Kohr ended up combining Billie’s suggestions with his original idea for the video. “So I took his idea, and I was like, I want to do these ordinary people,” he explains. “But I changed it a little bit in that I was like, I want them all to be caught in a moment of clarity, where their brain turns off and they stop thinking about all the things in their life. And their physical reality surrounding them is very clear, just for a moment. And that’s how I directed all the people. And I also wanted to do these different camera tricks, where I shot them once with a hand-held camera that has a slow frame, and then I shot them with a camera on a dolly with a real fast frame, same angle, same camera track, and combined those two so that it appears I’m going from this really fast motion shot to this super slow-motion shot. Because I wanted it to feel like this moment is happening simultaneously to everybody. And that it’s a common thing that happens to people. Essentially, it’s sort of like that eventually, everyone has that moment of clarity, or awakening, or Buddha-ness, or whatever you want to call it. It’s existential, it’s sort of internal, I don’t know how to say this. I’m probably going to come off like an idiot, but it comes out of that feeling that people have only as individuals, when they’re alone, when they reflect on themselves. It’s that whole kind of ‘I am’ thing, but it’s a very internalised feeling. It’s not loneliness, it’s more like the sensitivity of being alive.”
The combination of Billie Joe’s ideas and Kohr’s presentation resulted in a compelling video. Billie Joe serves as the narrator of the piece, with frequent cuts to him performing the song in a somewhat disheveled apartment. The other shots are of people going about their daily, ordinary activities — waiting for a bus, shopping at a hardware store, working at a dry cleaners — the camera zooming in as they have their “moment of clarity.” The people featured were “a combination of people we knew or had access to and actors,” says Kohr. “If you’ll notice, the woman who’s at the beginning and the end of the video — she’s the only one we photographed twice, by the way — she is also in the ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ video. She is the one with the Betty Boop head on that the ape knocks off her head.” Making sure they were included, Mike appears filling up his car at a gas station; Tré is seen recovering from an accident.
Kohr describes the shoot as “a joy, because we had three days to shoot, and we had all the money we needed. Even though I was doing this unusual thing, where I was shooting all these people only once. You know, when you do a film shoot, you do a lot of coverage? Well, in this shoot, I was shooting each person once; then we’d move to a whole new location and just do one shot, and then we’d move to another location and just do one shot. And luckily, the record company had faith in me, because I had a track record and all that jazz. And then, after I put it together, and Billie was like, ‘Man, that thing you did with the fast and slow motion, I didn’t understand what you meant before, but that turned out great.’ And Adrienne really liked it, too. And we put it out there, and it just did so well; audiences loved it, people would watch that video and they would cry. And I saw that the effects reverberated through the visual community; I saw versions of the techniques in television commercials, in movies, and on TV shows. And I was like, ‘That’s great.’ I know it sounds funny, but sometimes when you do something, and you put it out there, and it’s echoed, some people would say that’s plagiarism, but with me, I just go, ‘Oh, I created something that had that kind of impact.’”
On March 8, Nimrod won Best Rock/Pop album at the renamed California Music Awards (BAM magazine having folded). Later that month, the group headed to Japan, and then Australia. While in Melbourne, they appeared on the show Recovery TV, but were only scheduled as an interview. They ended up commandeering the instruments of the house band and launching into an unscheduled performance of ‘The Grouch’, a song whose chorus was replete with the phrase “fuck you.” Though no one was seen getting unduly upset by the performance, the group was nonetheless escorted out of the building immediately afterwards by studio security.
By April, Nimrod was certified Platinum; it would eventually sell over two million. The same month, the band taped a show for MTV in front of a live audience at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on April 17. “Okay, when the video cameras come on, act really punk!” Billie Joe told the packed house, who duly went into what was described as “a frenzied nonstop mosh.” The performance was wonderfully energetic, the intimacy of the small club setting greatly enhancing the atmosphere. Billie Joe enjoyed playing with the crowd; during the instrumental break in ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ he donned a black jacket, shook two plastic skulls at the audience, and intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re all a bunch of sinners! You’re all going to hell!” to delighted cheers. When using the occasional swear word in talking to the audience, he then seemingly caught himself, disingenuously proclaiming, “Oh, wait a minute! Television, you can’t cuss!” then proceeded to give the censors lots of work blanking out the swear words in songs like ‘The Grouch’ (the censors didn’t always blank out times when the audience itself would swear, while singing along). During an especially frantic ‘She’, Mike hit himself in the face with his own bass; Billie Joe didn’t even notice until someone in the audience pointed it out. “What’s that? Holy shit! What just happened?” he said. “I’m sorry, I think I just broke my nose!” said Mike, who exited the stage holding a towel to his bleeding face. Billie Joe then said he’d play the next number, ‘Redundant’, acoustically, “But you have to slam dance extra hard” (it was actually just a solo performance as he used his electric guitar). The broadcast ended with ‘Good Riddance’, but the final song was ‘One Of My Lies’. “Green Day was at their finest,” concluded the San Francisco Examiner. “Yeah, they’re punk, but they’re also very fine — and occasionally brilliant — musicians.”
Another US tour began April 30 in Houston, and the group also had a new song to promote, ‘Redundant’, which in the US reached number 16 on the Modern Rock chart, and number 27 in the UK. The video, again directed by Mark Kohr, has the band playing just outside a living room, where one person after another walks through, performing the same activity each time. “I was looking for a gag that dealt with the idea of how in life, we end up doing the same things over and over again,” he explains. “Because the song has the line about being stuck in repetition over and over, I was looking for a gag that would be this circle which would be broken at the end.” This was conveyed through the action of the first person, a woman who walks into the room, picks up the newspaper on the floor, and walks out. A new newspaper is tossed on the floor and she walks through again — until the end, when Billie Joe picks it up first. “When you break the circle, it’s scary,” says Kohr. “Like when the newspaper falls, and falls, and falls, and falls, and then Billie goes to pick it up, and she goes to pick it up in the same place, and it’s like, ‘Ahh! Where did it go?’” Seeing no newspaper, the video’s last shot is of the woman screaming.
On May 16 the group played the HFStival in Washington, D.C., named after the sponsoring radio station WHFS; other acts on the bill included the Foo Fighters, Everclear, Bad Religion, and The B-52s. During the course of their set, Tré lit his drum kit on fire, which was seen as a way of heightening the excitement beyond merely battering one’s instrument into pieces. “We never plan to do shit,” Tré told RollingStone.com. “But we always keep the implements of our destruction on hand in case need be. I had an axe and other things.” Standing amidst the destruction, Billie Joe performed ‘Good Riddance’, a song that was fast becoming an obvious set closer.
The atmosphere was more highly charged the following month at the sixth annual KROQ Weenie Roast & Fiesta on June 20 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre in Irvine, California (now the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater).The Los Angeles Times reviewer was unimpressed with the lineup (which included The Prodigy, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Creed, and Blink-182, among others), which he called “Unspectacular … way overcrowded with inconsequential newcomers.” But Green Day came in
for praise: “The puerile but feisty Bay Area trio played with the fire and authority that everybody else lacked, packed plenty of action into its set, and let a catchy array of tunes do the rest … on stage, Armstrong was his usual antic self, mugging and scampering cartoonishly, cussing to be cutely naughty, stripping to his undies and serving as ringleader for assorted pranks.”
What wasn’t mentioned was the unexpected appearance during the band’s set of Arion Salazar, bassist with Third Eye Blind, who ran on stage and hugged Mike. Mike was annoyed at having the band’s act interrupted, and a brief skirmish broke out. Backstage, the fight began again, ending with Mike getting hit in the head with a beer bottle, resulting in a fractured skull and twenty stitches. It was not clear who had hit Mike, but Salazar nonetheless issued a public apology, that read in part, “I am sorry that my attempt at doing something I thought would be funny escalated into Mike getting hurt … My heart goes out to him and I hope he recovers quickly. We have many friends in common and I just hope that he can accept my sincerest apology. I am sorry, Mike.”
The band then returned to Europe, and Lance Bangs accompanied them on what was a much happier tour. “I was in Los Angeles working on Being John Malcovich, documenting the production of that film,” he says. “They would fly me out to go tour with them and shoot footage. Billie Joe was definitely a music fan, wanting to see early footage of The Clash and tracking down information or books about Dylan. He seemed to have that sensibility, knowing that he needed to have things documented and put away for awhile so they would exist at least. Which was a pretty bright thing to be aware of. It was never like it was coming from management or anything, it was mostly Billie Joe being interested about having someone go and shoot some footage.
“And again, it was amazing how many kids were just going nuts and painting their faces and making shirts and jumping in the crowd and going crazy at their shows,” Bangs continues. “That definitely won me over. Pretty early on when I had been touring with them, I had come from a more indie rock sad music background. But I was won over by their live shows. What they were doing was really great live.” Bangs’ footage would end up in numerous short documentary shows about the band that appeared on music stations like MTV and VH1: Behind the Music, VH1 Ultimate Albums, Driven, and other similar programs.
The band’s incessant touring paid off when they won the Best Live Performance award at that year’s Kerrang! awards ceremony. More awards followed on September 10, when the group attended the MTV Video Music Awards, held at the Universal Amphitheater in LA, and, after being nominees since the release of Dookie, finally won a Best Alternative Video award for ‘Good Riddance’. “No way!” said Tré when the group reached the podium. “Susan Lucci, eat your heart out!” Billie Joe said when it was his turn to speak, in reference to the All My Children soap opera star who at that time had been repeatedly nominated for an Emmy award and had yet to win. He then thanked Rob Cavallo, Pat Magnarella, and, scratching his head to remember who else he might have left out, finally blurted, “And Mark Kohr! I don’t know if Mark Kohr is here but he’s the one who introduced us to making videos. And he made this one, he’s made almost every single one that we have done, so I just want to say thanks to him.” He also said hello to his wife, who would soon give birth to the couple’s second son, Jakob Danger Armstrong (giving Billie Joe a reason to get another tattoo).
After a trip to South America, touring finally ended in December, with more appearances at radio station-sponsored holiday shows. The last single from Nimrod was also released, though the song was actually promoted as being from the soundtrack of Varsity Blues — ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’, which reached number 31 Modern Rock. The video marked the first time the group worked with director Evan Bernard, and recast a Green Day show as an American football match, complete with cheerleaders, a pep-talking coach, and bizarrely dressed fans. The band is seen trashing their locker room after their “victory”, as the announcer solemnly intones, “Nice guys finish last, but on this fateful December afternoon, Green Day finished first!” The video was shot in Los Angeles November 22 to 23. The number later received a nomination for an MTV Movie Award for Best Song.
Over the course of promoting Nimrod, the newly recharged Green Day had played close to 200 shows. But they were learning to pace themselves, and they would not tour again so extensively for another year and a half. There would also be another long break before they recorded their next album, which would again see them exploring new musical directions. Green Day was growing up, but they certainly weren’t about to start growing old.
CHAPTER 8
Going Down to Jingle Town
“You can’t keep writing the same song over and over again. Lyrically, I think there’s a lot more said on this album then there has been in the past.”
— Billie Joe to Teen People, November 2000
At the beginning of 1999, it was announced that Green Day would open for The Rolling Stones on five dates in February. But the band pulled out almost as soon as the announcement was made. The official reason given was that they wanted to get to work on their new album, but in fact they wouldn’t start recording until the following year. As when the European Insomniac tour was cancelled in 1996, the band needed a break after the relentless touring of the previous year. Tré also later spoke of the turbulence in their personal lives; both he and Mike divorced their wives during this period (Tré remarried in March 2000). Mike also had some health issues to sort out; what he feared was a heart condition turned out to be simply a digestive disorder. For his part, Billie Joe admitted his own marriage had been “pretty rocky,” but he and Adrienne managed to keep their relationship together.
The band also managed to keep the relationship between themselves together, taking a month and a half off after the Nimrod touring had ended, then going back into their usual routine of rehearsal. “Band practise isn’t an event for us,” Mike told Guitar World. “It’s what we do. We enjoy it, but we take it very seriously. We always have.” Songs began to materialise during rehearsals, but instead of deliberately trying to build up a backlog, as Billie Joe had for Nimrod, the band opted to let the songs emerge naturally. “We wanted to make this record in our practise space,” Billie Joe told Guitar World. “No writing in the studio. Sometimes I think being in the studio can have disadvantages creatively. You can feel stifled a little bit.”
“The last record was just us going in and pounding out songs,” Mike told the Denver Rocky Mountain News. “We were saying, ‘Let’s just keep writing tons of songs and find the record within that.’ This time, Billie wasn’t forcing himself to write songs. We were letting the songs happen and letting the inspirational moments show up when they do.”
But what was more unusual was that the band played only two shows over the next 17 months, the fewest they’d ever played in their entire career. Even more unusually, the two they did play were concerts more associated with an acoustic performing style. The shows were two of Neil Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit concerts, the Bridge School being an organisation that works with children who have physical and speech impairments. Young had long been a supporter of the school, as his wife Pegi was a co-founder; the Youngs’ son also attended the school.
The 1999 Bridge School Benefit shows were held October 30 and 31 at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. Young, Pearl Jam, a reunited Who, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson, and Lucinda Williams were among the others on the bill. Improbably enough, Green Day’s set began with ‘Geek Stink Breath’, and though they toned their antics down somewhat — nothing was set on fire — Tré nonetheless managed to break several drumsticks, later tossing one to the Bridge School students sitting on a riser at the back of the stage, and Billie Joe added a tuneful kazoo part to ‘When I Come Around’, which finally brought the audience to its feet. “Green Day proved that punk rock can translate to acoustic instruments — it’s called rockabilly,” wrote Metro. “These multi-Platinum East Bay punks certainly surprised some people in the crowd
with their deep musicality.” The group also debuted the song that would become the title track of their next album, ‘Warning’, and debuted a new live member as well, Billie Joe’s band mate in Pinhead Gunpowder, Jason White.
Lance Bangs shot the group in rehearsal and was present for the shows. “It was great because it was really the first time I’d seen them play with Jason,” he says. “He’s a really great guy. And it was just good to see, when they stripped things down, what the songs were like. Their songs worked in that format; they’re classic, well-written songs. They won over a lot of the audience, they were really impressed with how the songs held up. It was just a really fun weekend. They felt like they were slightly out of their element, because it was mostly older, more established songwriter-type people. But they definitely came over really well, the crowd was totally into them. It was a blast.” Having a second guitarist not only added to the sound, it also freed up Billie Joe as a performer, allowing him to move around the stage without worrying about always having to play his instrument.
Bangs had also put together a video for another song on Nimrod, ‘Last Ride In’, which was put out around this time, though the song itself was not released as a single. “They just liked that song,” says Bangs. “It was a nice little instrumental thing. Different than what they are known for; it has more of a surf rock type feel. And they just wanted to make a film to go with that song.” The video offers a distillation of the kind of footage Bangs had been filming, with shots of the band rehearsing, and on stage.
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