Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  “I was outside trying to film some of the building and how fucked up it was,” he continues. “Then some guy speaking German comes up in a demolition hat and the orange vest with little stripes and everything and he’s like, ‘Move the bus, move the bus’ — whatever German it was, I could make out he was telling me to move the bus. I was sort of exaggerating that I didn’t know what he was saying; it certainly wasn’t up to me to go and move the tour bus. He was just like some guy who was bummed that we had parked back there. I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m not the person to go to with that.’ He was really intent, ‘You must move the bus,’ I was like, ‘I don’t drive the bus, someone else does.’ Just trying not to deal with it.

  “Then he’s like, ‘No, the boom, the boom,’ and making explosion noises. I’m like, ‘Do you mean there’s a bomb in there?’ and he’s like, ‘Yes.’ So I went to try and find Randy, and I’m like, ‘Hey, this guy’s outside, this construction guy. I think he’s saying that they are going to blow up the building. We’ll have to move the bus because it’s about to explode.’ And he’s just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever, it’s probably bullshit.’ He had no interest in investigating or checking it out, or dealing with it in any way. And I was like, ‘Okay, at least I’ve told him.’ And sure enough, they started blasting and demolishing all the other buildings around us — not the one they were going to play in, but all the other buildings around it. They all started collapsing. We’d basically pulled into this demolition site!

  “That was at the end of several weeks that were just miserable, being in all these weird broken places, dealing with sketchy, corrupt Eastern European mafia-type dudes, like this one concert promoter — we saw him getting into the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask on and everything. All of a sudden he just jumps into the back of an ambulance with a bag of money and disappears, like it was a fake injury so he could get out with all the money. All these weird crazy things kept happening on that tour. But the kids were amazing. The kids that would come out probably didn’t get to see a band like this very often, and it seemed to mean the world to them. They were just going nuts, painting their faces, and jumping off of speaker stacks and stuff, doing this kind of out of control stuff, at least more than I’d seen at shows. Like stage diving from 20-foot PA stacks and stuff like that into the crowd. It seemed always on the verge of someone getting a broken neck or getting killed. Just out of control.”

  The rest of the tour ended up being cancelled, to the disappointment of the Mr. T Experience. “It was our big chance, the Insomniac tour,” says Portman. “But typically, our big chance didn’t end up going that well because that tour was cancelled. We had two weeks of the stadium experience.” Nor did the footage that had been shot get used. “We tried at the time to put it together as some sort of tour documentary, but because they cancelled the rest of the tour, it was a weird time for the band,” Bangs explains. “A lot of the shows we thought we’d get a lot more proper concert footage, but that never happened.”

  An incident that happened when a show in Prague was filmed seemed to summarise the whole unhappy experience of the tour. “They filmed a full-blown concert film shot on 16mm and there was a multi-track recording of the whole show,” remembers Bangs. “At the end of the show, they had a section where they would turn on strobe lights, knock over the drums and jump around and stuff like that, smash guitars. And one of the onstage camera operators, who was wearing a steady-cam type rig, was an epileptic. And he didn’t know about the strobes. So during the finale the camera guy is just sort of flopping around on stage having a full-blown epileptic fit because of the strobe lights. It was kind of this disaster shoot. So I think they just scrapped all the footage and never really used it for anything. It was kind of like, let’s just put all this film away and move on.” Some songs recorded during this and earlier tours later appeared on the import releases Bowling Bowling Bowling Parking Parking, released in 1996, and Foot In Mouth, released in 1997.

  By the end, everyone was more than ready to call it quits. “I traveled with them back to the airport, and we all changed our tickets and jumped on flights to go home,” says Bangs. “I shot this footage of them on the cab heading back. They were depressed and just ready to be out of there and go home and get away from all this craziness. They’d been working non-stop from the point that Dookie had come out. They had just relentlessly worked — toured extensively, gone straight in and done a new record, and then back out on the road to promote that. They’d gone through this incredible life change of suddenly selling all these records. And they’d started instant families, they had all gotten married or had children within that time period as well. Everyone had loved ones at home that they were away from, they had not taken a break or properly rested or recovered, or wrapped their head around what they’d gone through with the explosion of Dookie. It was just kind of crazy that they’d worked so hard and not taken time to get adjusted.

  “It was really good that they just put it down and walked away for a little bit.”

  Basement of the Ashby Avenue house, 1993, where the band’s first video, ‘Longview’, was filmed. (John Popplewell/Retna)

  Billie Joe at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, California, June 10, 1994, the same month Dookie went gold in America. (Tim Mosenfelder/Contributor/Getty Images)

  Mike at Green Day’s landmark appearance at the Woodstock festival, August 14, 1994. The group’s set ended in a massive mudfight. (Neal Preston/Retna)

  Kings of the Road: Tré, Billie Joe, and Mike in 1994, the year Green Day broke through to the mainstream. (Ken Schles/Contributor/Getty Images)

  Billie Joe behind the drums at New York radio station Z-100’s “Acoustic Christmas” concert, Madison Square Garden, December 5, 1994. (Patti Ouderkirk/Photoweb/WireImage)

  Mike and Billie Joe, Madison Square Garden, December 5, 1994. Billie Joe routinely shed his clothes at shows, though he didn’t often perform completely nude. (Chris Cassidy/Retna)

  Green Day, San Francisco, December, 1995. That night, the group performed at the Oakland Coliseum. (Jay Blakesberg/Retna)

  Green Day. 1997. The band branched out in a new musical direction that year, with the release of Nimrod, which included the huge hit ‘Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)’. (Stephen Sweet/Rex Features)

  Green Day at the Kerrang! awards, August 25, 1998; the group won the Best Live Performance award. (LFI)

  Green Day arrives at the September 10 1998, MTV Video Music Awards, Universal Amphitheater, Los Angeles. After years of being nominated, the video for ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’ won Best Alternative Video. “Susan Lucci, eat your heart out!” said Billie Joe. (Jim Smeal/WireImage)

  Yeah, baby! Green Day arrives for the world premiere of Austin Powers: Spy Who Shagged Me June 8, l999. The group’s instrumental, ‘Espionage,’ appeared on the film’s soundtrack and was nominated for a Grammy. (Steve Granitz/WireImage)

  Billie Joe and Mike, at the free “Take Back San Francisco” concert, billed as an “anti-gentrification celebration”, at Civic Center Plaza, San Francisco, November 5, 2000. The show followed a “Million Band March” that drew only around 500 people; the concert attracted 2,000. (John Shearer/WireImage)

  Billie Joe and Mike at Wembley Arena, London, December 8, 2000. (Jon Super/Redferns)

  Green Day, 2000, the year of Warning’s release. (Kevin Estrada/Retna)

  CHAPTER 7

  Back From The Brink

  “I’ll tell you the truth — I had more fun a couple years ago.”

  — Mike to Rolling Stone, December 28, 1995

  The spring ’96 tour had not yet begun when Billie Joe met up with Tom Lantham of Rip magazine at a Berkeley diner for an interview. Lantham’s story, “The Band You Love To Hate,” was printed in the magazine’s April issue, and had it come out earlier, the tour’s cancellation would probably not have been as surprising. Perhaps reflecting his mood, Billie Joe was dressed entirely in black, and, in between staring “morosely at the floor,” gave
one of the more revealing interviews of his life.

  After beginning by saying, “When I came here today, I said I didn’t wanna talk about anything good, because I don’t really have anything good to talk about,” Billie Joe repeatedly touched on his own unhappiness (“I’m a pretty miserable person right now”; “I’m just not enjoying life right now.”) But more important were the underlying reasons for that unhappiness — specifically, the loss of an emotional connection with the music. Billie Joe pointed to the impersonality of playing large rock shows as a factor: “Before we did this last US tour … I was like, ‘Yeah! I’m excited! I wanna play these arenas!’ And then just every night, it started sucking, it felt like a routine or something … sometimes I feel like we’re losing our passion for playing music. And that’s the fucked-up thing, when you lose passion for what you love, then it’s like, ‘Is this marriage headed for divorce or what?’” Still, in spite of such statements as, “I just don’t know if I really wanna be involved in the rock world anymore at all … There isn’t a day goes by in the past year-and-a-half that I haven’t thought about quitting,” Billie Joe also made it clear that he hadn’t completely given up the fight. “No matter what, I’m gonna be writing songs for the rest of my life,” he said. “I definitely want to be respected as a musician,” then tellingly added, “Well, more as a songwriter than as a musician.”

  Billie Joe’s comments illustrated the growing pressures the band had been feeling since their explosive success in 1994. They had been able to take some time off at the beginning of 1995, when it was clearly needed (“I’m sure every one of us, in our own way this year [1994], has wanted to blow our fucking head off,” Mike told Rolling Stone, though he assuringly added, “But I think we’re all not that type of personality”), but even then, Billie Joe had needed to start working on songs for Insomniac. And on the album’s release the band had gone straight back into constant touring. It was clear the band hadn’t fully adjusted to their newfound status as rock stars.

  Nor had Insomniac performed up to expectations. By early 1996, the album had only been certified double-Platinum in the US (sales would eventually reach over four million in the US, eight million worldwide), a far cry from Dookie’s sales. Billie Joe explained to Rip that the lack of much advance promotion, coupled with the ‘Geek Stink Breath’ video having received little exposure, probably worked against the record’s chances of success: “I think we did alienate a lot of people. So that was expected, that it wasn’t going to sell a lot of records.” But even extensive interviews and a video that constantly aired may not have mattered; the next record released after a blockbuster album rarely achieves the same sales. And Billie Joe was already looking ahead, telling Rip on the next record he hoped to “go into different styles, go across my boundaries of the two-and-a-half minute punk song with a three-and-a-half minute jazz song, or maybe get into a little bit of swing or rockabilly.” The band’s next album would indeed touch on a broader range of musical styles.

  And the promotion of Insomniac wasn’t finished yet. On March 9, the record won Outstanding Hard Music Album at the Bay Area Music Awards, and Tré received another Outstanding Drummer award. The same month saw the release of the album’s next single, the double A-side ‘Brain Stew’/‘Jaded’ (on the record ‘Brain Stew’ segues into ‘Jaded’), which reached number three Modern Rock, number eight Mainstream Rock, and number 35 Airplay in the US; in the UK, the single reached number 28.

  The song’s video was directed by Kevin Kerslake. Kerslake came from a musical family and had been a vocalist and guitarist in the band Rimpest, but had always been more interested in film. He began his work in video after working with Kim Gordon, bass player with Sonic Youth, on a feature film, Sometimes Through The Wall. The film was never finished, but had included a sequence of Gordon sitting on top of a moving train, with Sonic Youth’s ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’ as the soundtrack. The rest of the band had liked the footage, and, with shots of the band inserted, ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’ became Kerslake’s first video. Kerslake went on to direct Sonic Youth’s ‘Beauty Lies In The Eye’ and ‘Candle’, and is probably best known for his work with Nirvana, which included the videos ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Lithium’, ‘In Bloom’ (which won Best Alternative Video at the MTV Video Music Awards), and ‘Sliver’.

  Kerslake was flown out to meet Green Day on their fall ’95 tour, “to meet them, to go to a show, to see if we got along,” he says. “It was a very familial scene backstage, because they had, like, babies and mothers and nannies and all that stuff. And we got along, so let’s do the video! It was totally painless and uneventful in terms of how the job was awarded. And then it was the usual manner in which videos are submitted to directors: ‘We have this much money, and come up with your idea.’ I prefer it, actually, to be that way. Sometimes you might get something like, ‘We need to see performance’ or ‘The band wants to act,’ or ‘Show them as little as possible,’ but this came over with very little in terms of specs.”

  Kerslake’s idea was fairly straight-forward; “taking some of the icons of their previous videos and dragging them through the dump, and then have all sorts of surreal visuals pop up, whether that’s hula girls, or whatever else.” The “icon” in this case was the couch that had featured so prominently in ‘Longview’. (“It wasn’t the same couch, but I wanted to make it have the same feel.”) The video’s first half accordingly shows the group on the couch being dragged through the dump by a bulldozer, intercut with shots of hula girls, various animals, and an old woman who lip-syncs some of the song’s lyrics. “She was good, but she took a lot of work,” says Kerslake. “To have an 80-year-old lady sing a punk-rock song was a fight. She wasn’t fiery or anything, she was really sweet. But she had these faces that just evoked a fair amount of venom, and I liked all that spiteful energy.”

  The video’s first half concludes with the band hurling Tré’s drum set into the dump where it’s unceremoniously crushed beneath the bulldozer. Then, as a horse gets to its feet and runs away, the scene shifts to Green Day bashing out ‘Jaded’ in a cluttered room. Heightening the transition between the songs is that ‘Brain Stew’ is shot in sepia tone, while ‘Jaded’ is in almost lurid colour. “Whenever you see Green Day, you want to see them live,” Kerslake. “I just figured if we’re going to get into some of the bratty punk stuff, to do that really crude and raw, almost like Super-8. I probably even referenced ‘Sliver’. I’ve done a lot of videos with that feel, but that’s probably the most well known. And I simply wanted to distinguish between the songs; if I was going to go into the garage phase, with tweaked-out colours, I thought it might be cool to play with a more antiquated look in the first part, giving it a look like found footage, like somebody pissed on the film can and it’s been lying in the sun for decades. That was the feeling that I was shooting for.” Providing some continuity between the two songs are the hula girls, who appear in both songs, and a close-up shot of wriggling worms (“It was fun to put your hands in there, actually”).

  The video was shot over two days in Los Angeles: “One day for ‘Jaded’ and one day for ‘Brain Stew’,” says Kerslake. “It’s a pretty slow video, there’s not a lot to do, just some animal wrangling. Set construction was difficult, because we created that junk yard. It was too toxic to shoot in a real one. So we had to create these large wall structures which gave you some sort of mass, and then you just basically piled stuff on that, to give it the irregularity of a trash heap. And then there was making a course for the bulldozer, hitching the couch to it and dragging it through that, and doing various portraits within that scenario.”

  The band members were quick to give a thumbs-up to the end result. “It’s funny, this job was so uneventful, in a sense,” Kerslake says. “There was never really much disagreement. Looking back at it now, it’s funny to see what you can get away with, because the band’s not in it very much, until the very end. So tonally, it has this sort of severity that I miss these days. I think that now everybody wants to see t
heir product on screen a little more.

  “I’m still pretty stoked about the video because it was pretty committed to absurdity,” he continues. “There’s nothing in it that wants to make any sense. It feels like it’s giving you the finger, or giving any sort of straight talk the finger. And that’s cool, to have that sort of teenage rebellion. Sometimes you do videos, and you want them to be really smart or tell a great story, or just have a great performance, and sometimes you just want to throw paint on the wall and let the splatter stay. Or just go into a certain realm and just want it to feel grim. And I feel like that’s in there too, just this bleak hopelessness, that I was happy to keep. It’s not necessarily that you have to exaggerate, or go to great lengths to say, ‘Oh, woe is us, life is fucked, we can’t make sense of anything,’ just embody it in the flow of images or the disconnect from one image to the next. So it happens on a more subtle level.” And because the split between the two songs was clear in the video, each section was occasionally aired separately on TV.

  After returning from the cancelled European tour, the band appeared on The Late Show on May 9, which was taping in San Francisco all week. Aaron Elliott tagged along, welcoming the chance to be a “tourist” in “the world of fame and fortune.” As he recounted in Cometbus #41,“I got to watch all the cameramen and see the behind-the-scenes workings of a TV show … I ran around stealing everything that wasn’t tied down,” including an effigy of David Letterman’s head, made of chocolate. The group also appeared on Saturday Night Special on May 18. On both shows they performed their latest single, ‘Walking Contradiction’, which reached number 21 Modern Rock and number 25 Mainstream Rock. The video, directed by Roman Coppola, was shot in LA, mostly at the intersection of Centre Street and 7th Street, and showed the band members obliviously creating havoc wherever they go; a simple walk down the street results in a runaway van, a flying police car, and the short-circuiting of the area’s electricity. Billie Joe later admitted to being especially scared during the filming of one scene which had him walking across the intersection as cars zip by, missing him by inches. (“I thought I was gonna die right there with all the cameras on me.”) The clip was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Special Effects, and it also received a Grammy nomination for Best Music Video Short Form, losing in the latter category to The Beatles’ impressive video for their “reunion” single, ‘Free As A Bird’.