Smith went on to do a lot of design work for the Dead Kennedys, including the group’s logo, a circle with a “D” and “K” emerging from the middle like the spokes of a wheel. Tré had previously asked Smith if he’d design something for The Lookouts, and though Smith agreed, nothing came of the offer. Now Smith received another call from the drummer. “He said, ‘Hey, remember when you said you could do a thing for our band? I’m in this different band now, can we come over and check out your stuff?’” says Smith. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, come by, I live in North Beach.’ So he, Bill, and Rob Cavallo came over — I think Mike was out of town. We spent two or three hours going over piles of pictures that I had. They were saying, ‘How do you do it?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not easy, but you just cut it out.’ ‘It’s all done with computers?’ ‘No, no it’s just a razor blade and glue.’ I can’t work a computer.”
Smith showed them one image from the Forties he’d clipped out of an ad of a woman in a striped dress holding a flower up to the nose of her husband, sleeping in a hammock. “And I had a picture of an armadillo and said, ‘Look, we can put an armadillo in her hands, that’s pretty weird, check it out,’” says Smith. “And Tré picks up this little revolver that I had just cut out a few hours before, and he goes, ‘Oh, how about this? She can blow his head off!’” Smith would base the rest of his design on that “spark of inspiration.”
Smith had not yet realised Green Day was no longer “a squirrelly little band.” “We went down the block to grab a pizza at an old beatnik café called Caffe Trieste, which has been there since 1956 or ’57”, he says. “It’s one of my favourite hangouts in North Beach. We were sitting there going over more pictures and I said to Tré, ‘How’s your band doing? Are you getting gigs? Do you have a day job?’ He said, ‘Let’s see, the last album we sold about nine million records.’ I nearly fell on the floor. Son of a bitch! I am literally so completely out of it, I am probably the least connected to contemporary culture of anyone I know — for me, Madonna was a religious painting. I just thought they were still gigging around, just one out of 4,000 other dinky little bands. It was really gratifying to know that they were successful.”
Smith calls his work on Insomniac “probably the most satisfying art project I’ve even worked on. Usually people say they’d like to use a picture I’d already done, and that’s fine. But these guys wanted something original. I kept saying, is there a particular scene or image you want, like gorillas or aardvarks? Biafra would be quite literal with a lot of things, he’d want to spell it out artistically. The Green lads were very open-minded; they said, ‘We just want you to do whatever you want to do. Just do your thing. It’s your record. We’ll do the music, you do everything else.’”
At that point, the album was provisionally called Tight Wad Hill, a title Smith admits “didn’t make much of an impression on me.” Instead, using Tré’s suggestion of having the woman pointing a gun at her husband, Smith decided to “build this swirl of madness” around the image. The pictures that Smith ultimately utilised, clipped from books and magazines, included two chimpanzees performing circus tricks; a violinist, somberly attired in a black robe, undergoing a chest x-ray while having his vision tested; a man trapped in “dental hell”; and Uncle Sam, praying on his knees, “taken from an old Fifties ad basically promoting McCarthyism, saying America is on her knees, and the Communist threat is going to take over the world. He’s earnestly praying, begging the Red Overlord in Moscow to let us survive.” An armadillo lurks in a corner, and flames threaten to engulf the entire scene. In a final touch, the woman lovingly pointing the gun at her husband holds Billie Joe’s guitar, “Blue”, in her left hand.
Smith designed an equally macabre collage for the back cover, of an ostensibly innocuous domestic scene; one woman sleeps in her bed, while another takes a bottle of milk from the refrigerator. But the soldier standing by the fridge is casually handing his rifle to an infant in a high chair, who in turn is busy feeding a monkey. Another man embraces an oversized bush baby, while through a window the fiery explosion of a PT boat can be seen. In the foreground, a woman applies her makeup, ignoring the mayhem around her. Behind the CD’s tray is a collage Smith had designed to be printed on the CD, a circular collage drawn from the front cover’s images. “It’s before I knew what a CD was,” he says. “I thought CDs got put on like records, you watch them spin around. Then someone said, ‘No, you can’t really watch them spin.’ I’d thought, ‘And on side two they could have …’ ‘No, no Winston, CDs don’t have side two, they only have side one.’” Ultimately a close-up of the man hugging the bush baby, (an image originally from “some insurance ad from the Thirties”) was used on the CD. “I guess the art director who slapped it all together in LA just changed his mind about what I’d done.”
Smith brought the finished work for the band to see, while they were working at Hyde Street Studios. “I used to go there all the time as a roadie,” he says. “And when I walked in there were two pieces of mine on the wall, hung in the room where the pool table was. It was kind of a shock. I said, ‘Hey, do you want me to sign that?’ They said, ‘No, no, no, that’s done by Winston Smith.’ So I pulled out my ID, and then they were like, ‘Oh yeah, will you sign it?’ I should have said, ‘That’ll be a dollar, please.’”
The group was equally impressed with both Smith’s work, and how he’d managed to complete it. “Bill asked me, ‘How long did it take you to do this?’ I said, ‘I’ve been awake for 38 hours now.’ I couldn’t stop working on it. It was like I was on this adrenaline high. He said, ‘You’re kidding me, didn’t you sleep?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t sleep, I’m an insomniac.’ About a month later when the record came out it was called Insomniac. I asked Billie one time, ‘Did you name it that because of what I said?’ He said, ‘No, it was something else.’ Then, a couple years ago I saw this teeny-bopper unauthorised DVD on Green Day, that interviewed a bunch of friends and people who knew them. And one guy who was being interviewed, his nickname was ‘Insomniac.’ Apparently that was why they named the album that.”
Smith had given the front cover collage the title, “God Told Me To Skin You Alive” (“At one point Bill said he was sorry he didn’t use that as the title for the album!”), the opening line from the first song on the Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables album. The back cover was titled, “Long Ago And Far Away.” The front cover art was also oversized for a CD, at 18″ × 18″. Instead of reducing the image to fit a CD’s 5″ × 5″ space, the image was only slightly reduced to 14″ × 14″, then folded to fit in the CD. “I wouldn’t do it again, because people fold and unfold the picture so many times that there are little holes in the corners where the creases intersect, like a road map that’s been stashed in the backseat of your car for years,” says Smith. Yet the folding also adds to the underlying horror; what at first just seems surreal imagery becomes sinister when the unwary unfold the picture to reveal that the woman’s holding a gun.
Prior to the release of Insomniac, a new Green Day song arrived with the inclusion of ‘J.A.R.’ on the soundtrack of the film, Angus. Ginoli remembers Green Day being shown a film script for the movie when he was on tour with them. “One of the things that they liked about the script is that it was based on a short story where the main character has a gay father and a lesbian mother,” he says. “And they filmed the movie that way and then apparently it didn’t test well, so all of the gay references were excised. Though there’s a couple of odd things that are in there that don’t really make much sense — there’s a few lines of dialogue that would make more sense if you knew that the parents were supposed to be gay. I heard through the grapevine that Green Day weren’t too happy about the way the movie turned out, but I’ve never really talked to them about it.”
The sudden death of a friend of the group had inspired both the song, and its title, ‘J.A.R.’ standing for Jason Andrew Relva, who died in a car crash, which gives the song a decided poignancy. (Mike got a tattoo matching one of Ja
son’s in his memory.) The song had been demoed during the Dookie era, but the arrangement of the officially released version is similar, if more polished. The song again topped the Modern Rock chart, reached number 17 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and number 22 on the Airplay chart.
At Green Day’s request, Pansy Division also appeared on the Angus soundtrack, contributing the song ‘Deep Water’, which had originally appeared on their album Deflowered. (Lookout acts Tilt and Ben Weasel’s new band The Riverdales, both of whom had toured with Green Day, also appeared on the soundtrack; Billie Joe had The Riverdales’ logo tattooed on his right arm.) “We got $10,000 for being on the soundtrack,” says Ginoli. “We don’t get royalties on the record sales, they just gave us a flat fee up front. It bought us a new van and we really needed one. And because that damn movie, which was not a big hit, has been shown in cable systems virtually everywhere in the world, it’s 10 years later and I’m still getting BMI royalty statements for airplay. Twenty-four dollars from Spain, $16 from Singapore, it just keeps trickling in. I get a few hundred dollars a year from Angus. It’s real nice. So whenever we get another check, Chris Freeman says, ‘Green Day — the gift that keeps on giving.’”
But the song ‘J.A.R.’ also reportedly played a role in Green Day’s sudden split with their management, Cahn-Man. Earlier in 1995, Cahn and Saltzman had formed their own label, (510) Records (funded by MCA and named after Oakland’s area code, and a nod to San Francisco label 415 Records, named after San Francisco’s area code). Their first signing was Berkeley band Dance Hall Crashers, though Saltzman told Billboard, “We will have a couple of punk-pop bands, but we certainly don’t intend to fill our entire roster with that kind of music.” When Green Day unexpectedly fired their managers in July, rumours spread that the reason was because Cahn and Saltzman had leaked ‘J.A.R.’ to Los Angeles radio station KROQ in return for gaining exposure for bands on 510. Cahn and Saltzman denied being responsible, but the song had indeed leaked somehow, and soon bootleg copies were circulating, causing Reprise to rush out official promo copies.
On August 29, Cahn and Saltzman sued the band, claiming they had reneged on their contract and owed Cahn-Man substantial monies. The band’s contract with Cahn-Man said they were entitled to 20% of Green Day’s earnings, and Cahn-Man’s lawyer, David Phillips, claimed the band paid less than that. Conversely, Green Day’s lawyer, Bernard Burk, said the percentage had previously been renegotiated. “The parties had their differences,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “One of the differences had to do with what the manager was being paid. Other differences remained and it was those differences that resulted in the severance of the management contract.” He added, “If [Cahn] didn’t see the road signs [of the impending breakup], he was driving with his eyes closed.” The case was later settled. Both sides have remained tight-lipped about the dispute. In one of his few comments, Billie Joe simply told Rolling Stone, “We felt like we weren’t being treated like people anymore but as assets.”
Going into the release of a follow-up to a wildly successful record was not the best time to be without management. For the moment, the band opted to manage themselves, utilising one of their guitar techs (and future tour manager), Randy Steffes, as their liaison. They did few interviews, and debated whether Insomniac’s release would even be accompanied by any videos. Eric Yee also recalls the band saying “they were never going to do a video ever again” around the time of the Oakland benefit shows in May.
At the time they were sued by Cahn-Man, the band was overseas, playing the Reading Festival in the UK on August 25, then touring Europe. As a result, their appearance on that year’s MTV Music Video Awards was live via satellite from Stockholm, the group performing ‘Stuck With Me’. ‘Basket Case’ had been nominated for nine awards, including Video of the Year, but lost in every category.
Insomniac was released the next month, on October 10 in the US, selling 177,000 copies in its first week and debuting at number two in the Billboard charts, ultimately kept out of the top spot by Mariah Carey’s Daydream (it was released October 21 in the UK, peaking at number eight).The reviews were generally positive, but with some caveats, as in this review by Entertainment Weekly, which stated, “The songs are new-generation-punk formula, but there’s no denying the band’s ear for a hook. Green Day sound exactly the same as on their first album, albeit with crisper production and, ominously, a palpable degeneration in their sense of humour.”
The dark themes of the album were what struck many listeners. “Insomniac felt like such a sad and painful record at points that I found it difficult to listen to it all the way through,” says Lawrence Livermore. “I always thought of it as their In Utero [Nirvana’s third album].” A decided black humour certainly pervaded the video accompanying the album’s first single, ‘Geek Stink Breath’ (a single which in the US reached number three Modern Rock, number nine Mainstream Rock, and number 27 Airplay, and number 16 in the UK), which quickly became notorious for its depiction of a tooth pulling. Yet it aired nonetheless because, in the words of director Mark Kohr, “Green Day went through a phase where they couldn’t do anything wrong. It was really amazing to witness that. I’d never had an understanding of that, really, that there’s a phase in an entertainers’ career where they literally cannot do anything wrong. It’s wild.
“What was interesting, Billie had said he didn’t want to do any videos for the second album,” Kohr continues. “I was doing a lot of videos for a lot of other people at the time, and I was really busy, so I was like, ‘Okay,’ because I’m really good at letting things go and not being clingy. And I remember I was at my apartment in San Francisco, I was moving actually, and my sister was there, and she was helping me pack up boxes, and the phone rings and my sister yells out the window, ‘Mark, it’s Billie,’ and I’m like, ‘Really?’ Because at that time they were off, they were out there in the world.
“And so I went and talked to him and he was like, ‘Hey, how you doing, blah blah … what are you up to?’ And then he says, ‘Well Mark, a friend of mine is about to get all his teeth taken out. He was a meth addict and he’s got all these rotten teeth, and I was wondering if you could film it. Maybe we could put it in a video.’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’ And he was like ‘Cool.’”
The more he thought about it, the more excited Kohr became over the visual possibilities of the procedure. “I was going to use these optics, so I could get into the guy’s mouth,” he says. “So I could shoot on film, not on video, on 35mm. We’ll make this really cool, I thought, so we’re really in there. Billie’s friend only ended up getting one tooth pulled, but that was okay. We shot in this place in San Francisco, and I remember the dentist’s last name was Lipscomb and I just thought, ‘How on earth can you have a dentist named Lipscomb?’ Because it’s like ‘lip scum.’ And he had a lisp … oh my God, a dentist named Lip Scum and he had a lisp! It was terrible.
“Anyway, we shot it, and it went real well. Billie showed up with his wife, and they brought their boy, little Joey, and I had to have a picture of them, with Billie holding this wrench in his hand, pretending to work on the dolly. It all went good, and then we talked later and Billie was like, ‘Well, come up with an idea for the rest of it.’ And so I came up with what you see, which is this very visual, textual, vibe-related band footage.”
The final video mixed footage of the tooth pulling and the band performing, cutting between the two with a near-frantic intensity. “I made it that way because the song is about somebody who eats sweets and does crystal meth, and so I tried to do a visual representation of the anxiety one might feel as a meth addict,” Kohr explains. “And so there’s all this flashing. The film we processed in tubs as opposed to in a regular film machine, so that it touched itself and got all this speckle on it. And we shot the band with a video camera, a little tiny one, like a pen on a pole. And then we put that [footage] on a TV, and we shot the TV with a camera, and then as we’re shooting it we had this magnet that we turned on and off to have th
e lines in the TV bend and distort; we shut off the TV so the image would drift off the TV and it would just be black on occasion. And I said to my editor, ‘I want you to edit this thing like you’re so anxious that you’re like a meth guy. You’re so anxious that you can’t do things at the right time. You’re always trying to do things too early. Make it so the edits are too early, they’re arriving too fast.’ Not just fast in frequency, but they’re arriving before they should in terms of from a musical edit standpoint.” Hence the raw look and jerky feel of the video, which ends with a close-up of the bloody, extracted tooth sitting on the dentist’s tray. “Isn’t that great?” Kohr says proudly. “That’s the real deal!” He estimates the final budget “wasn’t much, it was like seven or eight grand.”
There was some consternation about the graphic nature of the tooth pulling, but Kohr says, “What was so nice was that Green Day was so popular that they had to show it! But when they’d show it they would always give this disclaimer with it, like, ‘This is someone who did too much crystal meth, and that tells you, kids, don’t do drugs!’ They showed it for about two or three weeks, and what was so great was that I remember walking down the street in San Francisco and hearing people say, ‘Oh my God, did you see that Green Day video with that tooth pull? That was disgusting!’ And I remember thinking, wow, how great that it had that kind of impact. But they only showed it for short time.”
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