself, an incident that in 2001 Billie Joe admitted still made him feel “pretty awful”. He also recalled Green Day sharing a bill with one of Kiffmeyer’s subsequent bands, the Ne’er Do Wells, and watching Kiffmeyer playing his hardest. “And one thing you can not do to Tré Cool is to out drum him,” Billie Joe told Livermore. “One of the first songs we played [that night] was ‘Longview’, which is like a great drummer’s song, and from that point on, it was like, ‘Dude, you’re so over.’”
“Tré is just a much better drummer,” says Eric Yee, who ended up seeing many of Green Day’s pre-Dookie shows. “They pretty much started really kicking ass after they got Tré. As far as I’m concerned, that era right before Kerplunk! is just killer.”
Yee, who lived in San Leandro, had become interested in punk in the early Eighties after his brother brought home a Dead Kennedys record. He then began attending shows at now-closed San Francisco venues like On Broadway, Mabuhay Gardens, and The Farm, prior to Gilman’s opening. He had first heard about Gilman from Aaron Elliott. “I went to a couple of the early meetings,” he says. “I was there one time when they were building it and Tim gave me and my friend some money to go out and buy some sodas for the crew.”
When the club opened, Yee became a regular attendee. “I went to Gilman more times than I can count probably,” he says. “I went a lot. A lot. It got to a point where I just went to hang out. If I was just bored or whatever, if there was some kind of gig going on there, I’d just go and hang out. The problem with that was when I was a kid. BART closed around 12:30 am, and most shows didn’t get over until 2 or 3 am. A lot of times I had to hitch a ride back home.”
As a result of his frequent attendance, Yee saw Green Day during their Sweet Children era, but has little memory of their music. “I do remember my initial impression of them was that they all had long hair and I wasn’t into that,” he says. “I thought they were a bunch of hippies. I wasn’t with it. What changed my mind was I was hanging out with my friend Eggplant. He was meeting me at this Mexican place we always ate at, and he was with Billie Joe. So we met up and then we walked over to Gilman. That’s the first time I ever met Billie Joe. And I thought, this guy is pretty cool, so I liked them after that. I’ve always liked Billie Joe, he’s a cool guy. But I didn’t really start liking them until Tré joined the band, really. They weren’t necessarily embraced totally by everybody, because they were kind of like, cutesy, and they sang about girls. You know what I mean?” Nonetheless, he admits 39/Smooth and Slappy are both “kickass records.”
Yee estimates he might’ve seen as many as 120 Green Day shows. “They played a lot,” he says. “They used to play all the time. If they weren’t playing some gig somewhere, they’d be playing at somebody’s party, or they’d be playing Gilman. They played quite a bit in the early days. They were definitely the hardest-working band. They paid their dues, you know. It wasn’t like they just became instant stars.”
As Green Day’s reputation continued to grow, they found it easier to get shows, particularly in the now-thriving East Bay area. “In the East Bay scene at that time there were a lot of gigs going on all over the place,” says Yee. “There were a lot of parties. Those were some of the best Green Day shows. [A view shared by Murray Bowles, who says, “The shows that Green Day did that stand out for me are when they played parties in people’s backyards.”] I remember one party I went to, they played in West Oakland at some house. It was somebody’s birthday. And me and Eggplant were literally the only people that watched them. It was pretty funny. There was just nobody at that party, it was like a Sunday afternoon. Punk time, people don’t get up until 3 or 4 pm or something. They played really early on, and there was just nobody there at this party. They still gave it their all, even to just me and Eggplant. Another time, this friend of mine, Kevin, it was his birthday, so we were sitting around with Jesse Townley [who was also in Blatz]. We were like, ‘Damn, what should we do? Let’s get Green Day to play Gilman.’ And they actually played! Jesse at the time was running Gilman, so he opened up the club and they came.
“Another thing that sticks in my mind, some friends of mine, Eggplant and an ex-girlfriend of mine set up this surprise birthday party for me, and Green Day and Blatz played it,” Yee continues. “It was in Eggplant’s backyard. They played a lot of funny shows at Eggplant’s; Eggplant has had many spectacular parties, legendary, in his backyard. He had this weird hot-tub room, his dad and his stepmom. They played there, next to the hot tub. This really teeny room. It was raining like crazy. I remember the people in Blatz were getting electrocuted, so they didn’t like that. That was a very memorable show for me. That was my twenty-first birthday. And I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate than having your two favourite bands play your birthday party. How many people can say their two favourite bands played their birthday party? Not many. I was stoked.”
Having fully integrated Tré into the group, the band was now anxious to show off their new drummer on record. Livermore had been urging them to get back into the studio, but they didn’t make it until May of 1991, again recording at San Francisco’s Art of Ears studio with producer Andy Ernst. But the sessions quickly came to a halt when they finished recording the only six new songs they had; they returned to the studio in September and finally completed the album, Kerplunk!, for the princely sum of $2,000.
“That was sort of the secret of Lookout’s success,” says Frank Portman. “Larry risked nothing in putting these records out, and then when some of them became popular, it was just like an individual winning the lottery. Especially in the context of the kind of albums that people were putting out at the time — which was pretty much just you do an extremely thrown-together, low-budget version of whatever you happen to have lying around — Green Day’s records were much better thought-out and more together and more cohesive than practically anything. It was impressive. And they had some pretty great pop songs too, so it’s hard to complain about that. Green Day’s records were, as albums, better than a lot of what other people were trying to pass off as albums, that’s definitely true.”
Though Mike later said the band had smoked “a ton of weed” during the sessions (“Note to self: Keep the bong out of the mixing room!”), Kerplunk! was by no means a record to bliss out to. It’s also the first album that has a recognisable Green Day sound; if 39/Smooth was an album that depicted a group finding their feet, Kerplunk! captures a band that’s finding its own distinctive voice. This was apparent from the album’s opening track, ‘2000 Light Years Away’, a typically aggressive pop blast said to be about Billie Joe’s feelings for Adrienne; though still living in Minnesota, she and Billie Joe had kept in touch. Livermore first heard the album on his way home from Los Angeles, where he’d taken it to be mastered. As his plane raced down the runway, he slipped a cassette copy into his Walkman, and as ‘2000 Light Years Away’ began, with a vibrant cymbal crash before the guitars kick in, “it was so good it was almost scary,” he later wrote. “I knew instantly that life was never going to be the same again for Lookout Records or Green Day.”
Even stronger was ‘Welcome To Paradise’, a tongue-in-cheek look at the thrill — and fear — of cutting parental ties for a home of one’s own, even as the narrator admits his new environment is a “wasteland”, replete with broken sidewalks and gunfire, inspired by the West Oakland warehouse where Billie Joe and Mike lived. (“No place you want to walk around at night,” said Billie Joe.) Most exciting was the instrumental break, which featured a descending riff that built in intensity each time it repeated, cracking with all the force of a tightly controlled whip.
Though Kerplunk! had its quotient of poppy love songs, t
he more interesting material displayed a newfound introspection. Songs like ‘One Of My Lies’, ‘Android’, and ‘No One Knows’ all touched on growing old, mortality, and a fear of life passing one by. ‘No One Knows’ is even uncharacteristically slow, highlighting the pervasive melancholy of the lyrics; it also made Billie Joe and Mike’s harmonising on the chorus stand out that much more. ‘Christie Road’ is another downbeat trip home, the road in question lying a few miles outside Rodeo, next to the railroad tracks. The upbeat tempos returned on ‘Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?’, which references the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s classic book of adolescent alienation, The Catcher In The Rye. As in ‘Longview’, the main character wrestles with the paralysing combination of having dissatisfaction with his circumstances, but lacking the wherewithal to change them — except that ‘Holden Caulfield’ is sung from the perspective of the observer, while ‘Longview’ is delivered in first person. Screeching Weasel later recorded an answer song, ‘I Wrote Holden Caulfield’, for their 1993 album How To Make Enemies And Irritate People, on which Mike also played. Even Tré had a moment in the spotlight, on his own ‘Dominated Love Slave’, a ditty in praise of sadomasochism made all the more subversive by casting it as a country-and-western romp. The music was impressive given Mike’s later statement that songs like ‘Welcome To Paradise’, ‘80’, ‘No One Knows’, and ‘One Of My Lies’ had all come together in a week.
The cover served up a better reflection of the band’s aesthetic than 39/Smooth had, mixing adolescent jokiness with a darker undercurrent; a cartoon drawing of a young woman, winking and wearing a T-shirt with a smiley-faced flower that would be innocuous were it not for the fact that she’s also holding a smoking revolver in her right hand, making her wink that much more sinister. (On the back cover is a young man lying face down, having been shot in the back.) The subversive tone continued in the liner notes, headed “My Adventure With Green Day,” written by “Laurie L.” (a play on Lawrence Livermore’s name), in which a Pinole Valley High teen murders her parents in order to go on tour with the band, a mock celebration of violence that dated back to The Rolling Stones No. 2 album, whose liner notes (written by the band’s manager Andrew Loog Oldham), merely advocated robbing a blind man to get money to purchase the album, “And if you put the boot in, good. Another one sold.” Kiffmeyer also received a nod, with ‘Al Sobrante’ credited as “executive producer.” The album’s “Thanks” section name checked, among others, the band members’ parents, Adrienne Nesser, Murray Bowles, the Fiatarones (spelled “Fiataroni”), Gilman, cities and towns where the band played, The Village People, both John Kiffmeyer and Al Sobrante, and, in a final statement of inclusiveness, “everyone who goes to the shows, and you.” The album was dedicated to, Gravy, Mike’s late cat.
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