The band also began a US tour in October that continued to the end of the year. On November 11 they appeared on the Late Show With David Letterman, performing ‘86’. “The first time they were on our program, they scared the hell out of me,” host David Letterman admitted, though he also said, “I’m very fond of these guys and I’m hoping to adopt them.” It was an unusual song choice, given that the song wasn’t released as a single. Billie Joe and Mike were now using a distinctive “concert stance” on TV appearances like this one, a visually strong look that had the left leg forward, and right leg back, with the body of the guitar or bass resting on the right thigh and the neck pointing forward, like a weapon. At the song’s conclusion, Tré ran to the back of the stage and lay down in a pool that was part of the set.
On October 17, when the group played the Seattle Center Arena (now the Mercer Arts Arena), Billie Joe’s old math teacher, John Goar, decided to check them out. “It took me a while to warm up to Dookie,” he says. “But I was really thrilled for their success. And the show rocked! I was blown away by Billie Joe’s stage presence and charisma.” Goar wrote down the setlist for this and every subsequent Green Day show he attended. This show, though dominated by songs from Insomniac and Dookie, also featured songs from their first two albums and during the encore, Tré performed his two signature numbers, ‘All By Myself’ and ‘Dominated Love Slave’.
There was more unexpected excitement when Billie Joe was arrested for indecent exposure following at a concert at Milwaukee’s MECCA Arena on November 21. Security was tighter than usual at the show. While items like cameras and outside food and beverage were routinely prohibited, binoculars were also banned at the concert, in an attempt to restrict the kinds of items being thrown onstage at the band. As a result, the crowd resorted to throwing toilet paper rolls onstage, presumably taken from the venue’s public restrooms.
“Bad behaviour is one of the band’s signatures,” noted the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of the show, at which, “Armstrong playfully baited fans to yell profanities back at the stage” as he had during the band’s last show in the city a year before, at the Eagles Ballroom. Halfway through the show Billie Joe capped one such exchange — perhaps he was just inspired by all the toilet paper — by turning around, dropping his pants and “mooning” the audience. Later, he shared the advice, “Don’t smoke marijuana … Listen to your parents. Listen to Hootie & The Blowfish!” and simulated masturbation.
It was perhaps the wrong place to try such a stunt, as Milwaukee has a proud tradition of arresting performers who flout public convention. In 1972, comedian George Carlin was arrested for using obscenities during his show; in 1981, punk rocker Wendy O. Williams was arrested for making “obscene gestures” during her concert; in 1989, G.G. Allin and his band, The Toilet Rockers, were arrested “for reportedly defecating on the stage of the Odd Rock Cafe and allegedly performing other lewd acts on stage.”
The police wisely decided to wait until after the show to make their move, thus not disrupting the concert and risking the wrath of the audience. Instead, when Billie Joe left the Arena about a half hour after the concert ended, he was surrounded by police, handcuffed, and taken a few blocks away to the Police Administration Building. Photographer Jeremy Prach, who shot pictures of the arrest, later said police tried to confiscate his camera. “The problem was he exposed himself to a crowd of about 6,000 people,” said Lt. Thomas Christopher at the time. “Including people as young as ten. That was our main reason for taking the action.”
Billie Joe was kept in a holding cell until a bond of $141.85 was posted (“I wasn’t in the bullpen,” he said later. “I was in with the other ones, the not-so-bad ones. They made me take all my jewelry out. And my shoestrings, so I wouldn’t hang myself or something.”). He faced a maximum fine of $250, but the city attorney’s office declined to prosecute, so charges were dropped and the $141.85 returned to Billie Joe. It had been decided that the case would be hard to prove, as Green Day was known for such frisky behaviour, though the Sentinel added that, “The city intends to warn concert promoters that such actions in the future probably will be prosecuted.”
On December 14, there was another Bay Area show at the Oakland Coliseum where their reviews were much better than their previous concerts. “For one scant but exhausting hour, singer Billie Joe, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tré Cool screamed through an astonishing 16 songs plus encores, at speeds that ranged from merely fast to suicidally revved,” wrote the San Francisco Examiner. “It was like being witness to one huge, raw nerve onstage, and the effect was intoxicating … if you didn’t stand up and dance, you had to be near death.” The paper concluded, “They are no flash in the punk pan. Green Day is here to stay.”
The year ended with Green Day topping Billboard’s year-end charttoppers list as Top Modern Rock Artist. Billie Joe spent New Year’s Eve at a friend’s house, where the bands Juke and The Tantrums played in the backyard, like the old days. The same month, ‘Stuck With Me’ was released as a single overseas (reaching number 24 in the UK), and, with a European tour pending, a video was needed. “We did it in a hurry,” says Kohr. “Billie said, ‘Could you work with Winston Smith, and come up with some animation that we could weave a performance in and out of?’ So it wasn’t like we worked really hard at that one, other than that we had two animators to animate this cutout artwork. We tried to come up with little sequences of action for each setup. We shot the band down in LA on this reversal 35mm stock that felt really beautiful and did some swing and tilt optic stuff. It wasn’t that we didn’t work hard on it, but we didn’t lose a lot of sleep over that one — except for the animators, who got no sleep.”
“Two other artists and I toiled for two full weeks on that,” Smith agrees. “Twelve hours a day, cutting pictures out and making little paper puppets out of them, making them all move; they move like four times a second. There was a camera suspended over five layers of glass to get the effect. It was painstaking, with capital pain. To get it all done in time, it was really a horse race. Fortunately, the song only lasted like two minutes. It was blissfully short, otherwise it would have taken us another five years. We didn’t do it on computers.
“The best part about that was, we had a couple of meetings with Mark and a couple other production guys,” Smith continues. “A friend of ours, Rob Shapiro, he had a company called Satellite Productions, was working on it. He said, ‘We can’t show guns on MTV; no nudity, no guns, no religion.’ And we had just about all of that in there! Instead, he said, ‘We can have the woman pull out a circular saw and cut the guy in half, then his skin will fall off and there’ll be like the Gray’s Anatomy pictures of the muscles.’ I thought, that’s even more gruesome than a gun! I asked him, ‘Did someone tell you that the original title for this is “God Told Me to Skin You Alive”’? And he said, ‘No, that’s amazing!’ She actually is skinning him alive on the cartoon.
“Mike came up to me later and said, ‘That was really, really great computer work you did on our video.’ I said, ‘Computer? Hell no, that was all done by hand!’ That was done like early turn-of-the-century cartoons. He said, ‘It cost so much, I thought it was done on computers.’ So apparently the production of it was extremely expensive, just the camera work and all the people working on it.”
In January 1996, Green Day headed back overseas, first to Japan, then Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. Following a quick stop in Hawaii, they made an appearance on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, performing ‘Brain Stew’. Tré ran off again after the song’s conclusion. At the end of the show, as the group sat in chairs next to host Jay Leno, he promptly tipped himself backwards. The band then retired to their dressing room, which they reportedly trashed, smearing a couch with peanut butter. Then the band headed overseas for another European tour (during which they recorded a session for MTV Europe).This time they brought along the Mr. T Experience as an opening act, the first time the band had played stadiums.
“It’s weird,” says
Frank Portman of the experience. “It’s a very strange thing, especially when you’re not used to it. We would just do our own tours, and they were small, but they were on our own terms. The difference between doing a tour in clubs and something like that is … they just have nothing to do with each other. It’s like a military campaign. In fact, it was very military in the fact that their management was always calling our tour manager; every morning we were late or we did something else, and he would get chewed out by those guys. It was this huge organisation; those three guys were just like us, sort of shlumping around, but they had a whole organisation behind them, which included their road crew and their management, and then all of the people who had administered these hockey stadiums or soccer rinks in Europe. So it was a lot different. There was something very cool in a bizarre, surreal way about standing on a stage with 8,000 people; not too many people get a chance to do that. But it was very weird, and it was not like any rock tour experience that I ever had, it was completely something unto itself.”
Also along on the trip was filmmaker Lance Bangs. Bangs had started making films at age 11, shooting on “a little Super-8 camera.” As he got older he began shooting experimental films, “just filming empty places at night, like the bathrooms of gas stations or 24-hour laundromats, and doing tape-recorded narration over them. Like journal entry-type things. They weren’t made for the purpose of being sold or publicly exhibited. More like a diary type of thing.”
While staffing a Greenpeace booth at an R.E.M. show in Philadelphia in 1988, Bangs met R.E.M.’s lead singer, Michael Stipe, and passed on a tape of his films. Stipe was interested in Bangs’ work, and brought him to Athens, Georgia, where R.E.M. was based. Bangs started up a monthly screening night of Super-8 films at Athens club the 40 Watt, and began shooting visual material for R.E.M. to use during their live shows. Soon other bands were asking him to do the same thing, which led to his directing music videos. “I never intended or set out to direct music videos,” he says. “It’s just that bands that would come to the Super-8 screenings started asking me.” He also ended up filming bands both when they came through town and touring with them on the road. “I just kind of ended up in that world of indie rock bands,” he says. “Documenting a lot of shows and touring with different bands and shooting footage.” Before working with Green Day, Bangs had directed videos for R.E.M. (‘How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us’), Sonic Youth (‘The Diamond Sea’), and Pavement (‘Spit On A Stranger’).
In the spring of 1995, R.E.M. was on tour supporting their album Monster. Bangs and Chris Bilheimer, who worked for R.E.M. as a graphic designer, came out to see the band’s show at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, near San Francisco. Billie Joe was going to attend the show with his wife and other friends, “and Chris and I were going to meet them, help them find their seats, make sure they were taken care of. Something along those lines,” says Bangs. Bangs had seen Green Day over the years, “but at the time I was really not into the bouncier California pop thing,” he says. “I was into more sad, singer/songwriter type music. But they were really good at what they did. And I saw them at Lollapalooza; they were coming out and doing, like, ‘We Will Rock You’, and ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ by Survivor. All the kids were going nuts.”
Backstage, Bilheimer remembers Billie Joe making an attempt to disguise himself. “We saw this guy sitting in the corner,” he says. “He was wearing a stocking cap, and he had all these really bizarre dreadlocks hanging out of his hat. We looked really closely at him and realised it was Billie Joe. Adrienne had just recently cut off all her dreads, so as a disguise he put on a cap and shoved all the dreadlocks inside it and became pretty unrecognisable. He was just sitting there by himself and we were like, ‘Who’s that dude? Oh, that’s Billie Joe.’ He was just sitting by himself, so Lance and I went over and just started talking to him. That’s how Lance and I both met him and struck up a friendship with him.”
“Billie and Adrienne were in a goofy mood and being funny and enjoying coming to a big rock show,” says Bangs. “Chris and I had a really good time hanging out with them. Then we took them to meet Michael. Took a bunch of Polaroids and goofed around and stuff. I don’t remember how we kept in touch, I think they gave me their address or phone number. They asked to see some of the other films that I had made. I made a tape and sent a copy of Jesus Of Suburbia, a film I did when I was a teenager, then a bunch of other short films and things I’d done for bands.” Soon after, Bangs was asked to accompany the band when they next went on tour.
Bangs remembers the European tour as being “really amazing at first. It was a lot of places I had never been before, like a lot of Eastern Europe. Slovenia, Poland, and places like that. It was a pretty amazing opportunity to go over there.” The shows were also deliberately geared toward a younger audience. “In Europe, they call it Kinderpunk” says Frank Portman. “The headliner would go on at 8 pm, and the show would be over by 9. We played at 7 or 7:30, something like that. And then there was a totally grueling schedule where a lot of times you had to leave for the next show immediately after or you wouldn’t make it by the next day, so it was a little bit of a challenge.”
Portman also says the initial dates went well. “They had a chef who had all of his cooking equipment in anvil cases, and he made these very kind of nouvelle cuisine fancy dinners and everything,” he says. “And the whole crew, us included, we’d all eat this crazy food, like sautéed flowers, and stuff like that in the back room of these stadiums. And Green Day was nice. I was conscious of a kind of a wall separating us, though. I mean, it’s just like when anyone gets a lot of money or becomes really successful, it’s just a little different. So they were really nice and they were really friendly, but it wasn’t the same as hanging around with them at a party, definitely. They were like our employers. And they didn’t care, but their tour manager really didn’t let us get away with any nonsense. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, but if it had actually gone for the full three months, I don’t know what would’ve happened, ’cause it was rough.”
And as the tour went on Green Day’s efforts to be accommodating began to overwhelm them. “Their popularity had blown up so huge that there was this crushing demand for them,” says Bangs, “and they were still trying to be really cool and deal with that. They were making time for all these people every day; well, here’s the Italian version of Rolling Stone magazine, and here’s the local music paper, and here’s 20 kids that have these Sniffing Glue-type fanzines and wanted to do these hour-long interviews. It was kind of crazy how they were trying to overly accommodate everybody.”
Their efforts to keep ticket prices low also backfired among local promoters. “My sense of it was that it was important to them to keep ticket prices really low, and yet the size of the audiences that would want to come would mean that you would need to be in a bigger venue,” Bangs says. “And those venues were normally controlled by the people that are doing more expensive ticket sales for their shows. The promoter there isn’t going to want to deal with security and staff if they’re only making this lesser amount.
“And the impression I got from the shows was that they were being booked by people who weren’t regular concert promoters,” Bangs continues. “And they weren’t always in venues necessarily that were ideal venues to be in. We’d be in, like, a former Russian Eastern bloc hockey practise space rather than a regular concert venue. Some sketchy promoter would claim he could put on a show and have a proper PA, and do it for $7 a kid, then he’d run away with a bunch of the money and we wouldn’t really have security or a PA. There’d be holes in the floor and no electricity in the dressing rooms. No heat. A lot of the venues seemed like buildings that hadn’t really been finished yet, or they were like old abandoned buildings that weren’t really used anymore.”
The strain eventually began to take its toll on the everyone. “It was this weirdly stressful tour driving to all these bizarre places,” says Bangs. “It was cold and miserable. I ended u
p feeling sick. It was right after one of the early pre-SARS kind of things, there was some respiratory thing going around. It really seemed to effect Mike, he was wearing one of those breathing protection masks a lot. Trying to avoid getting sick from everyone else and so on.” Mike and Billie Joe later said they’d both suffered from serious bouts of anxiety during the tour.
And though Billie Joe also said the group had disliked making the jump to large venues (“We were becoming the things we hated, playing those big arenas”) the problem may also have that the spaces weren’t suitable to begin with. In a January 1996 interview with Amusement Business magazine, the band’s production manager, Mitch Cramer, stressed the lengths the band and crew went to in order to ensure everyone’s safety and comfort at shows. Set-up time was four hours, and the doors would be opened at least two hours prior to showtime, to allow a more relaxed entry. Cramer had also prepared security guidelines that he handed out to the local staff at a venue, and met repeatedly with them throughout the day. “What we’re trying to do is head off problems before they start,” he said. “That is why I’m so security-minded and so into making sure these kids have a good time.”
But the condition of the European venues used on the tour threw those kind of carefully laid plans into disarray, and the tour’s end came when the band arrived on March 28 at a particularly shoddy “venue” in Germany. “That one was grim,” Bangs recalls. “There were broken bottles and holes in the floor and rocks. Holes in the walls. No dressing rooms. Again, there was this local sketchy promoter dude. We’re like, ‘Where’s the stage?’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, we’re going to put one in.’ Well, we’re here to load in our gear, what do you mean there’s no stage and you’re going to make one? Where can we put our stuff now? And there’s a broken staircase with missing stairs — at the top of that, there’s a place to put our bags. I believe it was on the Eastern side of Berlin, and they were demolishing all the buildings around it. This was my impression of it, that it was some warehouse space that some dude had claimed he could put on a show in.
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