Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  But after those appearances, the band seemingly dropped out of sight; for the first time in their career, they wouldn’t play another concert for nearly a year, a sign of just how badly they needed a break. There were also some changes going on behind the scenes. Despite Billie Joe’s telling Rolling Stone, “We’ll never have a serious corporate manager again,” the band decided that after the fiasco of the European tour they needed someone looking after their interests and signed on with Atlas/Third Rail Management, where they were first looked after by Rob Cavallo’s father Bob, and then Pat Magnarella. Magnarella had previously worked as a booking agent at Venture Bookings and as a music agent at Triad Artists. He also managed The Goo Goo Dolls and The All American Rejects. And there were further developments on the personal front, with Mike marrying his girlfriend, Anastasia, in August; their daughter, Estelle Desiree, was born in April 1997.

  The band also spent plenty of time writing and relaxing, happily without the pressure of any looming deadlines. “We would meet up a bunch,” says Lance Bangs. “We went up to Seattle in maybe ’96 in October, and just sort of hung out awhile and took a vacation. Just kind of went different places and played pinball and hung out with the kids and stuff. Chris [Bilheimer] was around for some of that too. From there I guess I went down [to California] and started filming them in rehearsals and songwriting sessions. They seemed to write songs and practise a lot; maybe they went through lots of time of not seeing each other, but my sense was that they were still pretty social and involved in each other’s lives, spending time working on songs and having fun. They had something that impressed me when they were on tour; they would always have a room set up with some instruments where they could just goof around and play instrumental songs, play accordion and drums, maracas, and make music together. They warmed up that way instead of running on stage, playing the show, and then not seeing each other again. It seemed like a really smart thing, it was a good sign of their camaraderie and their relationship with each other.”

  Billie Joe also built a home studio in his basement, and was involved in a number of side projects. He’d begun producing other bands: Social Unrest’s 1995 album New Lows, Dead & Gone’s T.V. Baby (1996) and God Loves Everyone But You (1997), and The Criminals’ 1997 album Never Been Caught. His own side band, Pinhead Gunpowder, was also releasing records: Carry The Banner in 1994, the same year Jason White replaced Mike Kersh on guitar; Jump Salty in 1995 (a compilation of the Trundle & Spring and Fahiza EPs), and Goodbye Ellston Avenue in 1997, along with appearances on various compilations. In 1997, Billie Joe also co-founded a label, Adeline Records, named after a street that starts in Berkeley and runs south through Emeryville to the Oakland Inner Harbor Channel. Adeline’s other founders were Billie Joe’s wife Adrienne, Lynn Theibaud, and Jim Theibaud (an owner of Real Skateboards). “I think of Adeline as a punk-rock label,” Billie Joe told Alternative Press. “Adeline is a collective — people coming together and doing their own thing when they don’t like anything else. It’s really putting your money where your mouth is, and that’s the beauty of punk rock — you can bitch and complain, but unless you’re doing anything about it, then shut up.” Pinhead Gunpowder and Mike’s side band, The Frustrators, would release records on the label. Adeline would also release the vinyl versions of Green Day’s singles and albums.

  In the spring of 1997, the band began preparing to head into the studio, playing what was essentially a warm-up show in February, inviting 150 friends to see them at a warehouse in Oakland. The show also celebrated the 10-year anniversary of Cinderblock, a rock merchandise company founded by Jeffrey Bischoff, who was also a member of the Lookout band, Tilt. Huevos Rancheros and One Man Army were also on the bill, and Jello Biafra performed a spoken-word piece. A surprise birthday party was held the same month for Billie Joe at San Francisco club Bottom of the Hill, in honor of his twenty-fifth birthday. “Pansy Division played,” says Jon Ginoli, “and everybody from Pinhead Gunpowder, Billie’s side band, was there, and they ended up playing at the end. And there was a drag queen that they knew from New York, that we knew, too. It was just a real nice time, a real nice surprise.”

  Pansy Division and Green Day were also on a compilation issued around the same time, Generations 1: A Punk Look at Human Rights (royalties were donated to the Human Rights Action Center). “We had been asked to be on this compilation,” says Ginoli. “And we wanted to give them a particular song that had been on a single, but not on an album, and they said, ‘No, we need an exclusive track.’ So we had a week to come up with a song. Our new drummer, Luis [Illades], had just joined our band, but he lived in San Diego at that point, he hadn’t moved up here. So I forget how he got involved, but we ended up having Tré be our drummer, and we recorded at his house in Oakland. And then we went over a couple days later to Billie Joe’s house in Berkeley and mixed it.” Pansy Division’s song was, ‘Can’t Make Love’; Green Day’s was ‘Do Da Da’.

  Green Day then decamped to Los Angeles. Initial press reports about their arrival didn’t concern the upcoming recording, but rather the juvenile hijinks the group got up to during a stay at the Sunset Marquis [hotel] in March — walking naked around the halls; pestering The Rolling Stones, also staying at the hotel, with late night phone calls; throwing a TV out the window; and Mike ultimately topping that cliché bit of rock-star bad boy behaviour by defecating off the balcony of his room.

  The recording sessions for Nimrod, which began March 31, were held at Ocean Way Recording, and Billie Joe again had a batch of songs ready: 40, according to some reports, 18 of which made the album (another four appeared on the album as bonus tracks). The band relaxed during the sessions by playing several covers of songs by The Rolling Stones and Elvis Costello (Costello’s ‘Alison’ and the Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ were reportedly recorded), among others, none of which have come to light. Ocean Way, formerly United Western Studios, opened in 1952, and had seen the recording of such classics as The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’, and The Mamas And Papas’ ‘California Dreamin’. More recently, artists ranging from Tori Amos to Dr. Dre, Elton John, and k. d. lang had recorded there. It would now be their home for the next four months, at that time the longest they’d ever taken to work on an album. As Billie Joe told Billboard, “We really bled over this record to the point of straight-up delirium.”

  The songs were a decidedly varied bunch in comparison to the band’s earlier recordings. Though tracks like the opening song, ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’, had Green Day’s trademark pop-punk blast, there were also plenty of indications the band was becoming more musically adventurous. “We wanted to stretch as much as possible, but at the same time we never want to abandon the sound that we know how to do best,” Billie Joe told writer Jaan Uhelszki. The first single, ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’, about heading out to party after falling off the wagon, is an excellent example. Beginning with a plaintive violin line (courtesy of That Dog’s Petra Haden) before the verse, the song then alternates between verses delivered with an old-timey rockabilly swing and choruses of full-on rock. (Billie Joe also cited the inspiration of Big Band performers like Cab Calloway.) The song builds to a frenzied climax that abruptly stops, then concludes with a quiet strum of the guitar. It would become a live favourite, which the band would stretch out endlessly, so Billie Joe could engage in call-and-response antics with the audience.

  ‘King For A Day’ was destined to be another live favourite, especially due to the ska influence of the horn section, using players from the band No Doubt for the recording. The song took on the unlikely topic of cross-dressing, though perhaps not so unusual for a band that was known to appear onstage in dresses themselves (though Mike had said in 1994, “Drag’s really getting kind of trendy, so we stopped. Basically, now we’ll only do it in places that we know are really homophobic”). Billie Joe later expressed his hopes that the frat-boy element in their audience would sing along to the number without realising what the song was about.

  Some of the love song
s also show a new maturity. Gone is the pain of the unrequited relationships of the early albums, replaced by songs dealing with the pain of working through difficult periods as a couple. ‘Redundant’s’ sense of resignation is bittersweet, but also blissfully tuneful; ‘Scattered’ and ‘Worry Rock’ are faster paced, but similarly themed. And the self-explanatory, ‘Walking Alone’ could easily be a sequel to ‘86’, its mournful sentiments underscored by Billie Joe’s bluesy harmonica.

  And this time the anger was just as likely to be directed outwards as inwards. There’s the sheer, malevolent rage of ‘Take Back’, or the jabs at the synthetic, soulless “amannequins” in ‘Prosthetic Head’, certainly a song that reflected the plastic, superficial culture of LA. There were also signs of a political sensibility beginning to raise its head in ‘Reject’, in which the narrator’s happy to be a “reject all-American.” The use of the phrase was not coincidental; it was also the title of riot grrrl band Bikini Kill’s 1996 album, which Billie Joe had admired. “I really liked the way Bikini Kill’s last record came out,” he told journalist Craig Rosen. “They challenged themselves more. They have some really rough punk-rock songs and these delicate pretty songs” — essentially the formula Green Day followed on Nimrod.

  And nowhere was that contrast between rough punk and pretty songs better seen than in aggressive numbers like ‘Platypus (I Hate You)’ and ‘Jinx’ (the latter of which neatly segues into ‘Haushinka’, which had been written during the Kerplunk era and was also demoed for Dookie), and what would be Nimrod’s most acclaimed track, ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’.The song, which Billie said had been written in 10 minutes, was unlike anything Green Day had done before, being an acoustic number with an accompanying string section. “It was an acoustic song from the get-go,” Billie Joe told Guitar World. “If I’d put drums on it, it would have turned into a power ballad, and God forbid that ever happens!”

  The tuneful melody and nostalgic lyric made the song a popular choice for weddings and graduation ceremonies, though ironically it had been inspired by a break-up Billie Joe had when the band was working on Dookie; hence the bitter title, ‘Good Riddance’, which people often overlooked in favour of the song’s subtitle, the more positive ‘Time of Your Life’. More than anything, it showed the band was willing to step outside of the one-note, bratty persona many had of them. Billie Joe agreed, telling Guitar World the song “had really freed us, in a lot of respects, to be able to do different things. To get into more sensitive content without feeling like you’re selling yourself out. Or that you’re doing something because you need a hit.”

  The album was titled Nimrod, or, as presented on the album cover, nimrod., and was actually a word that had several meanings. In the Bible, Nimrod is a descendant of Noah, “a mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis 10:9), founder of the kingdom of Babel. It’s also the name of a town in Minnesota, the name of a villain in Marvel Comics’ X-Men series, the title of the ninth movement of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and — humourously, considering Green Day’s penchant for illicit substances — an acronym for an anti-drug organisation in Rochester, New York (Neighborhoods In Motion to Root Out Drugs). But in its slang meaning, it referred to a dimwit, or a dork — it had been Bugs Bunny’s nickname for his easily outwitted nemesis, the would-be hunter Elmer Fudd, in Looney Tunes cartoons of the Forties — certainly a definition more in keeping with Green Day’s prevailing attitude. For the album’s artwork, Green Day decided to draw on the talents of Chris Bilheimer, who had met the group — with Lance Bangs — in the spring of 1995.

  Bilheimer was raised in Savannah, Georgia, and was interested in art from an early age — drawing, painting, photography, and graphic design — taking summer classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design, beginning at age 14. He became interested in music through his older sister, who, while attending the University of Georgia in Athens, worked at the college radio station and provided her brother with mix tapes of what was popular on college radio in the mid-’80s. “That’s when I first heard R.E.M., U2, and Violent Femmes,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh wow, there’s this whole other world out there.’”

  Bilheimer eventually moved to Athens himself, and unsuccessfully tried his hand as a musician. “I really, really wanted to be a part of the music scene, but I just don’t rock. At all,” he says. “Art was the only creative way to be involved.” So he began designing T-shirts for bands, as well as handling stage lighting at clubs and designing sets for bands, “just trying to do as many creative things for the bands and performances as I could.” He then moved on to designing posters and record sleeves for local bands. “There weren’t that many people doing it,” he says. “I barely knew how to do it! I kind of got into graphic design as an afterthought. I’m pretty much completely self-taught. I was laying out flyers by using letraset type, really crude methods. Someone said, ‘You know, you can stretch type on this computer called a Macintosh.’ I’m like, ‘Wow, that sounds interesting.’ The University had a graphic design lab and it was open to non-design students on weekends, so I would just spend the weekend in there teaching myself how to use Macs. I just sort of fell into it.”

  Bilheimer met Michael Stipe through a mutual friend in 1989 and began working for R.E.M. at the end of 1993; the first album he designed for the group was Monster, released the following year. At the time of meeting Green Day, Bilheimer, unlike Bangs, was unfamiliar with the group. “I had never heard of them before Dookie,” he admits. “I really didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to bands outside of Athens. I’ve never been the most musically literate person. That was one of the joys about being around Lance all the time, that he’s one of the most voracious consumers of music. Just by proxy I would find out about stuff.” For the next few years, Bilheimer was simply a friend, seeing Billie Joe “a couple times a year. I went out for his twenty-fifth birthday party. I had fucked up and didn’t get a hotel reservation, so I ended up having to sleep on his couch, and I watched Teletubbies with Joey the next morning. A couple of times I was in Seattle [where R.E.M.’s Peter Buck had relocated] and he’d come up to visit friends up there. We’d go out and play air-hockey and goof around in Seattle.” But the offer to work on Nimrod came totally out the blue.

  “They went through three art directors, some of them at Warner Bros. and some freelance people,” Bilheimer says. “They were just hating everything, apparently. They called me, Pat [Magnarella] called me, said, ‘We are desperate and way behind schedule, and we’ve gone through three people. Can you come out here and talk to the guys?’ I went out there, and the first thing Billie Joe did was tell me, ‘We try not to work with friends because it can really fuck up friendships. That’s why we’ve never asked you to do anything before, but we’re pretty desperate at this point.’”

  By then, Bilheimer was familiar with the group’s output, both musically and visually. “I loved the art for Insomniac, the Winston Smith collage,” he says. “Their previous cover stuff was pretty cartoony, so it was nice to see something a little bit darker, a little bit edgier, a little bit angrier. By Nimrod they had definitely matured as songwriters, with their subject matter and everything. I felt like it was really important to do that with the artwork, to step it up to be a little more mature and have a darker kind of look. Insomniac showed me a little bit of the progression that I thought should be taken further.”

  Just working with the record’s title, Bilheimer had come up with a few different ideas “and one of them was almost identical to what ended up being on the cover. I had seen a photograph, it was a poster for a politician. It said, ‘Elect Blah Blah,’ and the poster had been re-pasted to a wall and someone had ripped the face off the person. It was this portrait of this typical white, middle-aged male, corporate politician American kind of guy, and someone had completely taken his identity away through vandalism. It was just really striking, and thematically it just seemed to really fit them. I had taken this photograph I had seen, and they thought it was a really cool id
ea. I went from there to doing basically the same thing, which is taking people and labeling them, actually making little labels that said ‘nimrod,’ and using that to take away the people’s identity.”

  The cover featured a picture of two men in suits and ties, taken from an encyclopedia, with yellow circles (on US copies; overseas copies had orange circles) reading “nimrod” over their faces, and a similar tactic was employed on the back cover and the CD’s booklet, using photos from a yearbook Bilheimer had bought in a used bookstore in Los Angeles. “I tried to find one from the era of the Leave It To Beaver idyllic ’50’s America,” he explains. “I tried to, once again, break down that image of people’s perceptions of a happy polite idyllic society.” The circles convey an air of something being hidden — or censored, something especially seen in the way the lyrics are presented in the booklet, with lines heavily blacked out as if you’re looking at an FBI file, something Bilheimer wishes he’d taken “a little further, that whole idea of blacking out of the lyrics so they seemed like they were part of something else and you’re only seeing a part of it.”