Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  Meanwhile, in the charts, ‘Basket Case’ spent five weeks at number one on the Modern Rock chart, reached number nine on the Mainstream Rock chart, and number 26 on the Airplay chart. ‘Welcome To Paradise’ also released as a single, reached number seven on the Modern Rock chart. Kohr says there was no video for the latter song. “Billie never wanted a video for ‘Welcome To Paradise’,” he says. “My understanding, though I could be wrong, is that Billie never wanted to do a video for it because it was essentially about the way that they lived when they were a poor band, when they didn’t have any money, and they and all their friends were in the East Bay and they were living this particular lifestyle. And ‘Welcome To Paradise’ kind of means welcome to this world, with a bunch of kids who don’t have very much money, who’re all friends. And Billie didn’t want to be singing from the position of being a popular entertainer or rock star, someone who’s making money, and singing this song that’s taking the piss a little bit about the way he and his friends used to live, because he obviously wasn’t living that way any more. He wanted to be respectful of his friends who lived that lifestyle, and respectful, I guess, of what living that way gave him.

  “There’s one song in the new White Stripes album [Get Behind Me Satan] that talks about being in your little room,” he continues. “And then the next verse is about when you get a bigger room; you get a bigger room and you try to think of something good, but you can’t, and so you have to think about what you were thinking about in your little room. Whenever I hear that song, I think of Billie and ‘Welcome to Paradise’, how the little room is what made him big, but once you get big, you can’t go back to the little room.”

  (According to Bob Sarles though, who’d edited the first two Green Day videos, a performance video was made of the song, shot during a sound check before a gig at San Francisco venue Slim’s, and directed by Robert Caruso.)

  Back in the states on another short break, Billie Joe and Adrienne Nesser (who’d moved to California earlier in the year) got married on July 2. The ceremony, held in the backyard of Billie Joe’s house, was “pieced together,” he said, from texts drawn from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religions, in order to cover all the bases. The couple spent their honeymoon at Berkeley’s posh Claremont Resort & Spa, a locale later used for band interviews over the years. The next day, on picking up a home-pregnancy kit, the two learned that Adrienne was pregnant.

  Just six months previously, Green Day had been largely unknown outside the punk rock underground, the band members living in a cramped basement. Now they were well on their way to becoming household names and selling their first million records, if not yet earning their first million in dollars. But there was scarcely time to take in all the changes in their personal and professional lives, for the band was heading out on the road yet again, touring the US and Canada on their own tour in July, and then joining the 1994 Lollapalooza bill in August. The Lollapalooza festival was a traveling rock show that had begun in 1991, co-founded by Perry Ferrell of Jane’s Addiction, spotlighting the emerging alternative scene and providing a platform for what was then Jane’s Addiction’s farewell tour. (The word “lollapalooza” is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as, “Something outstanding of its kind.”) The first tour featured Jane’s Addiction as headliners, along with Nine Inch Nails, Violent Femmes, Ice-T, and more off-the-wall performers like The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. Nirvana had been the original headliner for the 1994 festival; after Cobain’s death, Smashing Pumpkins was chosen to fill the slot. Other bands on the bill included The Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Breeders, The Flaming Lips, Guided By Voices, and L7. Green Day was only scheduled to play part of the festival, replacing The Boredoms. “We were conned into it by our management,” Mike later joked — presumably — to Spin.

  Green Day was also booked in the opening slot, having signed on to the festival prior to Dookie’s having made much of an impact. “They were opening to nobody at the beginning of the tour,” says Jennifer Finch of L7, who had made a point of listening to Dookie once she learned Green Day would be sharing the bill with them. “But then the awareness of the band really skyrocketed through the rest of the tour. They didn’t show any attitude; they operated with a lot of grace and dignity about it. They were very sweet, very humble. Just fun to be with. And they had a real sense of family, those three were really like a family together — all for one and one for all — which you really can’t buy in a band. They say a musician only gets one band like that in their lives … where everyone is just really into it because they’re into the other band members and into being together.”

  Nonetheless, Finch and L7 couldn’t resist teasing the members of this hot “new” band they’d known since Green Day’s members were still in high school. “We made fun of them intensely,” says Finch, “because they deserved it! They were like our lost little brothers. There’s those famous photos from Lollapalooza of L7 holding up signs that said, ‘Punk Rock For Sale,’ ‘Grunge For Rent,’ ‘Get Your Punk Here,’ during Green Day’s set. But it was with them, not against them. It was about the marketing of punk, the sales of it. Not the band creating it. In my perception, 1994 was the year that punk rock became a commodity in the open major-label market. I think in the Eighties is when labels shifted from having a love of music to being run by people with law degrees. And those people with law degrees did a great job of hiring people that could give the illusion that it was still about the music. The Nineties is when everything went real sharehold, that’s when things started to get sold, and companies went public, and things like that. All that sort of thing happened that year. That was the same year that L7 wrote ‘Punk Rock Broke My Heart’.”

  After playing Atlanta, Green Day left Lollapalooza for a few days to play an even higher profile event: Woodstock ’94. The original Woodstock, held August 15 to 17, 1969, had become a landmark event for the Sixties generation, “Three days of peace and music” that had featured such iconic acts as The Who, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, whose elegiac rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ was seen as a bittersweet commentary on the turmoil then going on in Vietnam. (Elliott Cahn, then in Sha Na Na, had also performed at the festival.)

  Now, 25 years later, the original promoters came together to present “Three more days of peace and music” (as the subsequent documentary was subtitled), mixing together baby-boomer faves like Santana, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Bob Dylan with newer acts like Nine Inch Nails, Melissa Etheridge, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, and Green Day. The festival was held August 12 to 14 at the 840-acre Winston Farm, in Saugerties, New York. At the time, the event was somewhat derided for being a cynical exploitation of boomer nostalgia (despite the presence of contemporary acts), further tainted by the heavy-handed touch of corporate marketing: Pepsi had paid $5 million to be the ‘Official Soft Drink’ of the festival, tickets were $135, and a live broadcast of the show was offered via pay-per-view at $50 a pop (though the fuss over Woodstock 2’s commercialisation would seem remarkably genteel after the havoc caused at the 1999 event, when the last day of the festival degenerated into rioting, resulting in extensive vandalism, property destruction, and reports of numerous sexual assaults. “The first Woodstock was peace and love, the second chaos and confusion, and the last one was just stupidity,” Mike told Entertainment Weekly).

  Still, it was a chance to perform before their largest audience to date, a reported 350,000, not to mention the additional exposure obtained through pay-per-view, and future video and record sales. “Despite the scale of it though, it was just another gig for us really,” Billie Joe later told journalist Ben Myers. “We were asked, ‘Do you want to play in front of 300,000 people?’ and we said, ‘Sure, why not?’”

  Ironically, as the group arrived for their slot on August 14, Billie Joe carefully navigated his way to the stage, anxious to keep his new Converse sneakers clean; clean shoes would be the least of his worries by the end of the set, which ranks as one
of the most raucous, chaotic — and legendary — in Green Day’s history. The rest of Billie Joe’s outfit was not dissimilar to what he’d wear on the later American Idiot tours: black trousers and shirt, with a red tie sporting a large black question mark. Mike wore a Screeching Weasel T-shirt. Tré had green hair; Billie Joe’s was dyed bright blue.

  The incessant rain during the day hadn’t dampened the crowd’s spirits, though they had become restive during the lengthy set by acts from the touring WOMAD world music festival that preceded Green Day’s arrival. As a result, the audience was wound up to the breaking point, and when Green Day’s set finally kicked off with a rousing version of ‘Welcome To Paradise’, a mosh pit erupted instantaneously. “Don’t smoke the brown weed!” Mike crowed afterwards, a reference to a stage announcement during the first Woodstock warning the audience to avoid the brown acid that had been circulating (in a jab at Woodstock ’94’s corporate sponsorship, singer John Popper had told the crowd to stay away from the “brown Pepsi” during the Blues Traveler’s set). “Look at you fuckin’ dirty mother fuckers!” said Billie Joe, before asking them to do “the wave,” over Mike’s protest, “This ain’t a fuckin’ baseball game! What the hell!” “This is off one of our records that no one has,” Billie Joe continued, introducing ‘One Of My Lies’, keenly aware the audience probably didn’t even realise the group had released any records prior to Dookie.

  And then the mud began to fly, as some in the crowd, seeking excitement beyond simply moshing, started hurling mud clods around. “Yeah, we suggest that you throw mud. That’s fun!” said Mike in response, adding, “I said [at] each other! Come on!” a moment later, when mud began flying in Green Day’s direction. Prior to starting ‘When I Come Around’, Billie Joe grabbing a flying mud clod and smeared it on his face to the crowd’s cheers (this performance ended up on the soundtrack album and video of the event). Eventually, a torrent of mud and clothing was being thrown at the stage. ‘F.O.D.’ finally lit a fire under the fans, who began leaping onto the stage in a steady stream, as a plastic tarp was hurriedly pulled over the large camera rolling on a dolly in front of the stage to protect it from flying mud. As ‘F.O.D.’ segued into ‘Paper Lanterns’, the mayhem increased, with the crew coming on stage trying in vain to block in-flight mud clods.

  Eventually, as Mike and Tré vamped on their instruments, Billie Joe dropped his guitar in favour of picking up mud clods and hurling them back at the audience. Though stopping momentarily to shout, “This isn’t love and peace, it’s fucking anarchy!” he couldn’t resist in indulging in a little more anarchy himself, going back to throwing mud. Mike lay on his back on the now mud-soaked stage, still playing his bass, then getting up to avoid Billie Joe, who slid across the stage on his stomach. Billie Joe then leaped up, shouted, “Hey, look at me, I’m a fuckin’ idiot!” grabbed his mic, and pounded it into smithereens on the stage. Grabbing another mic, he split the crowd into rival shouts of “Rock’n’roll!” and “Shut the fuck up!” before leading them in a brief sing-along of Twisted Sister’s ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’, then grabbed a young stage diver and hauled him back to centre stage, encouraging him to recite the title of The Beastie Boys classic ‘(You’ve Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)’. “Future idiot!” Billie Joe said proudly as the boy ran off stage.

  Perhaps sensing there was no other way to end things, Billie Joe finally announced, “Hey, everybody, say, ‘Shut the fuck up’ and we’ll stop playing.” When the crowd duly complied, he said, “Okay, we’re gone! Goodbye!” though even on exiting, he couldn’t resist running back to leap around with some fans who’d just jumped on the stage. Mike wasn’t so lucky; when he tried to exit the stage, the bouncers, mistaking him for a fan, caught him in a full body tackle and slammed him down, knocking some of his teeth out. The mud-drenched band finally escaped in a helicopter. It was, Billie Joe said of the experience, “the closest thing to total chaos I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” He later received an admonishing letter from his mother, who’d watched the show on pay-per-view and been highly displeased with what she called a “disrespectful and indecent” performance, adding how disappointed his father would have been with him over his antics.

  In August, Dookie was certified Platinum. After their Woodstock appearance, it leapt back up the charts to number five, and by September had been certified double Platinum. On September 8, the band attended the MTV Video Music Awards, held at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but despite being nominated for three awards — Best Group Video, Best Alternative Video (for ‘Longview’), and Best Newcomer — they walked away empty handed. Still, the band used their appearance to unveil a new song, turning in a high-powered performance of ‘Armitage Shanks’.

  The next night there was further chaos at a free outdoor concert at the Hatch Shell, an outdoor venue located in a large park along the banks of the Charles River in Boston known as the Esplanade. Throughout the day, fans had arrived to secure a good spot for the show, resulting in a crowd that swelled to an estimated 65,000 by show time, 15,000 greater than had been expected. The Boston Globe quoted Andy Govatsas of Reprise saying, “The [expletive] place is going to explode” as people continued to pack themselves into the area, and after an opening set by The Meices, the barricades in front of the stage were reinforced. Even before Green Day came on, fans were being crushed against the barriers, resulting in several pleas for the crowd to “mellow out” and step back, “or else Green Day won’t come on.”

  Green Day came on shortly after 8 pm. Billie Joe, unwisely in retrospect, further worked up the audience by cheering their efforts at tearing down a balloon emblazoned with the name of two of the sponsors, WFNX-FM and alternative newspaper, the Boston Phoenix. On seeing the size of the crowd, Mike gasped, “Oh my God!” then sounded a more cautionary note, telling the audience, “If you fall down, pick each other up,” a comment Billie Joe would echo later in the show. But fans broke through barriers during the first song, and during the seventh number, ‘F.O.D.’, it was decided to stop the show. “It was getting pretty out of hand,” the Globe quoted Elliot Cahn (himself a former resident of Boston suburb Brookline) as saying. “It’s horrible — bottles flying, people getting hurt. We thought it was a pretty good idea to end the show.”

  But fans refused to disperse, shouting, “Hell no, we won’t go! Pigs suck!” at the police, throwing mud, rocks, and bottles, then rampaging along the Esplanade, tearing up flower beds. Fifty state troopers and an additional 70 employees from Wizard Security had been on hand initially; now additional police squads, including K-9 units, were called in. More than 100 people were treated for injuries and 40 arrests were made.

  The event provoked a controversy in Boston, especially as the show was the first big rock event that had been held at the Esplanade since 1973. “Arthur Fiedler is probably turning over in his grave,” remarked Angelo Tilas, a district supervisor with the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), referring to the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, who’d held annual Fourth of July concerts at the same location. WFNX/Phoenix president Barry Morris claimed the band was in “relative obscurity” at the time they had been booked and that, “It would have been difficult for the MDC to know as much as seven days ago to have a sense of what would happen” (perhaps they should have watched the Woodstock performance on pay-per-view). An editorial in the Globe even denounced the double standard in both the media coverage and police response: “Had a stream of African-American kids leaving a rap concert flung bottles and cursed drivers in a predominately white neighbourhood, the night would be cobalt blue with squad car lights … But the responsibility for the violence that did occur bounced off white kids like Teflon, while for black kids, it would have stuck like a criminal record.” Backstage after the show, Billie Joe admitted, “A band like us is basically a disaster waiting to happen a lot of times,” but added, “If things were run more properly, I think we could have completed our set.”

  Again, there was no time to reflect further on their
escalating fame and increasing chaos at concerts, for after a quick visit to Europe, the band headed out across the US once again. For opening acts, they enlisted Germany’s Die Toten Hosen (whom Green Day had opened for in Germany the previous spring) and Pansy Division (whom they’d also toured with in July).

  Pansy Division had been formed in San Francisco in 1991 by Jon Ginoli. Ginoli, originally from Peoria, Illinois (“A town that is a national joke,” he says, “a place without culture”), spent his childhood glued to his radio. “I really liked Sixties pop radio,” he says. “The last half of the Sixties is probably the high point of Top 40 radio, ever.” He later became interested in the punk and new wave acts of the late Seventies, like The Ramones, The Au Pairs, and The Buzzcocks, and formed his first band, The Outnumbered. The band released some albums on Homestead Records, but eventually broke up.

  Ginoli had been open about being gay in The Outnumbered, but still felt he couldn’t address the topic in song. “I thought, ‘If I ever have another band, it’s going to be a band where I can be totally open and not write songs that make people read between the lines,’” he says. “But I also thought, ‘Nobody’s going to want to hear a gay rock band.’ I just couldn’t think of anything that was less commercially viable.”

  But inspiration came from three unlikely sources. Ginoli had been greatly impressed after seeing a show by controversial performance artist Karen Finley. “I had so much admiration for the fact that she seemed fearless and just would say anything,” he says. “She just really didn’t give a fuck.” He was equally struck by the outspokenness of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton. “That made me realise you could probably do anything in music now except be gay,” he says. “There’s anti-gay references on that record; they don’t go out of there way to do it, it’s just part of the life they were leading where they grew up. But it made me think, ‘Okay, you can talk about how many people you’ve killed, you can talk about murdering people, but you can’t talk about being gay. It seemed like it was the last taboo. It was like the last frontier.”