Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  The sleeve of Isocracy’s 1988 7-inch Bedtime For Isocracy. The band’s drummer, John Kiffmeyer, aka “AI Sobrante”, became Green Day’s first drummer. (Larry Livermore)

  Billie Joe at a show at the Gilman St. Project, Berkeley, September 9, 1989. He later said being involved in the Gilman scene “saved me from living in a refinery town all my life”. (Murray Bowles)

  John Kiffmeyer at Gilman, September 9, 1989 (Murray Bowles)

  Mike at Gilman, 1989. He said of the club, “Gilman was my high school”. (Murray Bowles)

  Mike, newly shorn, at Gilman, August 31, 1990. Green Day played Gilman more than any other venue. (Murray Bowles)

  Billie Joe, wearing his baseball cap backwards in trademark fashion, at Gilman, August 31, 1990. (Murray Bowles)

  Tré at a show in Pinole, California, November 11, 1990, soon after he became Green Day’s drummer. Billie Joe and Mike appreciated both his drumming skills and the fact he owned a van. (Murray Bowles)

  Mike and Tré at Ugene’s, Downey, California, January 26, 1991. (Murray Bowles)

  Billie Joe at Ugene’s, January 26, 1991. (Murray Bowles)

  Flyer for Green Day show at The Dome, Boston Arms, London, May 2, l992. The group steadily built an overseas following before the release of Dookie. (Courtesy of Jason Funbug).

  2243 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley; Green Day’s HQ during the Dookie era. (Gillian G. Gaar)

  CHAPTER 4

  Moving To The Majors

  “How do you guys think you’ll do in three years?”

  “I don’t know. You can’t always predict what’s going to happen three years from now.”

  — Billie Joe to Flipside, 1992

  Green Day’s European tour was originally scheduled for 50 dates, but it eventually ran to 64, as offers to extend the tour kept coming in. “We were so exhausted we were practically hallucinating, and so we said, ‘Sure! We can’t think of anything dumber! Let’s keep going!’” Billie Joe explained to writer Ian Winwood. By the time they returned to the states, Kerplunk! was already out and on its way to becoming one of Lookout’s biggest sellers, having sold 10,000 copies on its day of release (January 17, 1992); by the end of ’92, sales would reach 50,000. Reviews were positive as well. Writing in the New Musical Express, Simon Williams called Kerplunk! “storming-but-soothing antidotal cream to smear on the current rash of grunge merchants.”

  Eric Yee was among the fans who were quickly won over by the album. “My favourite stuff is from Kerplunk!” he says. “There was this great show Green Day played right when it came out, and at the show I heard someone from Lookout say, ‘Yeah dude, I got the vinyl in’ So after the show we went to Lookout headquarters and I grabbed one, and I was so excited. It’s a classic record in my opinion. It’s got all the great songs, ‘Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?’, ‘Christie Road’, ‘2000 Light Years Away’, ‘Welcome to Paradise’. They are all on that album. Pretty amazing album. That’s my favourite, at least.”

  There would be no new Green Day recordings until the band signed with Reprise. And despite Green Day’s increasing success, the members still found time to play in various side-project bands. In 1991, Billie Joe had joined Aaron Elliott in Pinhead Gunpowder, a pet project of Elliott’s for some time. After one of his stints as Green Day’s roadie, Elliott had been dropped off in Arcata, where he tried to get a band going. When the effort proved unsuccessful, he returned to Berkeley, living in a house called “House-O-Toast”. Guitarist Mike Kersh (from Fuel) and bassist Bill Schneider (from the band Monsula) practised together at House-O-Toast and invited Elliott, who played drums, to join them. Elliott then brought in Billie Joe and gave the group the name he’d wanted to use for his band in Arcata, taken from a “high-octane green tea” sold at an Arcata co-op.

  Due to all the members’ involvement in a variety of other bands, Pinhead Gunpowder was never more than a part-time endeavour. In 1991 the group released the 4-track EP Trundle & Spring on No Reality Records, followed the next year by the EP Fahiza on Lookout. It featured a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, along with appearances on the compilations Very Small World and Lookout’s Can Of Pork (the latter of which also featured a song by The Lookouts). In late 1992, Billie Joe also sat in on guitar for one show with Rancid.

  Green Day also kept up their rigorous touring schedule, both around the country and overseas. On May 2, 1992, they were at The Dome, Boston Arms, in London, supported by Joeyfat and Funbug. “They turned up really late,” says Jason Funbug. “I think they just flew in that day and were jet lagged or something. They didn’t really talk much. I remember, thinking I was hilarious, calling them ‘Purple Month’, ‘Blue Year’, etc. Then we — I’m a bit embarrassed to say — stole all the cans of lager, which was out of order. A funny thing was, in November they came back to Britain and did a Radio 1 interview and were asked if they had a favourite support band and they said Funbug! Which helped us immensely! I think they might have been joking. But it seems everyone in Britain heard about it. I was in Chicago at the time it aired and my girlfriend even rang me up to tell me.” The band’s plug might also have been to help Lookout; Funbug was the first non-Californian band to be signed to the label.

  The constant touring meant the band was making inroads in unexpected places. In the early Nineties, Lawrence Livermore was on tour in Europe with the Mr. T Experience. On arriving in the city of Bialystok, Poland, Livermore had been thinking they must be the first American punk-rock band to play the region. He then caught sight of the words “Green Day” spray painted on the town’s water tower. “They’d been there, done that, months before us,” he later wrote.

  The touring helped boost the band’s records sales — no small consideration — given that Green Day’s deal with Lookout had them earning 60% of the profits. For unlike many albums, which sell the most on their initial release, after which sales begin to decline, both 39/Smooth and Kerplunk! continued to sell steadily, which meant the group’s popularity also continued to grow. It grew slowly at first, but eventually to the point where it couldn’t be ignored. “The shows were getting bigger, the promoters seedier, and the people we stayed with less and less interesting,” as Aaron Elliott put it in Cometbus #41. “The band was headed toward success but stalled at an awkward impass along the way.”

  Certainly things had grown to a level the band members themselves could no longer control. In a portent of things to come, shows were having to be cancelled because too many people were turning up at venues that were too small. Sometimes the local fire marshall would shut down the show as a result. Or promoters from the next tier up would take over the show and cheat the band out of their money. The changing character of the audience also brought its own problems. “We were drawing a lot of people who didn’t understand punk shows, so there would be fights going on,” Mike told Alter/Native. “It was all leading to one thing, either quit or go on. So we’re going on.”

  The band’s first move, which set them apart from most other bands they’d been playing with in the East Bay scene, was to get professional managers. They went with the team of Elliot Cahn and Jeff Saltzman, who ran the Oakland-based management company Cahn-Man. Cahn got his start in music as a guitarist in the Fifties revival band, Sha Na Na. He left the music business to pursue legal work, then combined his two interests and returned to the music industry as a lawyer and manager. He then met Saltzman, who worked as a litigator but was also a musician, having been a member of the San Francisco band, House of Pants.

  The two formed Cahn-Man after Cahn signed a management deal with the heavy-metal band Testament; other bands the two signed included Exodus, Violence, Vicious Rumors, and other metal acts. They were introduced to Green Day by one of their associates, David Hawkins. Like Cahn and Saltzman. he also worked as a musician, playing drums for the local band, Engine.

  Green Day’s brand of poppy punk was far removed from the metal acts Cahn-Man had been working with, but the two liked the music well enough to decide to take a chance on the grou
p.* For their part, the band felt the managers weren’t “a bunch of cigar chewers”, in Cahn’s words. A contract was duly signed.

  Cahn and Saltzman found their new charges to be ambitious, but cautious about making too many changes. Nonetheless, the band had decided that their next step should be a securing a major-label record deal. “We wanted to go from an independent to a major,” Billie Joe told Kerrang! “We got an offer from Epitaph, but we were like, ‘Do we want to be on an independent pretending to be a major, or do we want to be on a real major?’ We chose to go to Reprise.”

  Lawrence Livermore was aware that Green Day was considering its options. “There were occasional rumours that Green Day might go to a major label starting maybe in late 1992/early ’93,” he says. “I knew that some of their friends and family were encouraging them to do that, but I didn’t think too much about it. For one thing they were away a lot on tour, so I didn’t see as much of them as I usually did, and besides, things were going so well for both them and the label that I didn’t see why they’d want to leave. We’d sold about 50,000 of each album by then, which was phenomenal for a tiny underground label at that time, and things only looked to get better. Still, I knew they might want to leave at some point, and I was fine with that. I did think they should do one more indie record first to solidify their fan base and strengthen their bargaining position, but as it turned out, they didn’t need to. They first told me for sure that they were looking to sign with a major sometime in 1993, and it was only a few weeks after that that they did.”

  Though they would take some heat for this decision later, purists in the community believing that any self-respecting punk rocker that signed with a major label was irrevocably “selling out”, others had a far more sympathetic view. The Mr. T Experience had shared stages with Green Day in the past, and would in the future, when the band broke through to the mainstream. But even before that breakthrough, Frank Portman recognised that the band members had always had an air of determination about them.

  “My impression is that they always seemed to take their career more seriously,” he says. “Almost from when I first encountered them, they seemed like they were pretty serious about being a band, which is very different from my band, and practically all the other bands around here. Even if you had a sort of secret dream that you wanted to be a big star, which I’m sure a lot of people had, you would never admit it to anyone, that would be a real faux pas. I know a lot of my friend’s bands from LA, you could totally tell how they would talk completely differently; they all had managers and they were all just charting their course to when they’d be getting on the radio and everything. I guess bands up here were doing that too, to an extent, but you had to at least affect an ‘I don’t care about that stuff’ attitude. In our case that was actually more or less genuine, but I think those guys took it a little more seriously. They seemed to put a lot into how they put the band across. They timed their recordings carefully, they didn’t overdo it; in the time they did those two albums, some bands could’ve done five or six low-budget, thrown-together albums. But they seemed to be a little bit more aware of why that would be a mistake.

  “I don’t think anybody ever imagined that anyone doing this kind of thing was going to become multi-gazillionaire internationally famous rock stars, but I think everybody could tell they were going places,” he continues, adding that, at the time, “success” for most rock bands was defined in more modest terms. “When I was a DJ on the college radio station, I did a lot of interviews with some pretty big stars in the college radio world in the mid-Eighties, like The Replacements, that kind of band,” he says. “And you would always say, ‘Well, what’s your ambition, what are you after?’ And they would always say, ‘I just want to be able to make a living from making music.’ And none of them actually would go so far as to say that that’s what they were doing; that was the ambition they had in the future, and it always seemed completely out of the question. That was the extent of what you could imagine. If you played a show where you got paid enough, where there was enough money to split up after you had paid off various things, like your practise space rent and so forth, that seemed like a really amazing degree of success. So, somewhere between that and being The Rolling Stones was where you imagined the successful bands would end up. But I think that everyone could tell that there was a potential for these guys to be a lot bigger than this scene.”

  And instead of seeing signing to a major as “selling out”, Portman saw the true risk being that moving to a major was taking a big gamble that more than likely wouldn’t pay off. “The complaint that people make about bands signing to a major label is that it’s not always a good move,” he says. “And in fact it rarely is, in the long run, a good move. If I had been offered a good deal I would’ve totally taken it, no question, but I made the decision that I didn’t want to waste a lot of time chasing after it because I didn’t think it would pan out. And I think that was the right decision for me. And most bands that sign big deals that don’t pan out are history within a couple of years. When the East Bay pop-punk scene had a buzz about it, and Green Day was starting to get popular — as always happens — a lot of bands got these little deals from big labels just to see what would happen. And it never worked out for any of them, really. And Green Day was smart about how they did it. They didn’t spend a lot of money — comparatively speaking — on that first album, they didn’t take a huge advance that was impossible to recoup. They were smart about a lot of decisions like that. Some bands just get into a state of delusion where you believe that there’s no way to go but up and there’s no stopping you, and you make a lot of poor financial decisions. But they didn’t do that.”

  Jon Ginoli, a guitarist with Pansy Division, a band that would also tour with Green Day, also saw both the advantages and disadvantages of signing with a major. Ginoli had moved to the Bay Area in 1989, where he initially worked as a sales rep for Rough Trade Records. “We were selling all these Green Day albums, and that’s what got me interested in wanting to check them out,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, people are really into this band, they’re local and I don’t know who they are, so I better get on the case.’ They were selling tens of thousands of records as an indie. Then I heard that they signed to a major and I thought, ‘They’re just gonna get lost in the shuffle. They’ll probably make more money selling 50,000 copies on Lookout than they would selling 500,000 copies on a major, so they might as well just stay with the indie.’ They were in a real good position, because they were probably making a decent living just off of doing little tours and having these record sales; that was a very enviable position that a lot of people would have wanted to be in. But I think they were kind of overwhelmed trying to deal with the popularity of being on an indie label and people not being able to find the record in stores and that sort of thing; things had sort of gotten out of control by the time they signed with a major. So that a major was actually going to make them more organised. I didn’t really have anything against them signing, but I did think that they were one of those bands that probably could’ve succeeded if they hadn’t signed. Like, some bands are going to be unknown unless a major grabs them, but I thought that Green Day still would’ve gone on to be pretty popular on the underground level, that they would be one of the top underground bands. But the thing is, if you’re going to sell 10 million records, of course, then sign with a major, ’cause you’re not going to be able to do that on Lookout. But, you know, who would’ve thought? I mean, I don’t think anybody thought that they would be so big.”

  “I knew there was a lot of interest in them,” says Yee. “Because one time we went to see them at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in LA, and there were all kinds of crazy people backstage, A&R types and whatnot. And it didn’t surprise me because they were huge at the time. So when they signed [with a major] it wasn’t too surprising, really. But they were very sensitive about it, because people were already calling them sell-outs, you know what I mean? They were very sensitive about that s
ituation. I didn’t care about the ‘sell-out’ factor then; now I do, but at the time I didn’t. It was more exciting at the time, new territory. A new world. It was pretty cool going along for the ride.”

  For the previous few years, the band members’ living situations had been somewhat erratic. In 1992 Billie Joe told Flipside, “I’m not living anywhere, really,” and recounted having to leave his possessions at his mother’s home while crashing with different friends; Mike added, “Actually, we’ve moved three times in two months, so we’re like, total rock stars.” But now, they had a new HQ.

  Ashby Avenue is a busy thoroughfare running from west to east through Berkeley, about a mile south of the Berkeley campus. Near the intersection of Ashby and Telegraph, at 2243 Ashby, is an unprepossessing, three-story Victorian house, the mailboxes nailed to the main stairs indicating that the house has been split up into multi-unit dwellings (it’s also six blocks from the house where Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason cooked up the idea for a magazine called Rolling Stone in 1967). In 1993, Green Day was hunkered down in the basement, both living there and using it as a rehearsal space. It was here that hopeful A&R reps visited, attracted by the demos Cahn-Man sent out and the band’s impressive sales on Lookout. As Megan McLaughlin, editor of college radio tipsheet CMJ New Music Report told Billboard, “Once people looked at the numbers, it was like, ‘Wow — imagine what a little marketing and major-label distribution could do.’”

  And the majors were definitely interested: Sony, Geffen, Interscope, and Warner Bros. were among those in the running. In the end, it was Rob Cavallo with Warner Bros. imprint Reprise, who got the nod, despite having never seen the band play live. But Cavallo was impressed by the vigor of the group’s music, though even he later admitted, “I never thought it would snowball.” And after hanging out in the Ashby house basement with the group, playing instruments together, smoking pot, then going out to dinner, the band decided Cavallo had a down-to-earth attitude that they liked as well. “He’s from LA and stuff, but he’s married and thinking about having kids,” Billie Joe told journalist Gina Arnold, “and that made him seem like more of a genuine person.”