And ‘Misery’ (with lyrics credited to the entire band) has the most unusual musical mix of all, bringing together a farfisa organ playing a motif reminiscent of the silent movie era, an accordion, a mandolin, and string and horn sections, blended into a waltz-tempo number. The music was then paired with lyrics spinning a tale straight out of an independent movie, replete with drugs, a murder, and, of course, a trip to Las Vegas (Billie Joe also cited the Tom Waits’ song, ‘Rain Dogs’, as an influence). This was another unusual aspect of the track; most Green Day songs were in first person and didn’t have characters acting out a storyline. It was an element that would be vastly expanded on in the next album.
“Warning was them trying to do a different style, trying to reinvent themselves,” says Rosen. “You can hear the beginnings of American Idiot in that record. Warning was what they needed to do to do American Idiot, in that they tried to flip things up a little bit. Go for a different style.”
“I think a lot of bands, they get a certain fan base and they find safety in that and they’re afraid to think outside of their own box,” Mike said, looking back at Warning in 2001. “We’ve got to keep it interesting for ourselves, too. If you get bored … or if you stop growing, you die.”
And though Rosen emphasises, “When they worked, they worked,” the band still managed to make time for visitors and some relaxation. “There were people coming by,” says Rosen. “It wasn’t an amazing amount, and it wasn’t out of control, but they had people coming in and out. They had their friends there. Every Friday night we had a little barbecue; my gofer at the time worked at a really good meat store and he would go and get steaks and all kinds of beef. So they would barbecue and have some people in. It was definitely not all work. Billie Joe’s wife would come by with the kids, Tré’s wife at the time would come down. They liked to party. Billie Joe was friends with Matthew Fox, that guy who stars in the TV show Lost now, and he would show up every couple of weeks and hang out.”
Chris Bilheimer and Lance Bangs were also at the sessions, shooting footage that would be used for the album’s EPK (electronic press kit), and, later, some mock PSAs. The EPK, hosted by “Cash MaHoy” (comedian David Cross) presented a tongue-in-cheek history of the band and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Warning. “But what now? After all these years, is it still possible for Green Day to make a great record?” asks MaHoy, who smoothly provides the answer, “Of course it is. Don’t be an asshole.”
“Being in a studio is boring as hell,” Bilheimer says. “The best way to describe being in a studio, is that it’s long periods of waiting broken up by shorter periods of waiting. It’s incredibly boring. So having a really serious look at people in the studio is a snore. I was trying to make something that was entertaining to watch.” Bilheimer knew Cross through having done some design work for Cross’ TV program Mr. Show. “I had been doing some work for them and they sent me the entire four seasons on tape,” he explains. “I used to sit with the band and we’d watch all the old episodes at 880. So when I was thinking who would be a good host, David happened to be in town and so I got him to do it. The band was just so excited because they were like, ‘He’s the funniest guy in the world!’ He was incredibly hung-over and had slept for like an hour; he did the whole shoot and then went back to sleep. He said he woke up that evening and he was like, ‘Did I do something this morning?’ Apparently he has almost no recollection of doing this.”
In addition to shots of the band working and goofing around in the studio, Billie Joe and Tré are shown explaining the basics of punk rock to a group of school children, and “Mistress Simone” is seen abusing poor Tone. (“He can’t sue us, can he?” asks Billie Joe.) There’s also a sequence of Bill Schneider going to the hospital to have a piece of guitar string removed from his eyeball, which not only references another operation seen in a Green Day video (the background music is ‘Geek Stink Breath’) but also brings to mind Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (co-written with Salvador Dalí), with its infamous sequence of a woman’s eye being sliced open. A performance video of ‘Warning’ was also put together from scenes shot in the studio.
“We would hang out with them and go see other bands play at night in town,” says Bangs. “I’d do interviews while we were driving around in Billie Joe’s car. He collected these old beat-up cars, I don’t know what they were — I don’t know anything about cars. They were these really cool old things, in my mind they seemed like Forties or Fifties-era cars. We would just drive around and shoot interview footage, and then just hang out. He had a firepit in the backyard, we would do BBQs at night and stuff and have family members over.”
The two also heard the album’s songs coming together in the studio. “It wasn’t like were going, ‘Oh, let’s see what Lance and Chris think of this crazy song we are trying,’” says Bangs. “It was more like they would be working on it and we would be there in the room with them and hear it incidentally. They weren’t like, ‘What’s your opinion of this, should we do this or not?’ They had fun. Billie Joe is really smart and he seemed like he enjoyed the process and talking a lot to Rob, or whoever was engineering, and making sure the band was taking time to try out different guitar sounds and have ideas and get things right. Obviously keeping things simple enough to not get bogged down, and doing overly meticulous studio things that they couldn’t play live, but definitely thinking about what the guitar sounds were, what they could do that was cool. Working on interesting arrangements. We were definitely aware that they were writing on acoustics and trying different things at that point. I first saw that when they would set up those rehearsal rooms while on tour, and do these instrumentals, play the accordion and do surf instrumentals, things like that, rather than just straight pop/punk stuff over and over.”
As important as the new developments in their sound, the fact was that Studio 880 was gradually becoming like a second home to the band. Ultimately it would come to be something like Green Day’s clubhouse, where they worked, played, and stored equipment. It proved to be an environment well suited to their own often-quirky tastes. American flags adorn several rooms and pictures of Jimi Hendrix are everywhere. “I have a little on-going thing,” says Lucasey. “If anybody can tell me how many Jimi Hendrix’s are hidden in this building I’ll give ’em a free day of recording. And nobody’s ever come close!” Studio A also has a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. “When the Green Day guys first saw that, they were like, ‘It’s coming down,’” Lucasey recalls. “And I said, ‘No, you’ll get used to it.’ And they did.”
The group was soon adding their own touches to the place. You’ll find “Tré Cool is fine,” scrawled in unexpected, out-of-the-way places, such as behind a curtain. A sign on the entry gate by the buzzer reads, “Moving gate can cause serious injury or death” (an observation that could’ve easily appeared in the lyrics of ‘Warning’) and features an illustration of an unfortunate person getting crushed by said gate; the sign had been amended by Tré to have the person saying, “Help me, I’m famous!” A coin has been glued to the floor in one place, tempting the unwary to try and pick it up. “And I came in one evening after a session to check around and clean up, and there was this coffee cup sitting there, with coffee and cream in it, right on my credenza,” says Lucasey. “And I go to pick it up and it’s stuck. Tré had taken some crazy glue and glued Rob Cavallo’s cup of coffee to the counter. And I have multiple keys to every door in here because of them. One time I came in and they had changed every lock on my doors, so it took 20 minutes to get through this place.”
A lot of the pranks are down to Tré. “Tré’s off the wall,” Lucasey says. “He’s like a little kid, he’s the one who starts all the shit, that’s for sure. If I find broken TVs, or things like that, the first person I’m going to point my finger at is Tré [in the EPK for Warning, Tré can indeed be seen hurling a TV off the roof of Studio 880’s main studio complex].And he’s pulled some nasty pranks, but I’ve always got him back, too, so
that kind of evens things out to where he’d probably think twice about doing certain things, ’cause there’d always be retaliation. Which I don’t think they were ever used to.” Perhaps as a gesture of reconciliation, Tré also brings decorative fish as gifts; a puffer fish hangs from a ceiling in the lounge, and another wall displays a large swordfish.
But their most inventive prank came when the sessions were completed. “It was in the middle of the summer, and it was really hot,” Lucasey says. “Green Day had finished up, and every day when I walked into the studio something stank more and more. And we couldn’t figure it out. Until it was just like, ‘There’s 20 dead rats in this building, what the hell is going on?’ So, we’re tearing apart everything, and looking under everything for this stench, thinking that it’s just dead animals; I mean, it went from thinking there’s a dead mouse, to a dead rat, to a dead cow, to a dead elephant!
“So what happened was, we’d been getting ready to do some construction,” he continues. “And there was a little hole in this wall, in the sheetrock; it was about five feet up the wall. A friend of mine says, ‘Maybe the dead rat’s behind that,’ so he looked down there, and he goes, ‘John, I found out what your problem is.’ And it was a bunch of lunch meat, delicatessen cold cut slices just dropped behind that. So we had to rip out the wall and take out all these rotten deli slices. But it still stunk. And it took another couple of days before we said, ‘You know, these couches really smell bad.’ And when we moved them, there were stains on the carpet underneath, so we took out the pillows and there’s these precision surgical slits in the couches that they put potato salad and meat in, raw meat, it was horrible. The couches were toast, the carpet was toast, everything was toast.
“Then one of the engineers called from Los Angeles where they were mixing the album to ask about something. And I go, ‘Hey, is Tré there? Can I talk to him real quick?’ And Tré gets on the phone, and I go, ‘I found those gifts you left for me.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, what gifts are those?’ ‘Oh, you know, the ones in the couch and behind the wall. And you know what, I’ve got some gifts for you! But don’t worry, I know you’re going on tour, I’ll just leave them in your mailbox, it’ll be there for you when you get back.’ And all of a sudden, his voice started getting shaky, and he’s all, ‘You know, that’s not meant for you, John. And it was no disrespect for you, it’s meant for your new clients.’ (A band that had been scheduled to use the studio after Green Day, but who had ended up canceling.) And then they bought me new couches and new carpet and stuff.”
Despite the hijinks, or perhaps because of them, Lucasey and Green Day ended up forming a strong bond. “Instantly, we all became friends,” says Lucasey, and it was the kind of friendship that would see the band returning to the studio even when they weren’t working there. At the end of the sessions, Billie Joe left behind some more benign graffiti, spray-painting “B + A” on a wall.
The group was pleased with their work. “I think Warning is the best record we’ve ever made,” Billie Joe told writer Jaan Uhelszki, though admitting, “but I’m a little biased.” In answer to a comment about the album being their “most serious,” he replied, “I feel everything we’ve done has been serious. I think our antics sort of get in the way of what people think.” Uhelszki also asked if the album had another ‘Good Riddance’. “Twelve of them.” Tré was quick to respond, but Billie Joe was more circumspect, noting, “No, we didn’t want to repeat that. We didn’t want to write another ‘Basket Case’ after we did that.” “It’s got depth. It’s got different layers,” Tré said to another reporter. “It’s like each song has its own life, each song has its own feel, its own vibe … Each song could be its own album.” He also stressed that though there were acoustic guitars on the record, the sound was not “sappy acoustic” but “more aggressive, percussive acoustic.”
Meanwhile, Bilheimer had been working on cover ideas. “I spent two months in the studio with them shooting the EPK and supposedly working on the album cover,” he says. “Which was funny, because I was there for an entire month before I ever did a photo shoot. I was supposed to be working on a cover with their photo on it, and I didn’t have any photos! Before they started recording, Billie said, ‘I want a band photo on the front.’ I was trying to think of what way to put them on the cover that doesn’t look like every rock band album cover with the band on it. It’s hard to do something unique with it. I was trying to think of something a little more classic. I think one of the most classic records of all time is London Calling [The Clash]. I wanted to get that feeling of the timeless classic black-and-white shot, a little bit of blurry motion, so it’s not necessarily about them and their faces. It’s more about setting an environment and a mood. It’s a little bit out of focus, it’s a little bit taking the focus off of them, not making it a pretty-boy shot of them on the cover.”
Bilheimer ended up shooting the group in Chinatown in San Francisco. The photo chosen for the cover (their first album to feature a picture of the group on the cover) has the band walking down the street, slightly out of focus, Billie Joe adding an air of despondency to the shot with his head hanging down. (“I’m sure you can read all sorts of things into that which were all probably happy accidents,” says Bilheimer.) An interesting graphic touch was the use of various industrial-looking icons throughout the booklet, such as the man in the circle getting zapped by a bolt of electricity.
“That to me is just an obvious off-shoot of the word ‘Warning’,” Bilheimer explains. “Those all came out of an industrial safety catalogue. Those were all images of warnings. I just love this idea that there is what I’m assuming is a billion-dollar industry of people whose entire job it is to make sure that people don’t hurt themselves doing anything stupid. Like, I’m the designer that has to make sure you don’t stick your hand into the giant buzz-saw, so I have to draw a picture of this person putting his hand into the buzz-saw with a line through it. Or the people who design phones that don’t have sharp edges so you don’t stick them in your eyeball. I was immediately drawn to those sort of icons, because they are also everyday things that you see. Incorporating everyday things into your design makes it accessible, people can relate to it. I try and do that with a lot of my design. The album also marked the first time since Sweet Children that a record had taken its name from one of the songs on the album.
The band finally hit the road again with the Warped tour during the summer, “basically to jump-start ourselves into touring mode,” Mike explained. “We’re like one of those Evel Knievel dolls that has been winding up for quite some time. We’re ready to just spring out of the box.” The Warped Tour is another of the themed traveling festival shows that emerged in America in the Nineties, along with Lollapalooza, Lilith Fair, and Ozzfest. The Warped Tour’s focus was ska/punk rock and “extreme sports” (essentially, sports involving spectacular stunts); the tour’s founder, Kevin Lyman, was previously involved with skateboarding shows. The first Warped Tour, held in 1995, featured such acts L7, Seaweed, Tilt, and Sick Of It All. Once Green Day was added to the bill (which also included such acts as NOFX, the Long Beach Dub Allstars, The Donnas — yet another band that got its start on Lookout — Suicide Machines, Papa Roach, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones), the tour, which began June 24 in Fresno, California, was quickly extended. Ticket prices were kept under $30. “I’ll get to skateboard every day, which will be fun,” Billie Joe told Jaan Uhelszki. “But you’re not going to get me on the vert ramp.”
With so many groups on a variety of stages, each band’s set was limited to half an hour. And, reasoning that their new album wasn’t due out for a few months, Green Day elected not to preview any songs from Warning during their set and stuck to their back catalogue. The set was neatly bracketed by ‘Welcome To Paradise’ and ‘Good Riddance’, and included such classics as ‘Longview’ and ‘Basket Case’, live favourites like ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’, oldies like ‘Going To Pasalacqua’, and the occasional cover, such as Generation X’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’.
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“Green Day nailed the mood at Saturday’s annual Vans Warped Tour by opening its set with the punk anthem ‘Welcome to Paradise’,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle of the group’s July 1 show in that city. “For one day, Piers 30-32 in San Francisco were paradise for punks and alterna-teens looking for the spirit of ’93, or ’84, or ’77 — anything but the corporate-rock doldrums of 2000.” “You make me proud to be from the Bay Area,” Billie Joe exclaimed after the first song, later announcing that the next day was his wedding anniversary. “My wife thinks I’m a pain in the ass,” he beamed. “She’s right! And,” he added, pointing to Mike and Tré, “these are my two other wives!” The set once again ended with Tré setting his drum kit on fire.
“Green Day proved that it’s lost none of its goofy, ebullient charm, sounding as fresh and irresistibly pugnacious as it did when the band became the tiny Gilman Street club’s first major-label breakthrough back in the early Nineties,” said the Chronicle. Elsewhere, the band’s July 18 date in Pittsburgh was marred by Tré’s head being cut open after a cymbal he’d hurled in the air fell back on him.
In August, they played a few shows in Japan, and at the end of the month taped an appearance for the TV show Farmclub at Universal Studios, which aired in October; ‘Minority’ and ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’ were broadcast, while the studio audience also enjoyed performances of ‘Blood, Sex, and Booze’, ‘Christie Road’, and ‘Warning’. In September, the group headed to Europe for more promotional appearances. Their time in the UK was especially busy, beginning on September 14, when they taped an appearance on Top Of The Pops, performing ‘Minority’. The next day, they taped an appearance with Radio 1’s Steve Lamacq, and performed that night at King’s College in London. The set was a mix of songs from Warning, older songs like ‘Longview’, and more off the-cuff numbers — as when, after asking the audience, “What cover song do you wanna hear?” Billie Joe answered his own question, playing Generation X’s ‘Dancing With Myself’, confessing afterwards, “We only do this when we’ve been drinking a lot.” For their part, the audience drank to the point where beer began to be hurled at the group; Billie Joe merely closed his eyes when he was soaked and kept on singing. Their last song of the night was The Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays In The Sun’. Billie Joe later told writer Ben Myers the gig was, “The best show we’ve ever played in the UK,” and the reviewers agreed. Rock Sound wrote, “Green Day may be a bunch of goofy bastards but they’re tight as hell too … the true heirs to The Ramones spirit.”
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