Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  By 1989, Ginoli had moved to San Francisco and was working for Rough Trade Records during the time the label released albums by the lesbian folk-rock band Two Nice Girls. “They weren’t really a punky band, but they had this song called ‘The Queer Song’, which was really funny and really blunt,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Why aren’t guys doing anything like this?’ And after attending a Two Nice Girls show where he was invited by the group to be one of their go-go dancers for the night, Ginoli began writing songs for a group he already had a name for — Pansy Division.

  Chris Freeman became the other founding member of the group, which was primarily a three piece (a second guitarist joined in 1997). In 1992, they put out their first record, a single, on Lookout. “And the thing about going with Lookout that turned out to be so advantageous was because of the Green Day connection,” Ginoli says. “The funny thing is, I’d never seen Green Day before we ended up going on tour with them. They always used to book shows in San Francisco and then cancel them, so there were a couple times they were supposed to play a club two blocks by my house, and both times I went to the club and they had canceled the show. I thought their Lookout records were pretty good, which is why I wanted to go see them. I thought, ‘If they’re this good live, they could be great.’ So I was interested in them.”

  Ginoli had liked Dookie (“I thought Dookie was great,” he says, “Dookie and Warning are my favourite albums of theirs”), and had received an unexpected offer to tour with Green Day in May 1994, the fortunate result of running into Tré while riding a BART train with Chris Appelgren, who worked at Lookout and later became a co-owner of the label. “We were changing trains,” Ginoli recalls, “and there was Tré. And it was like, ‘Oh hey, hi, how are you doing? Hey, nice to meet you. Hey, I gotta get on this train, bye.’ And Chris said to me, ‘You know, Green Day are fans of yours.’ (Billie Joe told MTV Pansy Division was “the future of what’s going to happen in rock’n’roll music.”) And I said, ‘Really? I didn’t know that, that’s cool to know. I’d like to open for them.’ And Chris says, ‘Well, I think they might be looking for an opening band.’ So he gave me Tré’s number and I called him up, and left a message. He called me back and he says, ‘Hey, so, do you guys have a van?’ That was basically all he said. And I said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got our own van.’ And he goes, ‘Okay. Then I didn’t hear anything, and I thought, ‘Well, I guess we’re not going to go on tour with Green Day.’ Then about six weeks later he calls back and says, ‘Hey, we’re going on tour, do you want to come open for us?’ And I said, ‘Hell, yeah!’”

  In contrast to those who thought signing with a major inevitably meant “selling out”, Ginoli says, “One of the things I admired about Green Day was that they signed to a major label and didn’t do anything different. I think selling out is when you change your sound in order to make money, and they’ve never done that. So I have tremendous admiration for the way that they’ve conducted themselves, and conducted their career, both when they were on an indie and when they were on a major. I felt really lucky that not only did we have this chance to tour with a big band, it was also somebody whose music I enjoyed and that we could really support. And who didn’t act like rock stars, just acted like cool people who were musicians.”

  Though in between drummers, Pansy Division having a perennial drummer problem (“Between the first show we played with Green Day and the last show we played with them in early ’95, they saw us play with four different drummers”), a suitable player was secured in time for the tour. “We got along really well with Green Day, they were really nice people,” Ginoli says. “And they liked us, but one of the main reasons they wanted us along, why they asked us instead of the other bands they could’ve asked, was that they were having growing pains. They were finding themselves face to face with a pretty mainstream audience who were not like the more informed indie punk audiences that they had had before. So they were getting people at the shows who were being jerks and doing stupid things and it really irritated them. (In the wake of Hatch Shell melee, Billie Joe had made a similar observation: “Punk rock has become mainstream again and a lot of the people in the public don’t know how to grasp it.”) So they thought, ‘Huh, let’s get Pansy Division. That’ll show ’em!’”

  Their first tour with Green Day took in “secondary, second tier, middle-sized cities,” says Ginoli. “There were a bunch in Canada. I think Philadelphia was the biggest city we played.” There were several challenges for the band, not least of which was adjusting to playing on a larger stage, something Ginoli noted Green Day was now able to do with ease. “We were used to communicating with a hundred people who we could all see,” he says. “And suddenly you’ve got 9,000 people in the Philadelphia arena. I remember at one show Chris said something about what was going on down front, and I was just like, ‘Chris, shut up. Ninety-eight percent of the people here have no idea what you’re talking about.’ You have to make your gestures bigger, you have to change how you communicate with the audience. So we were trying to do our best to keep people’s attention. And Green Day were great at it, they were big, big ol’ hams. And we could be too, but we had to learn how to do it.”

  Then there was the fact that the audience was impatiently waiting to see the headliners. “It wasn’t just a band that people were going to see,” Ginoli says. “It was a band that people had discovered recently and were fanatical about. So we knew that whatever band was going to be there opening was going to have an uphill struggle. But we did okay. I mean, we had a really mixed reaction, but we always would sell T-shirts and CDs at the end of the night. And the audience was real young; I mean, we were expecting when we started our band that people would be in their twenties, thirties, and forties, not teenagers, and certainly not 13-year-olds or 11-year-olds. So it was pretty eye-opening.”

  Especially as this youthful audience was confronted with songs like ‘Groovy Underwear’, ‘Rachbottomoff’, and ‘A Song Of Remembrance For Old Boyfriends’. “We didn’t set out to be an educational band,” Ginoli says. “We set out to document things that people like us hadn’t had documented in songs. And we were playing for an audience that already got it. Suddenly we were playing for an audience that had no idea what we’re talking about, and it really scared kids, but it also really awakened kids. What was great about it was it got kids talking; here’s teenagers hearing somebody just talking about being gay, and it’s real matter of fact. We thought, ‘Suddenly we have access to all these young ears, and what are we going to tell them? We’re going to tell them that gay is okay in a non-preachy, really enjoyable way.’ And we’re funny and we’re playing music in a style that they can identify with. So we really kinda blew their minds; they knew they shouldn’t react against us, but they couldn’t react for us either. And then there were some times where it was pretty successful, where the audience seemed to genuinely enjoy it.”

  One advantage was that many of the venues had general admission, enabling the crowd to always be jockeying for a better viewing position. “Pretty much the places we were playing were sold out,” says Ginoli. “They were packed. People wanted to see Green Day and they wanted to get as close as they could, so they would grab their places and then stay put. But we always had a certain amount of rancour. It wasn’t violent, it was just, you know, like being heckled. There were very few times where it was really tilted one way for us or against us.” One of those times when the crowd was definitely tilted against them was in Detroit, when the band was pelted with coins, though Ginoli adds, “They threw some coins at Green Day, too.” Ginoli ended up picking up $40-worth of coins from the stage after Pansy Division’s set.

  “And if the crowd didn’t react too well toward us that night, Green Day would say something about it during their set, like, ‘What’s wrong with you idiots? Pansy Division are great, what’s your problem?’” he says. Once, Ginoli saw Tré slam-dancing in the mosh pit during their set. “And they’d always mention us during their set, and we were always so grateful for that
, that they were truly supportive,” he says. “I had wanted at one point to contrive some pictures of me and Billie Joe making out, to start spreading rumours [especially in the wake of the interview Billie Joe would do with The Advocate in 1995, where he expressed his support for gay rights, not to mention the band’s penchant for wearing women’s clothing on stage]. And he consented to do it, but then my camera ran out of film, so I only have one picture and it’s not too lascivious, unfortunately. The moment was there, then the moment passed; I wished I had more film!

  “And the Lookout connection turned out to be really important,” he adds. “After we stopped touring with them, they brought all these other Lookout bands on tour opening for them. So it said something about trying to keep a connection to the indie world instead of going off and having whatever major-label unknown band open for you. I think it made a comment about — and I kind of hesitate to throw around this word — a kind of community.”

  Another way of demonstrating their support to the indie community they sprang from was Green Day’s endeavouring to keep ticket and merchandise prices down. 1994 was the year members of Pearl Jam had testified before US House Subcommittee hearings about the practises of the nation’s largest ticket vendor, Ticketmaster, claiming the company had a monopoly in the industry and that the service charges tacked on to ticket sales were too high. Conversely, Green Day was able to keep their ticket prices low by reducing their cut of the ticket sale, sleeping on their tour bus instead of in a hotel, and employing a small crew. The cost of a number of shows in ’94 was less than ten dollars, a strategy one booker told Billboard was “a brilliant move … Who’s not going to go for $7.50?” One reason the group had played Woodstock ’94 was, in fact, because of what they were offered to do the show, a fee which helped offset the loss they took by keeping their ticket prices so low the rest of the year. As Billie Joe later told the Boston Globe, “It’s what we think we’re worth … We sleep on the bus. We’re all fairly young, so we can still take some bumps and bruises on the road.”

  On November 4, Green Day won the first awards of their career, when the ‘Longview’ video received both the Maximum Vision award (given to the video clip that’s judged to have done the most in advancing an artist’s career) and the Best New Artist award in the Alternative/Modern Rock category at the 16th annual Billboard Music Video Awards, held at the Loews Santa Monica Hotel in LA. The awards were accepted by Wendy Griffiths, Warner Bros’ director of national video promotion, as the band was, of course, onstage that night at the Olympic Velodrome, in Carson, California.

  In December, the band arrived in New York City. On the second, they performed at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale on Long Island, where they came on “like an atomic bomb, sending a capacity crowd into a body-surfing, clothes-throwing pop-star frenzy furious enough to suggest a Saturday-morning cartoon show might be in Green Day’s future,” in the words of Newsday. Those who made donations for radiostation sponsor WBAB-FM’s annual food drive were also entered in a drawing to win backstage passes for the show. The next day, the band members could be found behind the counters of J & R Music World and Sam Goody record stores in Manhattan as part of Counter AID, an event organised by the AIDS charity group LIFEbeat, which enlisted well-known personalities to serve as shop clerks for a day. That evening they made their debut on Saturday Night Live, where they performed ‘When I Come Around’ (a performance that later appeared on Volume 2 of the CD Saturday Night Live: The Musical Performances), along with a new song, ‘Geek Stink Breath’.

  They wound up their stay in the Big Apple with another notable appearance by headlining radio station Z-100’s Acoustic Christmas Concert. The show, which also featured Bon Jovi, The Indigo Girls, Weezer, Sheryl Crow, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Melissa Etheridge, Hole, and Pansy Division on the bill, benefited both LIFEbeat and the American Suicide Foundation. Despite the show’s name, most acts didn’t play acoustic sets, and the number of artists on the bill had the show running over six hours, into the wee hours of the morning. But Billie Joe managed to jolt the crowd awake by returning to play the group’s encore, ‘She’, completely naked, save for his guitar. “His impulsive need to be noticed turned a musical endurance test into what will be one of the most talked about concerts of the year,” said the New York Post. The next year, ‘She’ would reach number five on the Modern Rock chart and number 18 on the Mainstream Rock chart.

  December also saw the release of the band’s next single, ‘When I Come Around’. The song topped the Modern Rock charts for seven weeks, and turned up at number two on the Mainstream Rock chart and number six on the Hot 100 Airplay chart. For the first time, the band was so busy that Mark Kohr’s initial discussions about the video were held with the management, not the group. “The band was out on the road, and I couldn’t get in contact with them,” he explains. “And the management said, ‘Well, Billie says it’s about voyeurism. He wants it to be about voyeurism.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’ And then they said, ‘Why don’t we make it about this girl, and there’s this guy, like this evil kid, and he’s like looking at the girl …’ And I was like, ‘Oh God! We don’t need to put out any more images like that!’ Because the band was so incredibly popular, and I didn’t want to be communicating that kind of message.

  “What I try to do in my music videos is I always try to work with different ideas, different visual themes and emotional themes and different stories, ideas, philosophies,” Kohr continues. “‘Longview’ was a sort of realistic presentation of these guys and their house, their apartment — it had theatrical elements, but still, they were not overly theatrical; it was cool, it was their environment. Then we had this colourised insane asylum. So I thought about ‘When I Come Around’ and thought well, why don’t I make it about this concept of the beautiful stranger, or the stranger you fear.”

  Kohr’s idea was to have a chain of people looking from one to the other. “But the thing is, it really took a lot of finesse to communicate that,” Kohr says, “Because when I went to talk to Billie about what we were going to do, I had to do that in front of the managers. And they didn’t want my idea. But I told Billie and he liked it, and I was like, ‘Thank God.’ Because I know it sounds funny, but television is an incredibly powerful medium. It really shapes the way people think and view their world, and so I was just trying to be responsible.”

  Kohr’s underlying intention was to put the viewer in the shoes of the video’s varied cast of characters, as they look from person to person and get their own ideas of who they think that other person is. “There’s the first guy and he looks out his window and sees a woman in the window opposite,” he explains. “And then we go to the woman, but she’s this old lady and she gets kind of dressed up. And she looks out the window and she sees like a mom and her little girl, and she’s like the old pretty lady who never had any kids. And she has her idea about them. And then we go to the little girl, and she looks out the window and she sees the ‘bad man’ and then the bad man looks and he sees the couple that are kissing, and thinks about how, ‘Gosh, that’s what I would like’ — the girl thinks he’s a bad man, but he wants to be a lover. And then the lovers walk and they look, and they see the old man in the wheelchair and they fear death, or whatever. It’s like that, it goes around in a circle. It’s sort of that idea that we all judge each other, but really we all are in that same situation of thinking that everyone else might be in a better situation — or a worse one, or whatever — than yourself, but really we’re all kind of experiencing the same thing. And what’s great is that people have told me that they interpreted it as exactly that, and I was like, ‘Thank God, I did my job.’”

  For the first time in one of their videos, the band isn’t seen performing. Instead, they are shown walking around the streets of San Francisco (and, in some shots, a BART station; the other scenes were shot in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles), making them, or at least Billie Joe, the singer, something of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action. The video premiered on MTV o
n December 11.

  What had been the busiest year in Green Day’s career finally began winding down with a December 13 show at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom filmed for later broadcast on MTV. It was final proof of their surging popularity. Even with their prodigious touring schedule, they still couldn’t be everywhere at once; a filmed performance would help them reach fans all over the world. The cameras also caught the band singing Pansy Division’s ‘Groovy Underwear’ in their van after the show. “But it’s not credited, so people who didn’t know us have no idea what it is that they’re doing,” says Ginoli. A New Year’s Eve show had also been set at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, with Pansy Division and Dinosaur Jr. opening. “And I was like, ‘That’s going to be the greatest!” says Ginoli. “But Tré’s wife [the couple actually married in March 1995] was about to have her kid, so they cancelled out. I was like, ‘Oh no, they can’t cancel it!’ She had her baby like a week later.”

  The show may also have been cancelled because the group was just worn out. Billie Joe told Entertainment Weekly, he was “Exhausted … I’ll probably sleep for the rest of the year.” It had perhaps not yet sunk in that the band was now firmly on the major-label album-tour/album-tour treadmill, and the current respite would only be momentary. With demands for more touring and the all-important necessity of releasing a follow-up album while the band’s profile was still high, Green Day’s schedule would be just as hectic the next year.

  CHAPTER 6