Green Day

by Gillian G. Gaar

  The picture on the final page of the booklet has the band wrapped up in duct tape, screaming (save for Mike, who has tape over his mouth). “That was a joke,” Bilheimer says. “We were talking about band photos and I was like, ‘You always see these photos of the band and they’re all standing unnaturally close to each other,’ and just how awkward and forced it looks, ‘So why don’t we actually give you a reason to be that crammed up and why don’t I just duct tape you guys to each other?’ That was purely just kind of a smart-ass response to taking publicity photos. It was not intended to go in the package necessarily. It just turned out that way because the photos were pretty fucking funny.”

  Bilheimer’s design work was not just limited to the record, but all the images associated with the release, from promotional postcards and posters to ads and backstage passes and the covers for the different singles. “When you sign onto a project, like for Green Day, you end up doing everything,” he says. “Every single advertisement in every magazine. Every poster. Everything you see of theirs.” In the course of working on Nimrod, Bilheimer had also come up with another idea that played off the circle. “I had this concept of taking other Warner Bros. or Reprise artists’ promotional items, like, say, the life-size Madonna cardboard cut-out that goes in the store, and covering them with ‘nimrod’ stickers,” he says. “I thought this was a genius idea because you don’t actually have to spend any money on making new stuff. And it was sort of cross-promoting the other artists. You’re also getting rid of stuff that’s just going to end up in a landfill. There was also supposedly going to be a campaign hiring some vandals to actually vandalize some billboards, for movies and that sort of thing. Supposedly that happened, but I never actually saw any.”

  A subsequent story in Billboard quoted Linnea Nan, director of artist development and creative marketing for Reprise, as saying, “We’re not telling [retail outlets] to sticker POP [point of purchase] for hot new releases, but we’re leaving it at the store’s discretion and hoping that they’ll have some fun with it,” with the writer adding, “Nan is optimistic that the sticker campaign will spark curiosity and intrigue with consumers, before it is revealed later in the campaign that ‘Nimrod’ is the title of the new Green Day album.”

  In building up to the album’s release, the group — billing themselves as The Nimrods — did a surprise show on July 19 at trendy LA club, The Viper Room (co-owned by actor Johnny Depp, and more notorious as the place outside of which actor River Phoenix collapsed and died on October 31, 1993).They then traveled to Japan, where they were schedule to play the Mount Fuji Rock Festival on July 26 to 27. But the event was cancelled on the first day when Typhoon Rosie hit the region, and the bands ended up spending their time at a nearby amusement park, where a fight almost broke out after Tré shot Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins with a BB gun. A brief European tour started in September, taking in six cities (Milan, Vienna, Hamburg, Cologne, Paris, and London).The album’s first single, ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’, was sent to radio in late August, in advance of a proposed September release date in an attempt to thwart leaks of the song.

  Nimrod was released October 14 in the US, where it sold 82,000 copies in the first week. It was released on October 11 in the UK, and reached number 10 in both countries. The day of Nimrod’s US release, the band also appeared on The Late Show, performing ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’. Paul Shaffer, the leader of the show’s house band, played the song’s violin part on his keyboard. Yellow “Nimrod” circles decorated Tré’s drum riser, and he somersaulted over his kit at the song’s conclusion, then dashed off-stage, to host David Letterman’s amusement. Afterwards, the band threw a party at the club Don Hill’s. During the first part of the evening, the house band performed songs from the new album, with vocals provided by an assortment of drag queens. Green Day finally took to the stage themselves for an hour-long set, throwing in plenty of covers (such as the perennial favourite, Survivor’s ‘Eye Of The Tiger’), including one from their Sweet Children days, The Who’s ‘My Generation’ (during which an over-excited fan cut his hand open on broken glass). The set ended at 2:30 am, when Billie Joe overturned Tré’s drum kit.

  ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ reached number 5 Modern Rock, number nine Mainstream Rock, and number 25 in the U. K; the video had its world premiere on MTV on September 16. “That one was really hard to do,” says Mark Kohr, who again directed. “At the time, I was keeping all these people working for me, and I was just rolling from one video to the next. It was hard, and we had done that for two years at that point, or maybe even longer, I can’t remember. And we were just shot. We were like, ‘We’re going to take a break, almost done …’ And then ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ came along, and I was like ‘Oh God, OK, well, I guess not.’”

  Billie Joe’s only direction had been that “he wanted to have some dancing girls in it, some pretty girls, but he didn’t want it to be overt, didn’t want it to be too much. And in hindsight, I think I even pulled it back too far. I wish that I had just made that video be that sort of weird, sort of cool Twenties theatrical thing that it is, but done essentially as a dance piece.”

  The video has a vintage feel, opening with the group on stage of what appears to be a vaudeville theatre; the action later cuts back and forth between the stage and a bar, both populated with an odd assortment of characters and artifacts. “I grew up loving musicals, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and all that stuff,” says Kohr. “And you know in Singin’ In The Rain, there’s that whole sequence with these long conveyor belts [the ‘Gotta Dance’ number toward the end of the film] and I always wanted to do a thing with conveyor belts. And in that video, of course, it opens up with them walking on a street that’s staying still, with other people walking around them, but they’re walking in the same place.

  “And then it just sort of grew,” Kohr continues. “In the song it talks about a fountain of youth, so I thought why don’t we make the fountain of youth like this bar? And the people in it are just exhausted, and they’re kind of like zombies almost; their teeth look bad and they have dust on them, and their faces are kind of white. And the band are at the back of this bar, but they’re under the roots of this tree. And I can’t remember why I made those symbols, but in the song it talks about a pot of gold, and so I had a pot of gold at the base of the tree. And it’s actually empty, and then there’s a mosquito that comes out, so it’s kind of like, money comes and bites you.

  “I was working almost with those Betty Boop and early cartoons, where you would have these weird things happen and trippy stuff. I was thinking about how in those Max Fleischer cartoons everything moved to the beat, the bottles moved to the beat, everything moved, everyone’s in motion. And then I had that one bartender that’s actually a giant, he’s like 8’ or 7’9”, he was the tallest guy in LA at the time. And then I had one guy who’s really short but who’s not a midget. So I had the tall and the short guy, and when Billie goes to fight the giant guy in the end, he’s really small by comparison, and it looked hilarious at the time. I was just trying to make it like a trippy adventure, vaudeville thing.”

  Considering the intricacies of the video, it’s surprising that Kohr was able to shoot it in one day. “I wish that photographically it read better, but if I had more time, maybe I could have pulled that off,” he says. “There were a lot of things I wish I could change with that one, and make it even better, because I always wanted to do a piece like that. It always kind of bummed me out, because I wanted to make that so good and I wanted to make a video like that so cool, and I had to shoot it in a day and I was exhausted, and my whole crew was exhausted. It was just really tough, but the band was really great, everyone was really great.”

  The band began their next tour to support Nimrod on October 30 in Dallas, which essentially lasted until the end of 1998; they played dates during 14 out of the next 15 months. There was the usual revelry on the road. On November 11, the band made an appearance on the show Late Night With Conan O’Brien, then played an in-store at Tower Records on
4th and Broadway in New York, with predictably chaotic results. “You can start a riot,” Billie Joe told the crowd, “You can do anything you want, ’cause you’re not at Tower Records, you’re at a Green Day concert!” The audience didn’t riot but did cause some damage to the premises, with Billie Joe further adding to mayhem by dousing the audience with beer and water, spray painting “Nimrod” on the walls and “Fuck you” on a window, and once again dropping his pants to moon the crowd. He was restrained from throwing a monitor from the landing where the band was playing by a Tower staffer who wasn’t able to keep Tré from throwing his bass drum. But a RollingStone.com story noted, “Reports that damages totaled $50,000 are excessive. A Tower spokesman says there was only $100 at the most.” “It was just good fun,” Billie Joe told MTV online. “[In-stores] give you the perfect opportunity to make a complete fool of yourself.”

  Undeterred, the band played another free concert in the alley behind the downtown HMV record store in Toronto, Ontario, on November 19; their concert that night at the Phoenix Concert Theatre had sold out in six minutes, so the free show was added. No mishaps were reported. The same month the group also appeared in animated form on the cartoon series King Of The Hill, cast as the garage band Cane And The Stubborn Stains. And teacher/fan John Goar caught the group again in Seattle when they played club DV8 on December 2. “The venue was small and intimate,” he says (Green Day had previously played the club in 1994 when it was known as Oz.) “I could imagine that Billie Joe was looking right at me. When the band was coming on the stage, I tried to yell at Billie Joe to get his attention, but no dice.” Goar later wrote about the show for greenday.net.

  The group also irked KROQ with their antics at the station’s Almost Acoustic Christmas show in LA in December. First they threw a Christmas tree into the audience; “Well, someone had to do it!” Billie Joe told writer Jane Ganahl by way of explanation. “It was sitting there two days and nobody had thrown it in!” The group provoked further outrage by spray painting the set, trying to stop the show’s rotating stage in the middle of another band’s set, throwing a bottle through a window, and Billie Joe again mooning the audience. (“I do that sometimes when things aren’t going well.”) The police were called, and another indecent exposure arrest loomed. But ultimately, charges weren’t pressed as the band had “played a really awesome set,” in the words of a KROQ representative.

  The US leg concluded with three nights at San Francisco’s venerated Fillmore Theater. The reviews were mixed. Craig Marine of the San Francisco Examiner, sounding like a disgruntled East Bay punk, wrote, “For all of the band’s high-energy machinations, they are so eager to please the crowd that they come across as some sort of schmaltzy lounge act, what with lead vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong’s constant butt-kissing chatter … he has also become the thing most true punks would probably hate to be the most — a frat boy poster child.” Conversely, James Sullivan, in the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “The first rule of punk is tenacity — the determination to do whatever you’re told you can’t … Green Day made it clear that it has tenacity in spades, punching through 20 glorious songs that assured its fans that the band has no intention of fading into the early retirement of so many fast-rising pop phenoms,” adding that the band’s songs “sounded as fresh as they did when Dookie was released.”

  They certainly remained a hit with the audience. All three concerts were sold out and the crowd was becoming more mixed in age, with teenagers moshing and crowd-surfing down front, while adults bopped away at the back. And instead of stripping, during the first show Billie Joe put on clothing, piling on the T-shirts and a bra that had been hurled on stage. But the show’s end involved the usual destruction, Tré stabbing his drum kit during the encore, leaving Billie Joe to perform ‘Good Riddance’ solo.

  After a break for the holidays, the European tour began on January 20, 1998 in Belfast. January also saw the release of ‘Good Riddance’ as a single. The group — or, rather, Billie Joe, who sang solo in the spotlight, somberly dressed in black — performed the song on The Late Show prior to the European tour (host David Letterman even introduced Billie Joe by name, as Mike and Tré, though in attendance, did not perform on the show. “These guys are looking for day labour, so if have anything you need done around the house …” said Letterman). While in the UK, Billie Joe also performed the song on the long-running music show, Top Of The Pops.

  The song was quickly becoming, in DJ Dean Carlson’s words, “a multi-format smash. Prior to that, they really were more branded as an alternative band, whether it was as part of the punk revival or as the new Buzzcocks for another generation. But this was a record that was such an across-the-board smash that everyone played it. There was a time in radio when you would just play a record that, on paper, didn’t make sense for that station, but when you listened to it, it totally made sense, because it just transcended the image of the band. You just played the song because it sounded so good. And you didn’t care about what the band looked like or the average age of their audience, it’s just the song itself appealed to such a wide audience. And that doesn’t happen very often, but that was one of those songs. I think there was a sentiment in that song that just made it universal. That’s what made that song go beyond just being a Green Day song and become a classic pop song. And those records are just hard to deny. There are always records like that; just because a record is accessible doesn’t mean it’s diluted or softened. It just means that the strength of the song completely transcends the image of the band. And I’m a sucker for a really great pop record.”

  In the US, the single reached number 11 on the Airplay chart (their highest placing on that chart since ‘When I Come Around’ in 1995), number two Modern Rock, and number seven Mainstream Rock. In the UK, the single reached number 11 (the highest placing in the UK chart since ‘Basket Case’). The song gained further exposure when it appeared at the end of the Sienfeld clip show that aired before the final episode of the comedy series on May 14, after which the album jumped 20 places on the Billboard chart. It was also featured in two episodes of the medical drama, ER (though skeptics couldn’t help noting that Warner Bros., coincidentally, owned both Green Day’s label and the companies that produced the TV shows). It was also chosen as the official theme song for that year’s PGA Golf Tour. Mike wondered how many of the people that heard the song even realised it was Green Day. “They just go, ‘I heard this really good song a couple of years ago and I don’t know who sang it,’” he told the Las Vegas Sun in 2001. He added he’d seen the song turn up in all sorts of unexpected places, such as on an enrollment cassette for the College Of The Redwoods up north in California.

  The video for ‘Good Riddance’ also made an impact. “That one was a gift from the gods,” says Mark Kohr. “They put it out to me and to other directors, and I wrote up a concept. I didn’t talk with Billie, I just thought, I’m just going to give it a go, see what I come up with.”

  Kohr’s original idea was not too dissimilar to the underlying scenario of ‘When I Come Around’; a series of people caught up in their own lives, yet somehow linked together. “It was really kind of cool,” he explains. “It was like this black-and-white thing where there were people in an urban setting, and people waiting in line at a supermarket, and you could see that they were just in their own thoughts. And then there was a couple and they were driving a car along an urban park, in a cool old car, and then there was a mortician doing the makeup on a dead person. And you would see each one of these scenarios, you would see these little stories, these ordinary stories, and then fireworks were going to come out of the park. I’ve experienced this from time to time in my life, where I’m just going along, and all of sudden there are fireworks going off, and it’s not the Fourth of July. And I go, ‘That’s kind of wild. Fireworks — how cool!’ and I see them in the distance, and I watch them, and then they’re done. And that’s what I wanted to have happen — I wanted to have these fireworks go off, and I wanted to have all these people lo
ok up, like the mortician guy doing the makeup on the dead person somehow turns and sees the fireworks, and the people waiting in line at the store, they look out the window and they see the fireworks. And this couple that are driving along see the fireworks through the trees and they stop their car and they sit on the hood. And I just wanted to have this scene that like, bound everybody together.”

  But Kohr’s idea was rejected. “I got this word back, ‘Well, Billie doesn’t like any of the ideas from any of the directors, because there’s a dead person in all of them,’” he says. So he was surprised to be contacted by the group again in November ’97. “They called and asked me, ‘Mark, could you come with us and spend a few days with us in New York, and we’ll come up with an idea.’ And I said, ‘Well, sure.’ They flew me to New York, and I hung out with them for a few days, and it was a great time; you know, hanging out, go on MTV, they did a show at Roseland, and all this stuff happened. And we didn’t talk about the video at all, for a day and half. Maybe it was even three days. And then they went to be on Conan, and Billie was like, ‘Why don’t we talk about the video?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’ Because, again, I wanted to let this emerge, I didn’t want to force it. But of course, secretly, I had a little anxiety, because at some point, we’re going to have to talk about this thing.”

  Once the entourage arrived at the TV studios, “Billie sweeps everyone else out of the green room, and it’s just me and Mike and Billie and Tré,” says Kohr. “And Billie says, ‘You know, I’d kind of like to do this like a Pogues video, where they’re working class, and we have shots of working-class people, kind of like they’re like drunk or something. And they’re in real ordinary places.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, anything else?’ And he was like, ‘No. Well, no, I know … and I’m playing a guitar, and I’m like sitting on a bed that’s on the floor, and there are flyers on the wall.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, that sounds good. Great.’ And again, it’s that I have the faith. I know that Billie’s given me it all, he’s told me everything that he wants. All I need to do is ask myself, ‘What does he mean by that? What do I work with there?’”