Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  Rolling With The Punches

  “Before Dookie everything was really fun, and after that, everything was angrier and more diverse.”

  — Mike to Bass Player September 2004

  As 1995 began, Green Day was still reaping accolades for Dookie, which had now sold over five million copies. Billboard named them number two Modern Rock Artists of 1994, with ‘Longview’ coming in at number three on the year-end Modern Rock chart, ‘Basket Case’ number four on the same chart, and Dookie twenty-fourth best-selling album. ‘Basket Case’ was MTV’s number one video for 1994, with ‘Longview’ coming in at number 18, and a clip of ‘When I Come Around’ from their Woodstock performance, number 70. Time was one of many magazines that called Dookie the best rock album of the year, writing, “While the raucous, cathartic songs of this Berkeley-based punk band are adolescent and snotty, they’re always laughing with you, not at you, or are they?” In February, Dookie had finally peaked in the US at number two, a year after its release. A reissue of ‘Basket Case’ reached number seven in the UK (on its first release it had stalled at 55), soon followed by ‘Longview’, which reached number 30, and ‘When I Come Around’, which reached number 27; Dookie had reached number 13.

  Green Day’s success also paid off handsomely for Lookout Records, at least initially, as sales of both 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and Kerplunk! soared; Kerplunk! topped Billboard’s Catalog chart (so-named as it reported sales of back-catalogue albums), 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Out reached number four. Both albums were certified Gold; Kerplunk! was later certified Platinum.

  On January 26, the group made the cover of Rolling Stone for the first time, having come out on top in the magazine’s annual Music Awards. Readers voted them Best New Band, Billie Joe as Best New Male Singer, and Dookie as Best Album and Best Album Cover, while the magazine’s critics also chose them as Best New Band. The accompanying article, “Green Daze: It’s Official, Green Day are the Best New Band in Rock,” by Chris Mundy, was the first in-depth profile of the band, and has since been quoted in innumerable books (including this one), fan websites, and other magazine articles.

  “Like every great cartoon, the band has it all: exaggerated insanity; video images in brilliant, primary colours; and an underlying, unexplainable innocence,” Mundy wrote, succinctly summarising their appeal. In addition to detailing the band’s history and background, Mundy also caught the group at a crossroads, coping with pressures they hadn’t anticipated having to deal with. “I’m not going to say that I don’t want to be a rock star,” said Billie Joe, trying to find his way after a year in which Kurt Cobain’s suicide sent a sobering message about the price one can pay for fame. “If you don’t want to be a rock star, then quit. That’s your best answer. Don’t be one … I want to try and make some sense of all this and not become a parody of myself.”

  Nor had the band anticipated the hostility they would face from those in the punk community for whom “selling out” to a major label was a cardinal sin. MaximumRockNRoll had driven this point home in the illustration on the cover of their June 1994 issue, which had pictured just such a “sell-out” pointing a gun in his mouth, captioned, “Major labels: Some of your friends are already this fucked.” Commenting on flyers that discontented punkers had passed out accusing Green Day of tarnishing their world by “bringing MTV into our scene.” Mike told Mundy, “I’ve never seen one TV in the punk clubs we’ve played. I think your mother and father need to take your cable away is what they need to do.” One disgruntled patron went so far as to scrawl, “Billie Joe must die” on the wall at Gilman.

  Lawrence Livermore’s last column for MaximumRockNRoll, which also ran in the June ’94 issue, was a defense of Green Day. “Is there anything still to be said on the subject of major labels?” he began. “I can’t help thinking of the preacher who, every Sunday, year in and year out, has to come up with new ways to denounce Satan.” He then pointed out the economic realities of signing to a major, namely, that most bands that do sign don’t go on to make huge amounts of money, either through record sales or touring. As such, Green Day’s signing to a major had less to do with money and more to do with taking advantage of the clout a major offered vis a vis promotion and distribution. “If you don’t like what Green Day or Jawbox or Samiam or Shudder To Think or god knows who else signed this month are doing, don’t buy their major-label records and stop worrying about them,” he concluded. “They’re big boys and girls and can take care of themselves. The only place you have in the decision-making process is in whether or not you want to go along with it.”

  “My main point was that Green Day was playing exactly the same music they’d always played and that they were entitled to do whatever they wanted with their music,” Livermore says today. “I also pointed out that they’d been more of a DIY band — touring in their own van, playing basements and free shows everywhere — than most supposedly indie bands I knew. I don’t think other bands on the label had a problem with Green Day doing what they did. If there was a problem, it might have been that some bands began thinking, ‘If Green Day can become big rock stars, we should be able to,’ and unfortunately, not every band gets to become big rock stars. So when they didn’t, sometimes they might try to blame the label for that. But that was the exception; most of the bands were very happy about Green Day’s success, not only because they liked the band and the music, but also because the attention Green Day drew to the label and the scene was beneficial for us all.”

  More opened-minded music listeners also grew tired of the backlash. One longtime Bay Area music fan, who calls himself Toxsima, was not initially interested in the band’s music, especially after hearing their first two EPs. “At that time, I was all about harder, louder, faster, or at least musically obscene and outrageously weird,” he says. “If you weren’t as hard as say, The Offenders or early Black Flag; as obscene as Scratch Acid, Big Black, or later-period Black Flag; or as weird as early Butthole Surfers, then I thought you were weak, and therefore not capital ‘p’ punk, in sound or spirit.”

  Yet Toxsima admitted he enjoyed Dookie (“I thought it was pretty catchy, kind of like how Social Distortion can be kind of catchy”) and the ‘Basket Case’ video. He’d also been familiar with what he calls, “the Green Day equals Great Music/Punk Savior vs. Green Day equals WeakLammo WannabeCrap” debate that went on in the Letters page of MaximumRockNRoll during Green Day’s pre-fame years, and, after spending some time out of state, returned to the Bay Area post-Dookie surprised to find the same debate still raging.

  “The majority consensus amongst the ‘underground’ was that ‘Green Day sold out the scene, man!’” he says. “That was 99.9% of what one heard from the mouths of the East Bay punkeratti; if you were ‘cool’, it was definitely ‘uncool’ to like Green Day. But most capital ‘p’ punks are a little too conformist in their nonconformity for me — very similar to any group where there is a party line that people are supposed to follow. And the more they moaned about how much they hated and disowned Green Day for ‘selling-out’ the scene, the more I liked Green Day, because I thought they were being narrowly and unfairly judged by these ‘alternative dictators.’ It made no sense to me that people were not happy for the three little local stoner boys done good. Why was it necessary to hate widespread approval beyond a certain level, when deep-down it’s all that any creative type hopes for?”

  In the end, for every group like Creedle, who released a single entitled ‘It’s Not Cool To Like Green Day Anymore’, there were old friends like the band Wat Tyler, who released a five-track EP on Lookout called I Wanna Be Billie Joe (though it was only the title of the record, and lacked a song of that name).Years later, Billie Joe said he wished he’d been able to not obsess on the backlash so much. “I should have taken that time and reflected a little more,” he told Livermore. Or, as Mike told the New Musical Express, “You’ve gotta put the blinders on sometimes and go forward and say, ‘To hell with what anyone says.’ You’ve just got to move forward and
I think, at the end of the day, I’m glad we’re here.”

  The band’s sudden fame also had other unexpected consequences: Billie Joe and Adrienne had moved into their first new home together, but were forced to move again when a local radio station read the address over the air. A happier development was the birth of their first child, Joseph Marciano Armstrong, in March; Billie Joe had his son’s name tattooed on his right arm. Tré’s girlfriend Lisea had also given birth to their child, Ramona, in January and the couple subsequently married in March. And the band members went out of their way to show that they weren’t just proud of becoming new fathers, they also understood the difficulties of raising children — and who was usually stuck with that burden. “Mothers have got the worst jobs in the whole world,” Billie Joe would tell Craig Marks in Spin. “And I never realised that until I had a kid. I don’t care what you do, or what job you complain about. Try to be a mother. You won’t last a fucking day.”

  “It takes so much more than physical strength,” Mike added. “It takes an emotional and mental strength that I don’t think guys possess.” These were not the kind of statements usually made by A-list rock stars — and certainly not expected from a band often written off as “snot-nosed punks” themselves.

  On March 1, the band won their first Grammy award. The ceremony was held at LA’s Shrine Auditorium, and the group had been nominated for four awards, including Best New Artist (they lost to Sheryl Crow), Best Rock Performance By a Duo or Group with Vocal for ‘Basket Case’ (they lost to Aerosmith’s ‘Crazy’), and Best Hard Rock Performance for ‘Longview’ (they lost to Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’).They finally won Best Alternative Music Performance with Dookie. They were also honoured the same month closer to home at that year’s Bay Area Music Awards ceremony, sponsored by BAM (Bay Area Music) magazine, held at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater on March 11. Dookie won Outstanding Album, Mike won Outstanding Bassist, Tré won Outstanding Drummer, and Green Day won Outstanding Group.

  On May 27 and 28 the group played their first Bay Area shows in some months, two concerts held at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, benefits for the Berkeley Free Clinic, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, Food Not Bombs, and the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. Pansy Division opened. “It was an 8,000 seat place,” Jon Ginoli recalls. “And Food Not Bombs was a radical group, so I thought, ‘That is so great.’ So we finally got to play in front of all the people here who had been hearing about us playing with Green Day but hadn’t had a chance to see us. So that was very satisfying, that was fun.”

  In fact, Pansy Division got somewhat better notices than the headliners. Barry Walters wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, “While Green Day struggled to retain its rebellious edge while enjoying MTV saturation, Pansy Division celebrated the true meaning of punk.” Green Day he found to be “… unfocused. Unless you surrendered yourself to the moshing hordes, the bad acoustics ate away at your attention. After an hour of speedy tunes and bratty catcalls, everything sounded too much alike.” However, he did note the band’s skill in subverting their newfound popularity: “Although Green Day’s speedy strummed sing-alongs have become frat-party staples, the evening was enlivened by a running parody and critique of traditional college-age masculinity that went beyond Billie Joe’s brashly thoughtful lyrics. Like Nirvana before them, the members of Green Day flaunt contempt for the bonehead element of their massive mainstream audience.”

  The band’s main task for the year was completing a new album, again using Cavallo as co-producer. The arrival of children in the Green Day family had an impact on how the songs were written — Billie Joe later said he had to retire to his basement to find a suitably quiet environment — but not necessarily on the subject matter. The bigger issue was, of course, the pressure to follow up an album that had not just been wildly successful, but something of a phenomenon. The band tried to ignore it as best they could, though Billie Joe later said that emotions had occasionally run high in the studio, and that Cavallo, among others, had even cried. When a reporter from the Dutch magazine Oor spoke to the group toward the end of the sessions and asked, “Are there any big bosses from the record company who have been watching here now and then?” Tré jokingly replied, “There’s someone waiting outside for me with a gun.”

  After rehearsing the songs in their Oakland practise space, the album was recorded at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco during the summer; though the group had 22 songs ready, only 14 made it to the album (the first studio version of ‘Good Riddance’ was also said to have been recorded during the sessions).Though Dookie was undeniably laced with moments of apathy, alienation, and even despair — not always immediately apparent due to the brightness of the music — on Insomniac such feelings were at the forefront, and readily seen in the song titles themselves: ‘No Pride’, ‘Jaded’, and ‘Panic Song’ (the latter with words by Billie Joe and Mike, based, as they later said, on personal experience). The album opens with the self-loathing of ‘Armatage Shanks’ and closes with a song that seems to sum up the group’s feelings about their unexpected success — ‘Walking Contradiction’.

  Musically, the album is punishing — a tightly wound, non-stop barrage of noise from start to finish (the album runs just under 33 minutes — “Actually, it’s an hour’s worth of songs, but we played them so fast it cut them in half,” Billie Joe joked). The beginning of ‘Panic Song’ is particularly aggressive, with an opening musical assault that goes on for almost two minutes, readily depicting the out-of-control feeling of a panic attack (something the narrator of ‘Bab’s Uvula Who?’ — a line taken from a Saturday Night Live skit — also suffers from). Illness and disease are recurrent themes throughout the album — even the album’s title evokes a disorder, insomnia, that’s also the subject of ‘Brain Stew’. ‘Geek Stink Breath’ is about the pleasures and perils (rotten teeth, bad skin) of over-indulging in methamphetamine, aptly described by Billie Joe as, “an ugly song for an ugly drug,” and drug abuse is also the subject of ‘Tight Wad Hill’, with its “white trash mannequin” left rotting on the hillside after his excursions with drugs.

  Songs about unhappy relationships suited the album’s pessimistic mood perfectly, as in the dominated love slave of ‘Stuck With You’, or the failed romance of ‘Stuart And The Ave’ (the intersection of Stuart St. and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley). ‘No Pride’ serves up more self-laceration, but the most bitter observations came in ‘86’, Billie Joe’s comment on not being welcome at old haunts like Gilman, which begins with some serious riffing that wouldn’t be out of place in a Sex Pistols song — a punk rock “you can’t go home again,” a song that’s equally tinged with sadness and burning with rage. Billie Joe would disingenuously tell Rolling Stone that Insomniac “sounds angrier than the last record but not really on purpose,” but later qualify that by saying in the same interview, “I always thought anger was a lot more interesting than feeling good about yourself.” Mike would be more blunt in Oor, saying, “The album leaves a trail of black burned rubber behind.”

  Its striking cover art was designed by Winston Smith, who had known Tré back when they were both living in Mendocino County. Smith was originally from Oklahoma, though “I left there as soon as my two feet could carry me,” he says. “I was 17 when I finally left. About 16 years too late!” He’d developed an interest in art at an early age, in part because his mother was an artist, and, finding no encouragement in his immediate environment, dropped out of high school to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, where he lived from the late Sixties to the mid-Seventies. On returning to the states, he had offers to stay with friends in Boston and San Francisco, settling on the latter city “after realising that Boston was too cold.”

  Smith then worked as “a rent-a-roadie at an outfit that rented studios and equipment. Everyone came in: Santana; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Journey — I liked a couple of guys in that band, but couldn’t really groove to their music.” But eventually he relocated to the same mountainou
s area where Tré and Lawrence Livermore were based. “All my neighbours gave their land names, like Sunrise Ranch or Shangri-La Ranch or Fairy Dust Ranch,” he says. “Kind of half-assed hippie names. Pretty Kitties Ranch.” In response, Smith called his home “Ground Zero.” “I said, in America, it’s all ground zero. There’s no getting away from it,” he explains. He’d also taken on the name “Winston Smith”, after the character in George Orwell’s grim futuristic novel 1984.

  “Larry had a place just like mine,” Smith says. “In fact, he was much more advanced, he had solar power. Kerosene lamps they used sometimes, but usually they would power up a generator. One of the first performances on his ranch had some dinky generator powering the amp, then kerosene lamps on the front of the thing. I thought great, blending the 19th and 21st centuries.” Oddly, Smith never saw The Lookouts or Green Day perform, though he did spend a lot of time with Livermore. “Mainly we used to hang out in San Francisco because we would be at friend’s clubs,” he says. “I recall one time going down 18th Street trying to figure out who was the oldest guy in the scene, him or me, he was a year older than me. Then we realised, no, no! Tim Yohannan [founder/editor of MaximumRockNRoll] is older than both of us! Good, we’re not the oldest geezers.” Smith also frequented Gilman, which was around the corner from where he’d previously lived in Berkeley.

  Smith’s interest in the music scene led to his designing posters for local shows. Eventually a mutual friend introduced him to the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra. “A friend of mine that I worked with at the time kept saying, ‘You’ve got to meet these friends of mine, they have this band,’” he recalls. “‘You think just like my friend Biafra. Here’s a record they put out, California Uber Alles.’” Smith was impressed; “They actually had something valid to say,” he says. “Some bands are just screaming weirdoes, and entertaining, but not very deep. Dead Kennedys actually had some substance to them.” On finally meeting Biafra, Smith learned that the singer had been equally impressed by an image Smith had created: a crucifix wrapped in dollar bills, complete with a bar code. “I was thinking of people making money off of religion,” he explains. “Like Jerry Falwell, and all these right-wing guys, shows like The 700 Club, which I called The 666 Club. Biafra said, ‘This is dangerous! We need to use this.’ Years later he wrote in an introduction in my second book, ‘I didn’t have a record in mind, but when I saw the piece I had to think of a record to go with the artwork.’”