The initial sessions for the album came to a halt not only because the group ran out of material, but also because they were heading out on the road again. As the band grew in popularity, they began spending more and more time touring. “The story of big rock bands all kind of have similar contours,” says Frank Portman. “And those guys toured a lot. That’s another measure of how seriously they took their whole deal. ’Cause we were always conscientious of, ‘Is there really a point to this?’ And we always kinda thought, ‘Not really.’ But they really did think there was. Talk about paying their dues, they played practically everywhere, and they toured for months and months and months, living like a pack of dogs in a van.”
Aaron Elliott wrote a story for Cometbus #27 that provides a good snapshot of life on the road for an indie band: “Touring is losing things. Losing your clothes, losing your money, losing your mind … Touring is also gaining things. Gaining scars and wounds. Gaining sickness and disease. Definitely increasing your tolerance for both beer and coffee … Touring is cabin fever at 65 miles an hour. No, make that 85.” The tedium of driving was broken up by in-jokes, such as keeping track of all the road kill spotted along the highways (“The list is almost up to 10 just from the last two weeks”), getting “stoned as fuck,” and keeping in mind the constant need to look for a more comfortable place to sleep, aside from the van. On one occasion, the traveling party ended up pulling mattresses from a factory dumpster to bed down for the night.
It was often rough living; even having an appreciative audience didn’t necessarily translate into a show earning funds sufficient to do little more than buy gas to get to the next town (and T-shirts to sell once they got there). But there was still a sense of community to be found, even among strangers. After playing a show in New Orleans, the band returned to their van to find it had been broken into and most of their possessions, including their tour money, had been stolen. They drove on to their next stop, Auburn, Alabama, anyway, where they played a house party for a group of college students. “It was cool,” Tré later told the Birmingham Post-Herald. “We didn’t have no money or clothes, and everyone was donating clothes and, uh, and basically money.”
Years later, Billie Joe looked back with fondness at the romance of the band’s early touring days. “There was this certain rock’n’roll underdog thing that we always had,” he told Rip. “I fuckin’ like touring like that — it’s like culture shock, really, driving around in a van, setting up my amp when I get there, and playing. That’s rock’n’roll, that’s what it started out as. A bunch of sweaty pigs in some tiny fuckin’ bar having a hootenanny, that’s what punk rock was to me.” The group handled all tour arrangements themselves. Tré’s father even converted an old Mendocino County Library bookmobile into a tour van and served as the band’s driver on a few tours. “Frank wanted to be sure they had a good driver,” his wife Linda explained (the choice of vehicle also occasionally attracted people who unexpectedly walked inside, thinking it was a real bookmobile). They also made some valuable future contacts, meeting a guitar player named Jason White while playing in Memphis, Tennessee during the summer of ’91. White was impressed enough to catch the band at their next stop in Little Rock, Arkansas later that week. After joining the band Monsula the following year, White would later end up in the Bay Area and go on to play with one of Billie Joe’s side-project bands, Pinhead Gunpowder, eventually joining Green Day as a second guitarist on the live dates.
When they toured closer to home, dedicated fans like Eric Yee traveled to see them. “The first time I saw them far away I went with Blatz,” he recalls. “They were supposed to play three shows together. One was in LA, sort of near Knott’s Berry Farm, a place called Eugene’s.” After seeing Blatz playing at another club the night before the Blatz/Green Day shows, everyone headed for Hollywood. “We were in this camper with these two huge dogs,” says Yee. “It was me, my friend Jesse, my friend Kevin, Joey [the drummer for Blatz], and Eggplant’s stepmom. We were hanging out on the strip and we ran into Green Day. You remember those magazine covers that you could get your picture on? They got theirs on High Times!* It was really funny. The next night, when we got to the show, we saw Green Day’s van there, and we thought, let’s go see them. So we open the doors, and there they were, hanging out with a bunch of girls in their van. We ended up going out spray painting. We had this really cheap spray paint, and we just spray painted shit everywhere. We sprayed, ‘East Bay, Not LA.’”
At the end of 1991, Green Day made their first trip overseas, leaving in November for the first date of a tour that would eventually run for over three months. Livermore hooked the band up with Christy Colcord and Aidan Taylor, two UK-based promoters who helped organise both this tour and a subsequent one in 1992. In typical fund-it-yourself fashion, they also brought along copies of their own records to sell and a photo negative of their T-shirt artwork so they could continue to print up their own memorabilia in order to raise extra money. The tour took in the Netherlands (where Billie Joe admitted that being able to buy pot legally in Amsterdam took some of the fun out of it), Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic (then still known as Czechoslovakia), and the UK. The dates included the usual assortment of venues, from genuine rock clubs to squats. It was an atmosphere they thrived on, no matter how crazy things got, as in Denmark, where they were regularly doused with beer during shows, which wreaked havoc with their instruments and gear. They also played a Halloween show in Denmark, after which they got another surprise when the man who lived in the apartment where they were spending the night decided to introduce them to his friend, “Sleepy” — a human head sealed in a glass jar. Billie Joe also picked up a case of lice during their travels. “I’d love to say it was crabs, but I wasn’t getting laid,” he cracked. And they all credited the demanding schedule with tightening them up into a better band.
“I think there should be a rule that any American band that goes to Europe or the UK has to have toured the United States at least twice because they’re a bunch of little spoiled brats,” Mike later enthused to journalist Ben Myers, proudly adding, “We’re not your average American band. We’re not shitheads.” He also told Flipside that while not too many people had heard of the band, “Some people did. There are mail-order punks everywhere. That’s rad.” The group also managed to hold their own, even at shows where, in Billie Joe’s words, “There were five bands on the bill, four of which sounded like Napalm Death. And then there was us.”
They made their UK debut in December at London venue The Rails, going on to play in Leeds, Dublin, Belfast, and such exotic-sounding (to American ears) locales like Tunbridge Wells. On December 17, when the group was in Southampton, newly minted copies of Kerplunk! arrived, and everyone was so excited they decided to make that evening’s show their record-release party, though Kerplunk!’s official release date wasn’t until January.
As the holidays approached, the group found themselves getting caught up in the spirit of the season, punk-rock style, and during a show at The Cricketers in Wigan, decided to join forces with the other band on the bill, Jail Cell Recipes (who’d been letting the band use their gear, as Green Day’s had become increasingly trashed) to stage an impromptu, and decidedly ludicrous, Nativity play.
“We got a little play going on,” Mike announced at the beginning, “and we can’t seem to get the hang of things unless people sit down. ’Cause it’s a real play. So you all got to sit down exactly where you’re standing, like it’s a hippie festival.” The packed room eventually complied, and “Mary” (Tré) came to the mic, wearing a scarf around his head, lipstick, and a huge bulge tucked under his skirt. On squealing, “my water broke!” a midwife appeared to attend to Mary, as a “shepherd”, busy defiling a “sheep”, suddenly spotted a Christmas tree that heralded the arrival of “the One Wise Punk” (Billie Joe), who “was as smart as Three Wise Men!” said Mike. Various foodstuffs were then pulled from between Mary’s legs until a friend with suitably long hair emerged, discreetly weari
ng a loincloth. “And the King was born!” shouted Mike. “It’s a goddamn prophet!” A “placenta” made of rice pudding and tomato sauce was then hurled into the audience. After flooring Mary with a punch, “Jesus” put in a plea to remember the true meaning of Christmas; “Santa Claus gets all the credit, and I think people should think of Jesus Christ more than Santa Claus on Christmas!” Then “Santa” (Mike) turned up to argue with “Jesus”, a dispute that ended by the unexpected arrival of the “Easter Bunny” (Sean from Wat Tyler), who knocked the beers out of the hands of Jesus and Santa, shouting “Straight edge! Straight edge!”
After the mayhem, Green Day’s set began, Billie Joe without a shirt, but wearing a tie (which he took off after the first song; Tré started out wearing a sleeveless shirt he also took off).The audience was so close to the band, Billie Joe’s mic was easily knocked away during the opening number, ‘I Was There’. “You guys are making the ceiling fall down,” Billie Joe observed afterwards, looking at a banner of cloth tacked on the ceiling that was starting to come down. “Bringing down the house!” said Mike. “You guys are ruthless.”
People routinely jumped onto the low stage and leapt back into the packed crowd throughout the show. Though most of the songs were drawn from the group’s earlier albums, this particular set also included a number of songs from Kerplunk!: ‘Welcome To Paradise’, ‘One For The Razorbacks’, ‘2000 Lights Years Away’, ‘Dominated Love Slave’ (with Tré and Billie Joe swapping instruments), and ‘Christie Road’. “It’s about a road,” Mike offered helpfully about the latter song. “A road in the middle of nowhere,” clarified Billie Joe. While playing ‘Disappearing Boy’, the band suddenly broke off and Tré stepped to the mic to take a vote on who’d been better in Nativity play — Santa Claus or Jesus? The vote seemed to going Santa’s way until Mike reminded the audience that the Easter Bunny had also made an appearance, and the resulting cheers had Billie Joe declaring the Bunny to be the winner. The band then played an impromptu version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ to a seemingly mystified British audience, then finally managed to finish ‘Disappearing Boy’. The set ended with an encore performance of ‘Dry Ice’.
When the band arrived at Newport, Wales, on December 23, where they were set to do a show at TJ’s, they met fellow musician and rock journalist, John Robb. Robb was bassist and vocalist for well-respected punk band The Membranes, who were splitting up at the time he first encountered Green Day. Robb had been interested in music since getting swept up in the punk explosion of late Seventies Britain. “Once punk rock happened, that was everything, really, musically, stylistically, politically,” he explains. “The whole thing was just a complete wipeout, it was amazing. It was a really good time to be 16! Things like the music press and John Peel were the lifelines to the music scene.”
Throughout the next decade, Robb also followed the US punk scene. “When The Dead Kennedys came along, I was completely knocked out by them because they were such a fantastic band,” he says, “and Jello Biafra’s lyrics are great, he’s a great singer. And they were really interesting songs, like Beefheart speeded up, but it still fit in a punk context ’cause it was really exciting to listen to. Then Black Flag came along and it just seemed to open the doors for loads of American stuff that was really cool. ’Cause there was a time when American punk was looked on as being a bit crap, really. But when these bands came through, people took it more seriously … from Black Flag it went to the Sonic Youth, Big Black, Butthole Surfers kind of thing — kind of artsy, all great bands. And then of course Nirvana came along and just completely blew the thing wide open.”
Robb knew about Lookout and the East Bay scene because of OpIvy. “A ska-punk band seemed really bizarre then,” he says, “because ska was something that had happened a long time before in Britain. That’s the good thing about music, it doesn’t obey any rules. Just when you think a scene is gone, something just completely spurs it out again. But you need really good bands to make that scene work again, and the great thing about Green Day, Rancid, and Offspring, is they’re all really good bands in their own way. If the main bands in that punk scene hadn’t been that good, it would never have spurred it back out again.”
Robb also knew about Green Day. “You knew the name, and you’d heard a couple of tracks, and you knew what they were about,” he says. “The two songs I’d heard sounded good. But you just didn’t think this band was going to be filling up stadiums in 10 years time. They just sounded like a good-time band. And they did a good show, but there was no scene for that kind of thing then. The punk scene was at its lowest ebb, in late Eighties/early Nineties Britain. But there were outside pockets of people into more punky kind of music, and TJ’s in Newport was one of those kind of places. TJ’s is a great venue. It’s just basically a drinking club which got turned into a venue. It’s a pretty rough-and-ready place, and when the kids turn up it gets wild. It’s been a wild kind of punk-rock dive for years and years. But in most of the country, if you played Birmingham for example, in those days you’d probably get about 50 people; there was no one else really into that kind of stuff.”
“It was great in Newport ’cause they all seemed to be into American punk, as well as British stuff, and bands I was into,” says Jason Funbug, a member of the band Funbug, then living in Newport and a TJ’s regular. “Back where I lived in the Midlands, I could’ve probably counted the people like that on one hand! TJ’s is quite an infamous club on the punk scene, everyone has played there. The owner is a Tom Jones lookalike and soundalike when he talks. He and his wife used to cook for the bands in their home above the club — I’ve had spaghetti bolognaise there with Rancid and Grant Hart [Hüsker Dü’s drummer].”
The TJ’s gig was also the club’s annual Christmas party show, with Knucklehead and Midway sharing the bill. “It was a pretty wild night,” says Robb. “That’s always a wild night, the Christmas gig. If you’re on tour, the first time you come over and people don’t you know you well and you get a gig like that, it’s always a godsend. The audience didn’t tear the place apart; Green Day were pretty unknown the first time they came over. But they were good live, though they were pretty knackered from touring — after about five or six weeks on the road you’re like a zombie anyway. I was just a compere for the show, so I probably just asked them how they were, how the tour had gone, and if they wanted me to say anything when I introduced them. There were some drunken hijinks, I remember. And they definitely had a fondness for British beer!”
Funbug was also at the show, having previously heard Green Day on John Peel’s radio show on BBC Radio 1; he was also interested in Lookout acts like OpIvy, Sweet Baby, and Screeching Weasel. As the TJ’s show also featured a fancy dress competition, Funbug borrowed a nun’s costume from his mother. “There were loads of people in fancy dress,” he says, and Green Day ended up picking him as the winner, awarding him with a case of lager, which was eagerly consumed that night. A live version of ‘At The Library’ from the show later appeared on the compilation Guinea Worm, put out by S&M magazine.
The group spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Bath, where they celebrated by stealing Christmas trees from front porches and Mike made everyone massive veggie omelets, “with everything from hash browns to brussel sprouts in them.” It was a rare moment of calm during which everyone could wonder what the new year might bring, a year in which all the band members would finally leave their teens behind and turn 20. Billie Joe later admitted he felt some anxiety during the trip, and experienced a bad case of nerves in Spain. “I don’t know if I was having an anxiety attack or what, but I just freaked out! I didn’t say anything to anybody. It was weird,” he told Flipside. “At the time I felt kind of bum-rushed to think about my future,” he said to another interviewer. “A lot of it had to do with being in Europe. It was our first time in Europe, we were doing the squats and pub gigs … and, you know, it was just kind of scary. I think all of us were scared because we didn’t know what our future was going to be at
all.”
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* A magazine devoted to marijuana culture and its attendant paraphenalia
American Idiots: Mike Dirnt, Tré Cool, and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. (LFI)
Sheet music for Billie Joe’s first single, ‘Look For Love’, recorded when he was five years old and released in I977. (Courtesy of Toxsima)
A young Tré flexes his drumming muscles, as Lookouts bassist Kain “Kong” Hanschke looks on, circa 1985. (Larry Livermore)
An early Lookouts performance. The band was the third project of founder/guitarist Lawrence Livermore to use the “Lookout” name, along with a fanzine and a record label. (Larry Livermore)
A flyer advertising the Lookouts’ 1989 EP Mendocino Homeland, named for the county where the group was formed. (Larry Livermore)
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