Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  Unhappy relationships were also the focus of the next two songs. ‘Emenius Sleepus’ — with lyrics by Mike — has the narrator running into an old friend, and realising with sadness how much each has changed. ‘In The End’ is a seemingly bitter critique of another romantic rival, though Billie Joe revealed that the song, like ‘Why Do You Want Him?’, was again directed at his step-father. The closing track starts off deceptively like a folk song, with Billie Joe singing the initial two verses and choruses accompanied by an acoustic guitar. Then the instruments come charging in and the song’s title becomes clear — ‘F.O.D.’ stands for “Fuck Off and Die.” Then comes a further surprise; after around 1:20 of silence, comes the “hidden” track, Tré’s ‘All By Myself’, a lovelorn tune recorded at a friend’s house, whose lyrics consist mostly of the title, and which Tré sings in a style that wouldn’t be out of place on a children’s record.

  Some of the tracks that didn’t make the album later appeared as B-sides: ‘On The Wagon’ as a B-side of ‘Longview’, and a cover of The Kinks’ ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’ and a re-recording ‘409 In Your Coffeemaker’ as B-sides of ‘Basket Case’. And there was another song Billie Joe wrote at the time that the group elected not to record; a softer ballad called ‘Good Riddance’, which they’d keep under wraps for another four years. The song, in addition to ‘She’ and ‘Sassafrass Roots’, was inspired by a breakup with a young woman Billie Joe had been seeing in Berkeley, “a total, raving punk rocker who didn’t approve of me being on a major label,” he told Spin. “She moved down to Ecuador, saying she couldn’t live in a world with McDonald’s and such.” The album itself was called Dookie, slang for excrement, a word chosen to “keep in touch with the child within,” as Mike said in the Warner Bros. biography (though perhaps less childish than the purported original title: Liquid Dookie).

  “We really wanted to make our records sound like us, but a bigger version of it,” Billie Joe told writer Dan Epstein. “If a punk band signed to a major label, it always seemed like they compromised their sound, and we didn’t want to do that.” Indeed, comparing Dookie with Kerplunk!, the biggest difference was only in the quality of the production. The band had welcomed the chance to have more time to work on a recording, “to actually pay attention to what we were doing,” as Mike put it. “The whole album sounds bigger … I think we obtained the same sound that we would have obtained if the other ones had been on a major label.”

  By the end of the sessions, King had a feeling the record was going to hit. “I knew Green Day was special,” he says. “Any time I worked with Elvis Costello, I knew it was going to be huge. When I did the first A-Ha record, I knew it was going to be huge. When I did the first Smiths record I did, I knew … you can just tell. What they had, and what you have to have for those records, is a huge self-confidence. Not in a cocky way, but they just knew that their stuff was it. They knew it was their time. They knew they were going to be big. To get to that point, you have to have that. There’s plenty of people that have the attitude, but they just don’t have the songs or they don’t have it. Whereas they knew they had it, all three of them. They knew it was all there, this was a special record. And I’ve worked on some great records and I can always spot when something great, something special, is going on. And it was just their time. They had this bunch of songs, they were all great players, and it just went really well. I knew it, they knew it, the producer knew it.

  “Nobody could tell how many it’s going to sell,” King qualifies. “That’s something altogether different. I would never have thought that. The other thing was that the timing was so good. In some ways, they’d been the leaders of the new punk revival, and that happened to become the popular thing at the time. And they were ready with the best record of that genre when that genre was exploding. It’s possible — and that’s part of it being so good — that the timing was perfect. If we had done that record three years earlier, it would still have been a great record, but it might have sold 50,000 copies. But all the ducks were in a row. Everything was right with that record. The timing was right for that kind of band. The kids were getting into new punk, second time around. Green Day had the best songs and the best record of that style.”

  And King certainly didn’t expect the record to go on to sell over 14-million copies. “Not bad for a record that cost less than $100,000 to make!” he says. “Which may seem a lot, but you don’t make demos for that anymore. You get baby bands that come in and they spend half a million on a record, on a band that just doesn’t have half the quality that they had. You couldn’t make a record for what they made Dookie now.

  “Of course I was thrilled by Dookie’s success,” King continues. “I got a lot of calls on the back of that record, which was terrific. It was great to know that you were vindicated, because it was such a great record, and it was received as such. And it’s quite amazing how people still refer to that record. I go around to studios and I have a handful of CDs I use when I go into a new control room; I put them on so I can tune the room to those songs, because I know they sound good and they sound good in certain ways. Reference discs, I use them as reference discs. And a lot of people have Dookie as a reference disc for their control room sound. So I think, from a technical point of view, all the frequencies are there in the right proportions, the drums really punch very well, the bass is great. That kind of thing. The proportions are right. So if you’re doing a band, they can look at that and say, ‘These proportions are right, let’s refer to that’. Then they can look at that and see, for instance, where the vocals sit in the mix. They can try and do a representation of that, and say, ‘Well, I know that record sounds great outside, so I’ll use that as my point of reference to where I want my vocal to sit.’”

  “For me personally, it was, ‘Wow, I messed up,’” says Hart of the job he missed out on. “‘I guess Neill’s got good luck, and he’s gonna have a good run ahead of him.’ And he did, too. He definitely got a ride for a few years off of that success, which is cool. From a musical standpoint, I don’t think I was terribly surprised at the record’s success, because I thought they were very good. But you never know. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and have only twice ever called a hit. You just never know, honestly; you think it’s one and it’s not, or the vice versa.”

  After finishing work on the album, Green Day joined Bad Religion’s Recipe For Hate tour. After the tour, they also ended up going back into the studio in LA to remix the album and re-record ‘Longview’ so Tré could re-do his drum part, and because the band felt they were playing it better after two months on the road (though it retained Eggplant’s “You will!” from the Fantasy recording). And though the album was a good six months from being released, signs of the punk realm’s discontent continued to poke up. A show at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, California was picketed by punks asking fans to boycott Green Day’s major-label album on its release. Gina Arnold’s book Kiss This: Punk In The Present Tense recounts a more vocal outburst during a show at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater, when a detractor in the audience yelled the inevitable, “Sell outs!” Quick as a flash, Mike responded, “Takes one to know one!” “This is about you, buddy,” Billie Joe chimed in, introducing ‘Chump’.

  “I went to a bunch of shows when they first started that tour with Bad Religion,” says Eric Yee. “I saw a lot of those shows, Santa Cruz, LA, Tijuana. That was a killer show, actually, the one in Tijuana.” Due to his friendship with the band, Yee “would just hang out until I would see them arriving for a show and they would just get me in — that was the strategy. But as they got more popular, that got harder and harder. At one particular show, me and my friend Kevin went down to see them in LA, at the Hollywood Palladium with The Muffs. I decided just on a whim to go down there, check it out. We were trying to sneak our way in, as usual. But we couldn’t get in. At one point I had to go to the store to go get a sandwich because I was starving. And Kevin stayed in the car, and they went in, Kevin didn’t seem them, and we didn�
��t get in. So I was like, screw this. I’m just going to go and buy a ticket.

  “But Kevin was like, ‘No, hold on a second. There’s Mike D, from The Beastie Boys.’ I’m like, ‘Who? Who’s that?’ I was totally oblivious to stuff like that. But Kevin walks right up to Mike D and he’s like, ‘Hey, Mike!’ Mike D kind of looks at him like, ‘Do I know this guy?’ Kevin said, ‘Mike, if you go inside, tell Billie Joe that Eric and Kevin are outside and they can’t get in, and they came all the way down from the Bay Area.’ Mike D goes, ‘Eric and Kevin. I’m going to tell him.’ I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me, that guy isn’t going to do shit for us.’ So I bought a ticket, then we went in. Green Day had just played their first song when I got in, and Billie Joe said, ‘Hey, is Eric Yee here?’ I’m like, oh shit, I can’t believe it, like Mike D told him! Billie Joe goes, ‘Eric, raise your hand!’ He had the crowd chanting my name, which was one of the coolest things ever. That’s the first and last time that’s ever going to happen. So we hooked up with him and then he got us into the show the next night.”

  The size of the shows tipped Yee off to the fact that Green Day wasn’t going to remain just an East Bay success much longer. “Those big gigs in LA were massive,” he says. “There were kids there with their moms and dads! I was freaking out. It was crazy. And after that they were always touring. You couldn’t even just go to a show like the Palladium; if I could just find them, they’d let me in, but by then, it was impossible.”

  It was decided that the album’s first single and video would be ‘Longview’, mutually chosen by the label and the band, though Mike admitted the band was “a little more hesitant” about the choice than the label was. The video marked the first time the group worked with Mark Kohr, with whom they would make a total of nine videos. “They’ve always been great,” Kohr says. “We’ve always had a really good working relationship. There’s always been a good balance in terms of Billie, Mike, Tré, and me working it out together. Billie’s the main, creative force there, though Tré and Mike would come up with things. But Billie’s always the final say. He wouldn’t be difficult about it. But you just knew that when he spoke, he was setting the tone.”

  Kohr was originally from the Los Angeles area and moved to San Francisco in 1982 to attend San Francisco State, majoring in Fine Arts with a minor in business advertising. After graduation, he worked at Colossal Pictures. “They did TV commercials, credit sequences, cartoons,” he says. “I did some film effects, like Ghostbusters, that’s one I worked on. All kinds of different things. Then in late ’89, a friend of mine said, ‘Why don’t we make a video? I’ll produce it and you direct it. We’ll use our own money.’ And I said, ‘Sure. That’d be great.’ Because everyone always says, ‘I want to be a director,’ and I thought, I’m not going to talk about it, I’m just going to do it.”

  Kohr’s first video was with the local band Buck Naked And The Bare-Bottom Boys, on the equally colourfully titled ‘Teenage Pussy From Outer Space’. He then began working with Primus, for whom he made a number of videos. “It was a great relationship, because we did artistic, really cool videos,” he says. “But they just didn’t show that much on MTV.”

  In late ’93, he was contacted by Cahn-Man and went to meet Green Day at their office. Kohr was not familiar with the group. “I didn’t do the whole East Bay scene,” he says. “I didn’t know Green Day and I didn’t know Rancid or those guys. I didn’t know that Gilman Street thing. Because Primus wasn’t really a part of that scene. If I did go to punk shows, it would be in the city, like at the Mabuhay Gardens and stuff, but that was before Green Day. I would go and see bands all the time, but I wouldn’t see bands like a nut. I wasn’t like, ‘I want to be in this band thing, in this band culture.’ For me, it was all about making images and all about working with emotions and being creative. That was my background, it was a visual background.”

  What struck Kohr on first meeting the group was how young they were. “They were just like kids,” he says. “Billie had these sort of dreadlocks. They were just so young. And they were a little nervous, because they hadn’t done a video. I think why they came to me was because I was the guy who was doing the Primus videos, and at the time, we were doing a lot of fun work. And they really respected those guys.

  “The meeting was kind of like, ‘Let’s see if we get along,’” Kohr continues, “but at the same time, I think I had the job, unless it completely didn’t work at all. And so I went and I talked to them. And I’ve always been really open to the artist expressing themselves; I’m a really good listener, because I’m an artist myself, and I know where they’re coming from. I’ve always known that when an artistic person talks, you really need to listen; they’re actually telling the truth, but they’re nervous, because you are a new person in their environment, and so they’re not fully expressing their meaning, but it’s all there. I remember going in and saying, ‘Do you guys have anything in mind?’ And Billie said, ‘I was thinking maybe you’d just shoot us watching TV in our apartment.’ I took that and I went and listened to the song, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is like watching TV, beating off, and not having anything to do, being bored and stuff.’ So I submitted a treatment, because the way music videos are dealt with, you get a song, then you get a number — how much they want to spend — and you write a treatment. And so I wrote a treatment that was pretty close to what they ended up doing. And the budget was approved real quickly. During that time, Billie would call me, or I’d call him and ask if they wanted anything else, and he’d throw in, ‘Well, can we have a monkey?’ and I was like ‘Sure, let me see if I can …’ and then we’d find a monkey.”

  The video was shot over two days at the Ashby Avenue house. “It’s always easier shooting on a set,” Kohr says. “But what was great was that it had all these things, like it had a real low ceiling, and visually it would really feel like it was pushing down on them, oppressive and claustrophobic.” The video cuts between Billie Joe, lounging around the messy living room on his couch watching television and the band performing in even smaller spaces like the bathroom. Underscoring the seediness of the environment, the band members themselves look somewhat grimy. At the end, Billie Joe stabs the couch in frustration, then sits back in boredom as the couch’s stuffing falls silently around him. At one point, the TV screen shows an animated sequence of a dog throwing a handful of “dookie”, making a visual link to the album’s cover.

  Kohr put in a few other touches. “I had the mirror panels put in there behind Billie’s head,” he explains, “so he’s watching TV, but you also see the TV in the same shot. Just stuff like that, so the story’s clear. Because if you just have a shot of him, a shot of the TV, then you just have more shots of him but you never see another TV, in terms of the story, or if the viewer comes in at the middle of the video, they might not get what’s going on.”

  Kohr says the band also wanted to make the song’s references to self-gratification more explicit. “They wanted to somehow imply that there was a guy who was masturbating in there, and they wanted to use this friend of theirs,” he says. “And so I had a PA run out to this vintage store where they have stuff from the Fifties, because I was like, ‘I need to get something that doesn’t have a copyright on it so that we don’t have to pay for it, and where we can fuzz out the naughty bits, so it’s not so risqué that TV won’t show it.’ When he came back the guy was like, ‘I went to this place, and I’ve never gone to a place like that before!’ and he had Gent or something. And we shot this thing where there was a guy pretending to masturbate. And it was kind of funny and awkward and stuff. But it didn’t make it in the video.”

  Despite Gilman’s ostensible ban on bands on major labels, Green Day did manage to play the club again. Livermore remembers an unannounced show around Christmas in 1993, when they played under an assumed name. He later wrote of the gig, “We were all dancing and singing along together, and it was all warm and festive and family-like, but there was also this bittersweet feeling that came from
knowing that things would never be like this again, that this was the last time we’d all be together this way.”

  “Green Day played at Gilman until they got too big for it,” Jesse Michaels says. “There was never an intentional ‘final show’, but people may have called it that after the fact. When they were really huge they showed up once or twice and played shows. I’m sure it was a confusing mess. The best shows were when they were the house band and it was another day in the neighbourhood.”

  But those days would soon be behind them. Though no one realised it, Dookie was about to turn their lives upside down. In retrospect, people like Frank Portman say that shouldn’t have been a surprise. “There’s no mystery why Dookie was such a runaway hit, because it’s so well recorded and the songs are so well constructed and catchy,” he says. “It’s obvious when you hear it. I mean, it was like that with Nevermind; I remember first hearing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and when somebody told me it was Nirvana I was kind of surprised, but then it was like, ‘Okay, alright, they take this chord progression and have made it into this thing that’s going to be the biggest deal in the world.’ I mean, the second you heard it, you knew that. And there’s something of the same thing about the sound of Dookie; when you first heard it, you just knew it was destined for big things.”

  It was also destined to change the main thrust of the alternative rock scene. As Simon R. Barry wrote after Dookie’s release in the UK magazine e.p.: “Grunge is dead, long live Green Day.”

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  * Cahn-Man’s roster would later broaden; not only would the company manage The Muffs and Jawbreaker, they would also serve as legal representatives for The Offspring, Rancid, Primus, Mudhoney, and jazz-rock guitarist Charlie Hunter.