“They wanted to make use of all that footage that had been shot,” Bangs explains. “Billie Joe had also gotten a Super-8 camera and shot some footage of his family vacation and water skiing and things like that. I got that transferred for him and started going through all the footage through the years, and pulled various moments together in that song. And the video definitely aired on MTV. I don’t think you could buy a CD single of that song, necessarily, but it was definitely put out and promoted on MTV.”
The similarly flavoured instrumental, ‘Espionage’ — featured in the film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me — was also released that year. The song was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, but lost to ‘The Calling’ by Santana, featuring Eric Clapton.
The members also continued their own involvement with various side projects. Billie Joe duetted with former Avengers lead singer Penelope Houston, now a singer-songwriter solo act, on the song ‘The Angel And The Jerk’; it appeared on the 1999 compilation Friends Again, as well Houston’s own 1999 album Tongue. He also produced One Man Army’s 2000 album Last Word Spoken on Adeline. And there were further releases from Pinhead Gunpowder: Shoot The Moon, released in 1999 on Adeline, and three EPs released in 2000, a split EP with Dillinger Four on Adeline, a self-titled EP on THD Records, and 8 Chords, 328 Words on Lookout (all three EPs, and an additional unreleased track, would be compiled by Lookout on 2003’s Compulsive Disclosure).
Meanwhile, Mike had his own side projects. He appeared on Screeching Weasel’s Thank You Very Little, released in 2000 on Panic Button. He also formed a side band, The Frustrators. Mike had been jamming regularly with guitarist Terry Linehan and drummer Art Tedeschi (who had played together in the band Waterdog), and the three decided to add a lead singer. Tedeschi brought in singer/guitarist Jason Chandler, with whom he’d played in the band Violent Anal Death (Chandler, Linehan, and Tedeschi were all originally from the East Coast). In 2000, the band’s song ‘Trout’ appeared on the Adeline compilation Might As Well — Can’t Dance, and they also released an EP on the label the same year, Bored In The USA, with a cover, designed by Chandler, parodying Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA album. (“Eight catchy tunes about cars, rotting food, midgets used for sport, and sex!” boasted the label’s website.) There was a minor controversy when the band’s song, ‘The Great Australian Midget Toss’, was played during a Lakers’ basketball game in Los Angeles, resulting in complaints from an organisation called The Little People of America. “This sends out the wrong message to short-statured individuals and their families,” LPA representative Casey Hubelbank told the Associated Press. “[The] fact that the song was used as a taunt at a major sporting event only makes it worse … We don’t like to throw the word ‘boycott’ around, but in this case can you blame us?” The band’s response appeared on their website, in which they stressed that, “The song is meant as a farce. If anyone in this world listens to our song and finds in it some call toward violence, then that person should seek counseling,” and concluding, “If anyone has taken offense at our jokes, we do apologise for the misunderstanding.” No boycott ever materialised.
Expectant fans who wanted new Green Day material in 1999 had to content themselves with the group’s contribution to the compilation album Short Music For Short People, released on Fat Wreck Chords (run by “Fat” Mike Burkett, singer/bassist in NOFX). The album’s title referred to the fact that all of the “songs” were 30 seconds in length, enabling a total of 101 acts to appear on the record. The Green Day track was ‘The Ballad of Wilhelm Fink’.
Finally, three years after the recording of Nimrod, the band began making preparations to record their next album. They also decided to make a few changes. The band had previously co-produced their albums, and had shared that duty with the same two people: Andy Ernst, who co-produced the albums on Lookout, and Rob Cavallo who had taken over when the group signed to Reprise. This time, they decided to go outside their circle and picked Scott Litt, who’d previously worked with The Replacements, R.E.M., and Nirvana, among others, to produce. And in addition to a new producer, the band was also going to be working at a new studio: Oakland’s Studio 880.
Studio 880 is located on a dead-end street, virtually next to an overpass of Interstate 880. “It took so much effort to shut out the noise from the freeway, we have a mutual respect for each other,” says John Lucasey, the studio’s owner. High gates topped with barbed wire surround the location, and you need to press an outside buzzer for admittance. There’s no address on the outside indicating that you’re at Studio 880; you just have to know that it’s there.
When the gate slides back, the first thing you see is a huge parking lot. Immediately to the right is a fence with a high gate that leads to a covered patio, and what’s called the ‘880 Entertainment Complex,’ a building with four studios, pre-production rooms, and offices. The décor in the lobby is Tiki-room ambience, with wood-carved columns holding up the balconies, bamboo torches jutting out from their sides, and a large Tiki god (from the set of the first Scooby Doo movie) surveying all from the top of the stairs with eerie, glowing red eyes. Tropical foliage appears to spill from the ceiling, and from somewhere in the distance you can hear the gentle sound of trickling water. “Some people call it the Rain Forest Café,” Lucasey jokes. At the far end of the parking lot is the door to the main studio complex.
Lucasey’s family previously owned a factory on the spot he now calls “the house that Green Day built.” “I grew up in this building,” he says. “The control room, where we mix all the hits now, used to be where the machine shop was. I worked there during the summer when I was in high school, as a tool and dye apprentice. And I used to drive a fork-lift through where all the studios are now. So it all means a lot to me.” The immediate neighbourhood around the studio is called “Jingle Town,” a reference to the young hipsters that used to frequent the area back in the Thirties, “hip dudes in these long, pinstriped zoot suits with deep pockets,” Lucasey explains. “And they’d hang out on the corners, and they’d always have change in their pockets and jingle it. That was kind of their trade mark, so they called it Jingle Town ’cause of that.”
Lucasey had been interested in music since he was a teenager. “I wanted to become a musician, but I couldn’t afford lessons,” he says. “Then, after I’d finally learned, all my friends had become better musicians than I did.” Still wanting to be involved in music somehow, Lucasey designed stages for his musician friends, tried his hand at songwriting, and became increasingly interested in the workings of recording studios. “But I also had a wild side,” he says, which resulted in his moving to Los Angeles in 1984 where he worked as a stunt man for some years.
When he decided to get back into music again, he didn’t want to work in LA. “I didn’t like the music scene there,” he explains. “And I knew something special was going to happen in the Bay Area because there are so many characters here, so much original talent. Los Angeles is a neat place, but everybody puts on their showcase face there. People who play shows here, they’re playing shows because they love to be in a band, it’s not about, ‘How do we become rock stars?’”
So Lucasey returned to the Bay Area in 1991, initially opening a small studio in Oakland. He then relocated to Walnut Creek, opening Lucasey Video and Audio Productions on North Main Street. “My dream was to own a big recording studio, but this was a little tiny place,” he says. “And it was off in Walnut Creek where there were no bands. But there was this used music store, Black Market Music, down the street, and I used to always visit and hang out at there. And one of the guys who worked there was a guy named Bill Schneider. He also had a band and he had no money, and I always took in the little refugee bands and said, ‘Here’s some free recording time … if you make some money then you pay me, alright?’ So I gave them free recording time.”
Lucasey’s generosity would bring him an unexpected payoff when Schneider began working for Green Day as their roadie and, later, guitar tec
h (not to mention playing with Billie Joe in Pinhead Gunpowder). Lucasey eventually moved to Oakland and opened Studio 880 in 1998. “And one day I heard on the radio that Green Day was looking to do an album again,” he recalls. “They were saying, ‘Yeah, they’re going to Los Angeles and meeting with studios.’ So I was like, “I wonder if my friend Bill Schneider still works with Green Day?’ So I just called him up and he’s all, ‘Hey John, long time no talk!’ He told me he was still working for Green Day and I go, ‘Well, I opened this new studio in Oakland. It’s a lot bigger than the last one. I heard Green Day’s looking for a new place to record … would you mind telling them about my studio? Could you have ’em come in and check out my place?’ Then all of a sudden he’s, ‘Ahhhhh, you know, John, to be honest with you, they’re kind of a big band, they’re not like a little demo band. These guys are big time.’ So I said, ‘You know what Bill, you’re right. I don’t know how to describe my place, so all I’m going to say is one thing, and if you can’t, you can’t. But remember that time I gave you that free recording time with your band?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah …’ And I said, ‘All I’m asking you is just to mention it to them, and just tell them that I’m inviting them down. And if they say, ‘No, F-off,’ at least you tried. This is the only favour I’m asking.’
“So, about two hours later, Bill called me,” he continues. “And he had this little trembling voice, and he’s like, ‘Uh, John? Dude, they’re gonna come down!’ And I was like, ‘What? They’re really?’ And he says, ‘Yeah! I’m just as shocked as you! They wanna come down tomorrow.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is really cool.’ So they came in the next day. And it was funny, because I saw them out in the parking lot, and at the time the place was one-sixth of what it is now, and from the parking lot it just looked like a warehouse. And they were like, ‘Hey, what’s up dude?’ Then they walked in and their jaws just went to the floor. It was just amazing, it was just — I saw it right in their eyes, they’re like, ‘This is in our backyard, and we’re like ten minutes away from here. This is amazing.’” Michael Rosen, who was Studio 880’s studio manager at the time, remembers the Green Day connection coming about somewhat differently. He says he contacted the band after learning they wanted to record in Oakland. “I had gone to Los Angeles, and a friend of mine who managed Cello Studios, we had lunch, and she told me that Green Day was looking for a studio up in the Bay Area,” he says. “They wanted to be in Oakland. They specifically didn’t want to be in the Bay Area, they wanted to be in Oakland, because they wanted to come back to their roots. They wanted to be near their homes; they had done enough traveling, and they wanted to do something that was in their backyard. I actually worked at Fantasy when they did Dookie, and I think they liked that studio, but they wanted this to be a little grittier. There’s a little more cachet, a little more street-cred, perhaps, in Oakland.”
But both agree that once Green Day had given the thumbs-up, Rob Cavallo, Scott Litt, and Alan Sides, a studio designer and owner of Ocean Way (where the record would be mixed) inspected the facilities and requested certain modifications, which Lucasey was happy to do. “No problem!” Lucasey says. “I redid the hardwood floors and we made the room just sound amazing. I was willing to accommodate them. It’s a world-class setting that they could tailor to make a certain sound, which became a very successful sound — we definitely have a very distinctive sound coming from the studio. It just had the vibe, you know; the studio’s here in Jingle Town, it’s kind of the barrio, and it’s a world-class place.”
“The neighbourhood was really something,” Mike later told Guitar World. “There were people out there selling drugs and shit. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of ‘community’ in the Latino community.” “Every time a truck went by [on the freeway], you could feel it, and you can hear it in the frequencies the microphones pick up,” said Billie Joe in the same article. “We said, ‘This is a great place! It’s 10 minutes from where we live. We can still have our lives at home, but still not be distracted when we’re working in the studio.”
Pre-production started in February, but within a few days Litt had bowed out of the project. “Scott had come by the studio,” says Rosen. “Every producer and engineer, especially when you work with a big band, you want to see where you’ll be working, that the studio has everything that you need. So Scott had come by and talked about a couple of things that he might want to do in the studio, and then we never saw him again. I heard through the grapevine that the band wasn’t sharing his vision for what they were doing, that they didn’t like his vibe, or something like that. But that was it. We never saw hide nor hair of him again.”
Instead of bringing in another producer, Green Day decided to produce themselves for the first time, working mainly with their engineer, Ken Allardyce, and with Rosen “making sure everything ran smoothly as far as their session, getting anything they needed — runners, coffee, equipment. Everything from soup to nuts.” The sessions finally began April 1.
As the band had been working on material for some time, “when Billie Joe came in he had a pretty clear picture of what he wanted to do on the record and went right at it,” says Rosen. “Billie Joe’s a pretty smart guy. He has a very strong sense of what he wants and how to go about getting it. The only confusion was that Rob Cavallo sort of produced that record as well, but he didn’t spend a lot of time up there. He was the executive producer and he would come and go from Los Angeles every couple of weeks. He would come in and go, ‘These monitors sounds like crap, why don’t you get new monitors?’ And I’d have to run around and find someone to rent some monitors for a day or two and change everything. Then he’d leave and they’d go back to what they were doing before, and they’d be like, ‘We were fine, what is this guy going on about?’ See, they were trying to do things for the first time without him, so it was kind of a strange dynamic. It’s kind of like how it is with your parents, when you go away to college or something like that. They wanted to do things on their own, yet they counted on his input. They definitely respected him and counted on him.”
“Rob looks like Joe Business when he comes in,” is Lucasey’s assessment. “He’s always on the phone with Jewel or whoever, talking talking talking, going fast at it. And then he sits down, and he picks up a guitar and you’re like, ‘Oh shit, this guy can actually play.’ And then he’ll challenge you. He’ll say, ‘Name a song.’ And I’ll try and name like the most off-the-wall Beatles songs, or the strangest songs from the Sixties and Seventies, and he can play every single one of those songs. ’Cause he really believes in music. He really knows music. He also knows what will sell, too. He’s definitely earned the respect of Billie Joe, and that is one hard fucking thing to do. They definitely work together well.”
If on Nimrod the group had dabbled their toes in musical experimentation, on Warning they took the full plunge, bringing in ever more diverse instruments, creating an album that’s the most different, musically, of any of Green Day’s records. After three opening drumbeats, the first sound you hear on Warning is the vigorous strumming of a brace of acoustic guitars — certainly an unexpected opening on a Green Day album. The song itself cleverly takes the same cautionary phrases that everyone sees when they buy a new appliance and turns them into lyrics — and, more subversively, subtle statements of dissent. In considering the warning about not crossing police lines, for example, the question is raised, who is more dangerous — the cop or the private citizen? And was it better — or safer — to knuckle under or “question everything”?
In the case of ‘Minority’, the answer was definitely the latter. Musically, the song has an engaging swing, with the feel of a Pogues’ song, but with a proud statement of defiance in place of drunken revelry. It’s preferable to stand against authority, goes the song’s message, even if it means being in the minority. There were also swipes at consumerism in both ‘Fashion Victim’ and the album’s closing song, ‘Macy’s Day Parade’, though the sadness in the latter number is somewhat mitigated by t
he singer’s determination to hold onto one “brand new hope.”
Instead of the celebratory apathy of the loser that had been the subtext of songs like ‘Longview’, Green Day’s songs were now giving more serious consideration to the world around them. And appearances to the contrary, these were actually issues that had always concerned the band. In 1995, Billie Joe had told Oor, “I refuse to be some sort of politician,” but in the same year he’d also told an interviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, in answer to a question if it was difficult to write about dissatisfaction in light of his success, “There’s still things that anger me. Your basic racism, police brutality, and shit like that I’ve been against for a long time, and will always be against … there’s things that piss me off every single day.” The difference was, now he was beginning to sing about them.
But though the album also featured songs like ‘Waiting’, which, with its exultant call to “Wake up!” was not as straight-forward as it might first appear (the same could also be said of ‘Hold On’), not every song made a “statement”. ‘Church On Sunday’ looked at another troubled relationship, again saved through compromise (or resignation).‘Blood, Sex, And Booze’ revisited the terrain of ‘Dominated Love Slave’, though lacking the tongue-in-cheek delivery of the latter number. For a bit of authenticity, the group hired a dominatrix (credited as “Mistress Simone” on the cover) to whip and humiliate the luckless second engineer, Tone. “The dominatrix was real, it was not a joke,” says Rosen. “She was not some little girl pretending to do this, she beat the crap out of the assistant engineer. He was petrified. That poor kid had no idea what was going on. He was being all tough and thinking that he could handle anything. But she beat him; he thought she was playing around, and she was not playing around.” Perhaps appropriately, the song also ended up on the soundtrack of the 2001 film, Freddy Got Fingered.
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