Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  CHAPTER 5

  The Dookie Hits The Fan

  “I still scratch my head and say, ‘How in the hell did they make it?’”

  — Tré Cool’s dad to Rolling Stone, January 26, 1995

  Dookie was released in the US on February 1, 1994. The cover art featured a cartoon illustration of the East Bay in the process of being bombed. UC Berkeley’s Sather Tower — more popularly known locally as the Campanile, after the tower of the same name in Venice — is on the right, and a cluster of factories emitting fumes next to a drawing of a skull and crossbones can easily be read as the oil refineries of Rodeo. Some of the band’s friends cavort among the people in the foreground; Murray Bowles can be seen holding a camera up to snap a picture in his trademark fashion. A BART train snakes through the scene and the blue-and-white striped awning of a Telegraph Avenue hangout, Café Mediterranean — here labeled “Da Med” — can be seen. Dogs on the rooftops hurl fistfuls of excrement down on those below; one also pilots the plane that’s dropping bombs labeled “DOOKIE”. Green Day’s name rises out of the resulting blast, while a monkey sits in the lower left corner, looking at his own handful of poop, thinking, “Throw?” The illustration was by Richie Bucher, a member of East Bay group Sweet Baby, and whose artwork on a record by the band Raooul (another Lookout act) had favourably impressed Billie Joe.

  The in-jokes continued throughout the accompanying booklet. Among the illustrations are a sign reading, “Now Entering OAKLAND,” a flyer under the lyrics for “Having A Blast” reading, “Having A Blatz,” and, on the last page, one of San Francisco’s bridges being blown up (as the drawing is in black and white, you can’t tell if it’s meant to be the grey San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, or the more well-known orange Golden Gate Bridge). The back cover featured a photograph of a mosh pit. On the original version, a hand puppet of Ernie, from Sesame Street, can be seen emerging from the middle. On later pressings, the Muppet was airbrushed out, supposedly because of possible copyright infringement, though the original booklet did note that the character was copyrighted by “Jim Henson Productions, Inc.” [sic]. Billie Joe later said that the complaints of an “old woman”, who’d bought the record for her kids and been “horrified” at the album’s content had led to Ernie’s removal.

  The album (which was also available in a limited edition on green vinyl) sold a modest 9,000 copies in its first week of release. Sales were initially slow; it wasn’t until the following year that Dookie would peak in the US charts at number two. And for all Mark Kohr knew, the ‘Longview’ video wasn’t about to take off immediately either. “When we were working on the video, we had no notion of whether it would turn into anything at all,” he says. “It could have shown once on MTV as far as I knew, because that’s what I had done up to that point. We would do these incredibly cool videos for Primus; I mean visually, they were amazing, and really innovative, stylistically. And they would show once, and it was always really disappointing to us. I’d later hear, ‘Oh yeah, when that “Mr. Crinkle” video came out, it blew me away, and so-and-so brought it in and showed it to everybody …’ I wish we knew that, because we felt like we were doing them and just throwing them out there and they were having no impact. So with ‘Longview’ I felt like, ‘This video isn’t really going to do much of anything.’”

  But ‘Longview’ generated strong interest as soon as MTV added it to its playlist on February 22 (it reached the station’s “Buzz Bin” on March 28). “Oh yeah,” says Kohr. “It became huge! Later, when I’d pass the house where it was filmed on the way to my chiropractor’s, I’d blow it a kiss. I’m serious. Every time. Because my career just — boom! — took off huge after that.” And three days before the video reached MTV, Dookie entered the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart at number 127. It would stay on the charts for 113 weeks. The singles charts in the magazine had long since been split into far more categories than simply Pop, R&B, and Country. There were now charts for Modern Rock, Mainstream Rock, Airplay Chart-only, Sales Chart-only, Heatseekers, and more, reflecting the ever-more niche-driven US radio markets. Songs also charted if they were simply serviced to radio and not sold to consumers. So, while ‘Longview’ didn’t appear on the Pop Top 40, it did top the Modern Rock chart, peaked at number 13 in the Mainstream Rock chart, and reached 36 in the Airplay chart.

  As the album, single and video wended their way up the various charts, Green Day was busy promoting their album on the road. March was full of TV appearances: Late Night With Conan O’Brien on March 16 (Mike later told Entertainment Weekly he’d been so mortified at how he looked and sounded that he trashed his hotel room), The Jon Stewart Show on March 17, and MTV’s 120 Minutes on March 20.

  By the time the band briefly came off the road in April, Dookie had sold 65,000 copies and the band began working on their second video, ‘Basket Case’. “‘Longview’ took off immediately,” says Kohr, “like — boom! — it exploded. We were all really taken aback by it, and then they wanted us to start talking about the second video really quickly. So I went to meet with the band, and Billie was like, ‘I’m just getting freaked out; every time I turn on MTV, there’s my face.’ He was a little bit nervous about it. So I said, ‘What do you guys want to do?’ And Billie said, ‘Well, I was thinking we could shoot in an insane asylum, and I’d be surrounded by crazy people’… maybe reflecting the situation he felt he was going through. And of course the people in the meeting were just like — I could just see the hair go up on their heads — ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Again, I just try to be calm with the artist and not say, ‘No,’ because that’s not the way to go; there are ways to deal with things where everybody gets what they want.”

  Aside from the unusual setting, ‘Basket Case’ was essentially a straightforward performance video. “I felt that if I had them to act too much, they might be uncomfortable,” Kohr explains. “I mean, they’ve grown more comfortable with that in time, but I just really tried to be easy with them in terms of that stuff at the beginning. The great thing is that Billie, he’s just a natural, a natural entertainer. And you basically build the environment around him, and you put everything in place, and then he knows what to do; he just feels it and he goes with it. It’s very easy with him, if you set everything up right. But at that time, if I over-directed him and Mike and Tré … well, Mike would get stressed out. Not Tré. Tré is always a big ham. But they might get stressed out and it might be really wooden and unnatural and they might feel they were doing something that they shouldn’t quote unquote ‘be doing.’

  “At the time I also had them take care of their own clothes,” Kohr continues, “because I just really wanted them to feel the most comfortable. We were in the Bay Area at the time, and they really had an idea of what they wanted to do stylistically. Whereas, when you come down to LA, everyone needs a stylist and the stylist goes and picks stuff out. But if it can happen naturally from those individuals, it’s so much more expressive and appropriate.” (In fact, it looks like Billie Joe is wearing the same T-shirt he had on in the ‘Longview’ video.)

  Kohr located an actual insane asylum in the Bay Area, where the video was shot over the course of two days in an empty wing. “It was creepy,” he recalls. “It was haunted, it felt like. It was so rich, full of vibes. And of course part of it was a functioning insane asylum, so we’d go by the places where the insane people were, and it was pretty heavy.” The video starts with Billie Joe being handed his guitar by an aide. Tré is wheeled up to his kit in a wheelchair, and Mike is wheeled in on a stretcher, as if coming from a bout of shock therapy (disoriented, he is led to the mic stand and has to have someone help him strap on his bass). As the band plays, other “patients” meander around them; most were friends of the band, many of them (including Tré’s father) wearing Kabuki theatre masks that Kohr had picked up. The music conveys a joyous sense of release, but at the video’s end, the band is securely locked inside the ward. As the single wasn’t going to be released until the summer, Kohr had time to shoot in black
and white, and then have the film colourised.

  “I shot it all on 16mm, so it’d have kind of a rough look,” he explains. “But it would also have this really strong colour on top of it. At the time, people would shoot in 35mm, so it’d be smooth, and then put the colour on it. But I wanted it to be kind of gritty, because it’s a punk thing, so I shot in 16mm. And then it was all hand-painted. It worked out well, because the colours are really unusual.”

  The shoot occurred in early April — coinciding, Kohr recalls, with the shocking announcement that Nirvana’s lead singer, guitarist, and creative force, Kurt Cobain, had been found dead in his Seattle home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Green Day had just played in Seattle at the all-ages club Oz on April 5, and returned home after playing Vancouver, B.C., on April 6. “I remember going to their home, Billie was just like, ‘Oh my God, did you hear …?’ He was sitting on the same sofa that we shot him on [in ‘Longview’]. And I was like, ‘I know.’ It was just wild. He was really taken aback by the whole thing, of course, he was really affected by it.” (In a slight variation, Billie Joe remembers hearing about Cobain’s death when ideas for ‘Basket Case’ were still under discussion.)

  Nirvana had been credited with kicking the door open for alternative rock, when their landmark album Nevermind was released in September 1991 and the hitherto little-known band ended up topping the US charts four months later. In retrospect, 1991 had been dubbed “the year punk broke” (ultimately the title of Dave Markey’s documentary of Sonic Youth’s summer ’91 tour of European rock festivals, which also featured Nirvana), when the underground/alternative music scene that had been percolating beneath the surface over the previous decade finally breeched the mainstream arena. Observers such as Dean Carlson, a DJ who’d worked at several radio stations in Washington state during the Eighties and Nineties, notes that the dearth of compelling music in the American Top 40 meant that the listening audience was ready for something new and different — like Nirvana — and, later, Green Day.

  “In the early Nineties, I think pop ran out of new ideas,” he says. “That was kind of a stinky time. You had bands like INXS that kept releasing records. You had very average-sounding hip-hop/R&B that wasn’t really hip-hop because it was before it was really political. You had Michael Jackson releasing his umpteenth album, and you had MTV and VH1 churning out so much sound-alike music. That was also the early stage of when boy-bands were exploding and New Kids On The Block segued into Backstreet Boys, and there was just so much sugar and saccharine out there that punk was refreshing. And that’s really when ‘alternative,’ to use a term that I loathe so much, because no one really called the music that unless you were in the industry — the chart was alternative, but if you bought the music, you never really called it that. Anyway, that’s why alternative was so refreshing at the time when all that other music was just boring everyone to death. And not only the tastemakers were hungry for something new, I think the masses were hungry for something new. Sometimes that’s all it takes. It’s almost like all the planets have to be aligned at once. It’s more than having the right thing at the right time; when you say ‘the right time,’ that means, ‘What else is out there?’ And sometimes if what’s really popular is just boring everyone to tears, then it’s time for everybody to gravitate toward something new.”

  For the next few years, that something new was grunge, as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains all hit the top of the charts. Similar Pacific Northwest acts like Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Tad, and the original grungemeisters, The Melvins (who had by then relocated to California), also secured major-label deals. Major record companies quickly set up “alternative” music departments, and contracts began giving the new crop of bands more leeway as far as artistic control over their work. The mania for all things “grunge” soon surpassed the musical realm into a celebration of all accoutrements of the supposed grunge “lifestyle,” from coffee and micro-brewed beer to “grunge fashion.” (In perhaps the best example of the media utterly missing the point, Vogue’s December 1992 “Grunge & Glory” fashion spread featured “designer grunge” knockoffs of thrift-store wear priced at $500.)

  Yet the underlying tone of grunge music, steeped in melancholy (some would say negativity) also meant it would perhaps be harder to maintain substantial interest in the genre over the long run. “There was a point where grunge was so big, and there were so many bands, and it was so heavy, and they were so down, that you could only deal with so much,” says Carlson. “It really was a downer. It just was so heavy, especially when we started losing the musicians; that kind of brought it all home, especially when they took their own life. You’re just like, ‘Wow, this isn’t a fashion statement. They’re really living this life.’ Punk was very expressive and grunge was, not intuitive, but it just was … what spoke to so many people was that it was so personal. I mean, Kurt’s lyrics were incredibly touching. He was a sensitive guy, and he felt a lot of pain, and he shared that. Punk was more like the reaction from the pain. Punk is ‘hurt you’ and grunge is ‘hurt me.’ Or, ‘I am hurt.’ It’s almost like grunge turned inward and punk turned outward.

  “And maybe that just had to happen,” he continues. “I think, in some ways, the people listening to grunge were ready for something a little more positive. They just wanted to crawl out of the pit, if that makes sense. I even remember the gathering that happened at the Seattle Center after Cobain died [a public memorial held on April 10], and you could literally feel that we were ready to write a new chapter, that this would give way to something else. It’s not like the Seattle sound went away, but there was a shift.”

  And it was a shift brought around, in part, because of Cobain’s unexpected departure from the music scene. “I think that happening kind of created this space for Green Day,” says Kohr, expressing a view shared by many. “After Nirvana, there was a weird kind of vacuum really,” says UK musician/journalist John Robb. “And I don’t think anybody expected poppy-punk to fill that vacuum at all. It was a real shock. And I felt that when Green Day came over, that vacuum was getting filled; there were a few poppy-punk bands around at the time, like The Descendants, and a few other bands, even Bad Religion, to a certain extent. Green Day seemed like a younger version of all that, like an extension of that thing. I thought Dookie was a fantastic record. It was really big in England, In every little town in Britain you’d see loads of Green Day T-shirts; they definitely made an impact. The kids that had just missed Nirvana now had their own band. Even though they weren’t as heavy or intense a band as Nirvana, they touched the same topics, alienation and those kind of things. I remember seeing The Offspring and Green Day both being Top 10 in America. It seemed really weird to see punk bands names in the American Top 10, ’cause it’s always really crap, the American Top 10; it’s always R&B or really middle-of-the-road music, like The Dave Matthews Band or something like that. It was great to see some exciting bands in there; it was a complete regeneration of what punk was about.”

  A regeneration to some, but for much of Green Day’s new audience, Dookie provided an introduction to a musical genre — and history — they hadn’t previously been aware of. “My knee-jerk reaction to Dookie at the time, being a jaded 30-year-old, was, ‘Oh great, they’ve repackaged The Buzzcocks,’” says Carlson. “But then, once I calmed down, I realised that this represented a whole new resurgence of bands. Yeah, of course it sounded like 1977, but the lyrics were different. The lyrics were more timely. They had taken the — template is too technical of a term to use — but they had taken the idea of punk rock and made it a little more relevant to what was going on in those times. So even though there were these little two minute, 15 second songs that were filled with melody and a barrage of guitars, it was updated, and it didn’t take very long before I could tell that this wasn’t just another hyped thing from the record labels — ‘Look, we’ve reinvented punk rock!’ What this was, was a whole slew of bands that were taking a sound and making it available to a whole gene
ration of kids that weren’t even born when punk rock was being created. But I think that’s okay, it’s perfectly okay for bands to reinvent things from the past. I mean, follow it back, it’s been going on from the beginning; everyone’s guilty of it.”

  Green Day had no time for such analysis. At the end of April, the band headed out again on a 40-date European tour. At an advance marketing meeting, Warner Bros. European executives had been given an introductory “kit” about the group with a copy of Dookie, a ‘Longview’ video, and other promotional items packed inside individual lunchboxes. Their June 3 show in Madrid was recorded for broadcast on Spain’s Radio Nacional, and select tracks also appeared later as B-sides (a March date in Florida had been recorded for the same purpose; tracks from that show also appeared on a six-track CD released in Japan, Live Tracks). In London, they taped a session for the BBC’s Radio 1.

  They also met up with Lawrence Livermore in London, who was invited to attend the band’s June 6 show at the Astoria II. He went backstage to see his friends, but soon left as “the celebrities and TV lights were getting on my nerves.” But while walking home, the band’s tour bus pulled up, and Tré stuck his head out the window, yelling for Livermore to come aboard. While drinking together in a bar, the band was shown a copy of Billboard that had a full-page ad Reprise had taken out in the band’s honor. The ad read “Dookie Is Gold.”

  As a joke, the band later gave a gold record award to MaximumRockNRoll, feeling the magazine had regularly slighted them. “Green Day has always felt that MaximumRockNRoll was out to get them,” agrees Eric Yee. “But if you look at the record reviews, up to the major-label records they always got great reviews. It was mainly because of the people writing letters complaining about them that they got this idea that Maximum was anti-them. I don’t think Tim [Yohannan] was ever out to get Green Day. Though he was anti-corporate rock, that’s for sure.”