Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  Cavallo was originally from Washington, D.C. His father, Bob, was a club owner and, later, a manager, whose roster had included the Lovin’ Spoonful; Earth, Wind & Fire; and Prince. The family later relocated to Los Angeles, where Cavallo played guitar in local bands and then began working as a recording engineer, working on sessions by Linda Ronstadt and Fleetwood Mac, among others. He moved into A&R after his father introduced him to Lenny Waronker, president of Warner Bros., working under Michael Ostin (then Warner’s head of A&R). From there he moved into production, while continuing to do A&R, co-producing The Muffs’ self-titled major-label debut (a record Green Day had liked). In addition to The Muffs, Cavallo went on to produce Jawbreaker, L7, The Goo Goo Dolls, and Chris Isaak. He eventually became a senior vice president of A&R at Reprise.

  Green Day’s demos included new songs that would be the stand-out tracks on their major-label debut — ‘Longview’, ‘When I Come Around’, ‘Basket Case’ — that had an identifiable Green Day “sound” that the band had perfected; music with enough of an edge to make it alternative, but with appealing melodies and ear-grabbing hooks that were as catchy as anything in the Top 40. “They have all the elements,” Cavallo later told People. “Great lyrics, great melodies, interesting influences — The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Kinks, The Beatles.” So Green Day signed a five-album contract with Reprise in April 1993, netting an advance of $300,000, though not without some trepidation. “I was struggling so hard even to sign that fucking contract,” Billie Joe later recalled. “When I was sitting there, I was contemplating, ‘Should I just run outta here right now? Am I making the biggest mistake of my life?’” It was agreed that Cavallo should produce, an unorthodox arrangement with one’s A&R rep that raised some eyebrows. But Cavallo stressed it wasn’t part of the deal; “It just signified how interested in the project I was. I considered it a gift to spend time in the studio with them,” he told Gina Arnold. In a magnanimous gesture, Green Day decided to let Lookout retain the rights to the records they’d recorded for the label. Then Billie Joe used the advance to pay a year’s rent on their basement apartment. Tré bought health insurance.

  Easing the leap to a major was the decision to record locally, the band members requesting a studio they could ride their bikes to. As it happened, there was an excellent studio about two miles from the house on Ashby Avenue — Berkeley’s Fantasy Studios, located just off busy San Pablo Avenue in a quieter, residential area, not far from Berkeley’s Aquatic Park. When Fantasy originally opened in 1971, it was primarily used by the artists on Fantasy Records, which then included acts like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Chet Baker, and Sonny Rollins. Over the years a wide variety of other musicians have used the studio, including Santana, Aerosmith, Elton John, Bobby McFerrin, Journey, and Robert Cray, to name a few.

  “We have world-class level gear, but mainly what we have is space,” says Steve Hart, now Fantasy’s chief engineer, but then a freelance engineer who used the studio as his base. “This is an old studio, so there’s a lot of real estate,” he explains. “It’s huge — I think we’re 25,000 square feet total. Most newer studios don’t have that kind of real estate, so their rooms are small. Here, about half of our bottom floor is all studio complex. So we have state-of-the-art consoles, big rooms, and a lot of vintage gear and a big ol’ mic collection, just due to the fact that it’s been here since the Seventies.”

  Hart, who in addition to working with artists like David Bowie, En Vogue, and The White Stripes, has also worked on such films as Amadeus, Titanic, and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, says he was one of four engineers considered for the job of working on Dookie. “Rob Cavallo wanted to work here because it was local for the band, and he didn’t want to bring in a big name LA engineer,” he explains. “So he picked four engineers from résumés that the studio gave him. They had a 4-track live cassette and Rob was actually having a sort of contest, where whoever could make that 4-track live recording sound like anything would get the job. Now, at that time, I was pretty busy on an international level; I had been working in Europe for five years and at that moment I was working in Asia, going to and from Hong Kong and Taipei and mixing singles for various artists, and making good money. On the day of the test, I was flying to Taipei in fact, so I just told Rob, ‘Look, I can’t do your demo, here’s my résumé take it or leave it.’ But Neill showed up, so he got the job.”

  “Neill” was Neill King, who recalls his hiring somewhat differently. “The studio manager at the time, Nina [Bombardier], who is a friend of mine, called me up,” he recalls. “I was working somewhere else on a Joe Satriani record. I think Rob had talked to her, and said, ‘I’ve got Green Day coming in and we want an engineer, but I don’t have anybody.’ There may be other stories; they probably did interview other engineers, but I wasn’t aware of that. Nina just said, ‘Come in and talk to Rob and the guys.’ So I came in talked to them, we got on pretty well, and they liked what I’d done in the past. And that was it.”

  King, originally from London, got his start working with British acts like Madness, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, The Undertones, and The Smiths, before moving to Los Angeles and then the Bay Area, producing, engineering, and mixing, depending on the needs of the project. “I prefer producing, but because I’m an engineer and mixer, people kind of get me to do all three, wear all the hats,” he says. “In a perfect world, the producer is the artistic liaison between the artist and their songs, their ideas, and he tries to communicate that to the engineer and mixer, whoever they are. And in that perfect world, the producer doesn’t do anything with the board, with the sound. He’s just involved with the band, with the artistic side of things. And the engineer doesn’t usually have very much input with the artistic side of things. But now those have become very blurred. Obviously, I came into engineering and mixing from a musical background; I didn’t want to be just an engineer/producer in the old sense of the word. I wanted to be a producer, but engineering was my foot into the door, because I could make the records technically. And the idea was, gradually, not to do all the technical stuff, to have somebody else do it, and just be the producer … the artistic liaison. That’s where my main interests lie. But I became a pretty good engineer and mixer, so I worked mainly as that. But in the last 15 years, since my wife and I have moved to the Bay Area, I’ve done everything. And, in some cases, played on the records as well. And now, there aren’t many producers who don’t know a little bit about the technical side, and it’s very hard to be an engineer if you don’t know a little bit about music.”

  King had never seen Green Day, but knew of their reputation. “The East Bay punk scene was quite a thing,” he says. “And I think they liked me because I’d done that kind of scene the first time around in the UK. I think that was one of the draws, they thought they’d like to work with me because I worked with people they’d liked growing up.” When he finally did see the band live at Gilman, the knowledge that the group was signing with a major label “was causing a little bit of antagonism among the hard-core punks,” says King. “They didn’t want that at all, they didn’t want them signing to a major label. There was a backlash, so actually it was kind of empty, one of the emptiest times they ever played Gilman. People were kind of boycotting them a little bit. It was ridiculous, but that was what was going on. It was a great show though, terrific show. Probably one of the last times they played there.”

  Recording began soon after the contract details were finalised. Once in the studio, the band wasted little time in getting down to work, completing the recording and mixing in six weeks. “This was the first time they had a budget,” says King. “But still, taking six weeks to record and overdub an album is still ‘indie’ by today’s standards. People seem to take forever in the studio.” Work began around midday, with a dinner break at 7 or 8 pm. “We’d go out to eat somewhere,” says King, “or at least Rob and I would. The guys would sometimes just go home for dinner. They had no money at all. They were still living hand to mouth.

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sp; “Obviously the first two records were done very quickly, so this was more of a production than they’d been used to,” says King, comparing the group’s earlier work to their major-label debut (it also reportedly marked the first time they used a guitar tuner in the studio). But one common factor among all three albums was that the songs had largely been worked out prior to recording, so little time was needed to work out arrangements, as listening to the demos reveals. “The songs were pretty much worked out,” King agrees. “Billie is extremely talented. He’s a great singer, and he knew those songs really well. He would just nail the takes, each take. And they usually were complete takes, no punching in. We were doing it from beginning to end. A lot of singers today can’t do that; they don’t have what it takes. But on that record, it was just so together. He gave me three, four good takes of each song, and I compiled the best of each take. Then Billie and Rob would listen and they’d say, ‘This is great … try something else with this line…’

  “Mike’s bass parts were terrific,” King continues. “I did edit a lot though. I did a lot of editing on Tré’s drum tracks — not that they weren’t good, but again, we just wanted to get the best of the best. I did a lot of tape editing — it was before ProTools and computer editing. I would tape edit two or three drum tracks and stick those together and make the 24-track master. And then we’d put Mike’s bass on, which didn’t take too long. And then Billie went for his guitar tracks. Rob had a great guitar rig, a Marshall stack I think, that really sounded good. Rob was very good with guitars, that was his main thing; he was a great one with guitar sounds, so the guitar sounds were fantastic. Billie had his trusty Fernandes, we used that a lot. And then on the solos, we tried a bunch of guitars, we rented a bunch of different Telecasters just to give a different sound on the solo bits. In retrospect, we kind of introduced that ‘produced punk’ sound, if you like. Everybody else seemed to take it up after that. It was still punk, but obviously you’d spent a little bit of time working on it. I think everybody after that copied that … you know, Blink-182 and all those bands. It had the same energy, the same production techniques, but I think we were the first to come up with that.”

  Steve Hart also dropped in on the sessions. “Neill’s a friend of mine, so I went in a few times and sat in,” he says. “It wasn’t like a big deal thing, ’cause they were just another local band, you know. But I checked it out; I like Neill and since I also had been called on the job, I was interested to see what he ended up doing. If you’re an engineer dropping in on another engineer’s session, you don’t want to get in the way, so usually what my MO would be, and still remains to this day, when they’re playing it’s fine, you can sit there and listen and be a fly on the wall. But I would not hang out when all the band members would come in the control room or anything, because that’s their moment. They don’t need distractions.

  “What I remember is that it was very straightforward, very live,” Hart continues. “There wasn’t a lot of messing around with tons of overdubs and stuff, and nothing excessive in any way with the amount of mics or gear or anything. Rob was trying to make it cheaply, so the simpler, the faster. But it sounded great and I really liked the band; I remember being totally impressed with how short and to the point the songs were, which is not always the case. The band were cool, straight-ahead working. By no means was it painful at all, and it didn’t seem like any party on the other hand, either. I don’t remember any copious amounts of booze or anything, it was work.”

  The few visitors helped keep distractions down to a minimum. “It wasn’t like the place was full of people coming in,” says King. “It was just the band Rob, me, and the managers would show up maybe once a week to check out the stuff we were doing. I don’t think they even had any roadies. Rob, apart from being the producer, also represented the record label, so there weren’t any other label people coming in. And he had the American Express card! It was great. He did his part, I did my part, and the band was great. They played great and they had great songs. It was all just facilitated really well. It was just first class, from beginning to end.”

  For his part, Cavallo wanted to have an atmosphere where ideas could be freely shared. “When you go in with a band, you want to make sure nobody feels that they should be embarrassed or ashamed to throw out any kind of an idea,” he told Taxi.com. “I think that’s one of the most important things you can do — to create that open kind of environment. Because then what you end up doing is truly getting the best out of the artists that are in that room.” In the same interview he added he wanted to have the kind of relationship with Green Day that The Beatles had enjoyed with their producer, George Martin.

  The album opened with ‘Burnout’, a song Billie Joe had written on the way home from Laytonville one night, while in an altered state himself. The song that would introduce Green Day to a major-label audience was a fast-paced ode about a stereotypical stoner loser who, after one too many highs, finds himself “amongst the dead”. ‘Having A Blast’, with its references to blowing oneself up in a rage, sounds disturbingly like the tale of a suicide bomber, though later verses seem to point to the singer’s anger being motivated by yet more romantic complications, as opposed to political complaints. ‘Chump’ is a diatribe against a rival, and, in a nice touch, the musical assault at the end segues neatly into the introductory loping drum beat of ‘Longview’, which would become the album’s first single.

  The song is ostensibly about another loser, stuck at home, whose boredom with his usual pursuits (watching TV, masturbating), has him caught in an apathetic slump. Billie Joe later said it was drawn from his own feelings about having to live back at his mother’s house on occasion, when he had nowhere else to go. “I felt really pathetic,” he told Rolling Stone. “For a time I was wallowing in my own misery and liking it. The lyrics wrote themselves.”

  Somewhat at odds with the listless sentiments is the fierce power of the music during the chorus; also ironic was the fact that this slacker anthem, with its refrain of “no motivation” was performed by a group that, despite their image, was the antithesis of slackerdom, given the hard work, drive, and ambition they’d poured into advancing their careers. Chief among the song’s many strengths is how the smooth glide of Tré’s drums and Mike’s bass line (which he told Rolling Stone he came up with while “flying on acid … later, it took me a long time to be able to play it, but it made sense when I was on drugs”) have fully captured your attention before Billie Joe’s vocal even begins.

  Eric Yee and Eggplant were at the session when the song was recorded. When seeing the song performed live, Eggplant had been in the habit of shouting “You will!” following Billie Joe’s line about being called pathetic, and the group had him shout the phrase during the session. “Listen closely and you’ll hear someone in the background go ‘You will,’” says Yee. “That was Eggplant! He used to do it at shows, that’s how it came about. We’d always be just hanging out in the pit, messing around, and Eggplant would just yell it during the song.”

  Along with the new songs, a few previously recorded songs were rerecorded, including ‘Welcome To Paradise’. The arrangement was the same as that on Kerplunk! (though Dookie’s version runs slightly longer), but comparing the two offers a clear way to assess what the band gained by stepping up to major-label production. The sound is fuller, gutsier, and the extraneous guitar noises during the instrumental break are more subdued, meaning that when the descending riff begins, the force with which it builds is far more powerful and exciting — at the end of sequence, you have the impression that the song is literally about to jump the track. “It’s gonna get its fair shake now,” Mike explained. “We thought [the song] fit this album really well lyrically, content-wise, and we just wanted to show what a strong song it was.”

  ‘Pulling Teeth’ is a black-humoured “love song” about domestic violence, though in this case it’s the woman, not the man, who’s the abuser; the bittersweet mood is perfectly enhanced by the skillful vocal harmonising.
Then comes ‘Basket Case’, which would go on to be another Green Day classic. This portrait of another hapless soul on the verge of a mental breakdown starts out quietly, but with an unmistakable intensity in the vocal delivery. The music, which initially seems to lurk in the background, bursts forth — as if freed from its cage — on the words “cracking up”. From then on, the song goes full throttle, before crashing to a stop. In a neat lyrical twist, which could easily be missed if you didn’t read the lyrics, the gender of the prostitute patronised by the narrator changes gender in one line. Billie Joe later admitted there was an autobiographical element to the song, inspired by his own bouts with anxiety.

  ‘She’, ‘Sassafras Roots’, and ‘When I Come Around’ all deal with people trapped in unhappy circumstances — the woman in ‘She’ who feels suffocated by her pre-arranged life, and the dissatisfied couples in the latter two songs (though at least ‘When I Come Around’ ends on a more conciliatory note).‘Coming Clean’ tackled a more unusual topic — at least in rock songs — of coming to terms with one’s sexuality. “I still struggle with that too,” Billie Joe said in the Warner Bros. bio. “It’s part of adolescence and growing up.” To the gay/lesbian magazine The Advocate he said, “I think everybody kind of fantasises about the same sex. I think people are born bisexual, and it’s just that our parents and society kind of veer us off into this feeling of, ‘Oh, I can’t.’”