When it was announced that The Network would perform at the Key Club in Hollywood on November 22, Mike issued his own public statement: “I hope you enjoy your 15 minutes of borrowed fame, because where I come from, one good record doesn’t mean dick. So keep runnin’ your mouths ’cause it’ll give me a good reason to come to the Key Club and kick all your circus monkey asses!!!!” If attendees at the show hoped to discover The Network’s identity, they were disappointed, for the group kept their faces covered throughout. The show was filmed by John Roecker, an LA scenester and music fan who’d previously operated the “apocalyptic general store,” You’ve Got Bad Taste with Exene Cervenka from the band X. Roecker himself appeared onstage during the show, tossing flyers into the audience as The Network played ‘Spastic Society’.
2003 also saw the group picking up more honours at the California Music Awards, held May 25 at Oakland’s City Hall Plaza, winning Outstanding Group, Band of the Year, and a special “Spirit of Rock” award. Billie Joe was also named Best Guitarist. But finally, the games, go-kart racing, and celebrations ended, and the group buckled down to work on their next album. Billie Joe later said that prior to the sessions he had a creative crisis and flew alone to New York, where by his own admission he indulged in copious drinking and a search for, as he put it, “something”. The current state of the real world brought him no further reassurance. On March 20, 2003, America’s war with Iraq began, and though it officially ended on May 1 of that year, American troops remained overseas, battling an increasingly hostile insurgency that eventually succeeded in killing more Americans after the “official” war ended than had been killed during it.
Though reporters were embedded with the troops in Iraq, their view of the war was severely restricted, a lesson learned from the days of the Vietnam conflict, when the gut-wrenching footage routinely broadcast on American TV during the dinner hour had helped change the public’s mind about the war. Coverage of the Iraq war was more sanitized, but nonetheless available on a plethora of cable networks 24 hours a day. War coverage was also constantly interspersed with commercials, a juxtaposition that ultimately reduced everything, from the horrors of inhumanity to pleas to try a “new and improved” laundry detergent to the same level of banality. It was a dichotomy captured perfectly by a line in Margaret Cho’s 2005 show Assassin, discussing media coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II: “He’s not dead yet … but he might be when we come back from this commercial!”
Anyone with an awareness of the news outside America’s borders could also not help but notice how America’s stature had fallen around the globe in recent years. Immediately after 9/11, the United States had most of the world’s sympathy. But this had steadily declined over the years. Foreign leaders were increasingly put off by, in the words of Newsweek, America’s “imperial style of diplomacy.” “Most [foreign] leaders who are consulted are simply informed of US policy,” the magazine said. “‘When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen — we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can’t take it in,’ explained one senior official.” This directly translated into a lack of support for America’s war with Iraq from countries usually friendly to America. And even countries that did support the war were often openly critical. After President Bush won re-election in 2004, Britain’s Daily Mirror ran a picture of Bush on the front page with a headline that chided the voters who had returned him to office: “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” Brian Reade’s accompanying editorial was equally damning: “They say that in life you get what you deserve. Well, today America has deservedly got a lawless cowboy to lead them further into carnage and isolation and the unreserved contempt of most of the rest of the world.” It was a surprising statement to come from a nation that was traditionally one of America’s staunchest allies.
Billie Joe was well aware of these attitudes. “I know how Americans are often viewed by the rest of the world,” he told Kerrang! in July 2004. “We’re seen as being dumb and arrogant, which is a pretty lousy combination. Americans talk about how their country is the best country in the world, which is something I don’t notice people in a lot of other countries doing.” All these different elements became themes of Green Day’s new album, American Idiot. The thrust of the album was not simply an attack on a particular administration, but a denunciation of a entire cultural climate, spelled out in the title track via key words like “mania”, “hysteria”, “tension”, “alienation”, “propaganda”, and “paranoia”.
Though the final versions of the American Idiot songs were recorded in LA (at both Ocean Way Recording and Capitol Studios), the songs were written and first put together at Studio 880. References to Oakland appear throughout the album and its artwork. The title of ‘East 12th St.’ refers to the street location of the office where Billie Joe had gone to fill out paperwork following his DUI arrest. Lucasey felt the line in ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’ about “moms and Brads” being away referred to 880’s studio manager named Brad, who would sometimes be “the enforcer” when the group’s antics got out of hand (in the group’s appearance on VH1 Storytellers, Billie Joe indicated the line referred to a stepparent). In the album’s booklet, ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’ is datelined “Jingle Town USA,” a locale also mentioned in ‘We’re Coming Home Again’ (go-karts are also mentioned in the latter song).
Rob Cavallo was back on board as co-producer, and he also helped keep the group focused on their work. “He had his couple of days of fun when he got here, but he dedicated himself to this album,” says Lucasey. “When he saw what it was, he spent four months here; he basically moved to Oakland. And he’d be like, ‘Okay you guys, that’s enough on the go-karts; you can do it maybe once a week.’ So we just had go-kart night, when we’d barbeque and do go-karts. And it was kinda neat, because the guys could’ve said, ‘No, F-off, we’re gonna do what we want.’ But instead they were more like, ‘Okay, somebody really does care about us; somebody’s gonna dedicate that much time and effort to us when they could be in Hollywood doing any project they want.’ For him to really change his life and move away from his family for four months, that is sheer belief and dedication into what’s going on here. So I respect Rob like you wouldn’t believe. Although I could kick his ass in a ping-pong match — he’ll tell you different — everything that he does is focused and intense.” Even so, Cavallo initially had his own doubts. “When they first came to me and said, ‘Let’s get the band back together and make the best rock record we can,’ I wasn’t totally sure they could do it,” he admitted to MTV.com.
The spark for the album that ultimately became American Idiot came when Mike arrived at Studio 880 one day and found himself having to kill time while waiting for Billie Joe and Tré to arrive. “The engineer challenged me to write a 30-second song,” he recalled to Bass Player. “So I laid down drums and wrote this quick little tune. My one goal was to make it as grandiose as possible. Just after I finished the song, everyone came back. Billie listened to it and went, ‘Wow, that’s fun! I want to do one!’ Then, he threw the ball at Tré to do a quickie. After we had all done one, we started connecting them and screwing around with different ideas.”
“It was funny at first,” Billie Joe told Entertainment Weekly. “But then something more serious started happening.” Serious indeed; from various scraps of songs, they pieced together the first of American Idiot’s epic song suites: ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’. The number was different from anything they had done before, and not just because of its length (nine minutes and eight seconds). While some of band’s previous work had played with musical dynamics (‘In The End’ from Dookie comes to mind), ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’ goes through innumerable changes in mood and time signature (which the band would pull off flawlessly in concert). Billie Joe would later describe American Idiot as being the story of a character’s emotional journey; the same could also be said of ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’, which distills that journey into a single song.
But there was also another inspiration for the na
me ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’ — the 13-minute short Lance Bangs had made when he was around 20, that shared the same title and had been one of the first pieces of his work he’d sent to Billie Joe. “It was just all this experimental Super-8 stuff of this kid that I was in high school with,” he explains. “I sort of used him as this idea of this kid that was the reincarnation of Christ that no one was paying any attention to. And so he was kind of humiliated.” In Bangs’ film, “Jesus” is a high-school senior named Josh, with Bangs (who narrates) as his fellow student and devoted disciple. The two boys, stranded in the suburbs and attending a religious school, plot to galvanize the youth of the world. But their plans to commandeer a stage at Lollapalooza come to naught, and Josh’s crowning as Prom King at the high-school dance proves to be equally anti-climactic. The boys’ friendship is over, and they graduate from high school, each facing the world alone.
All in all, ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’ was a remarkable accomplishment. But it also presented a new challenge; to come up with material that was just as strong. The group realised this themselves. “We sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Now we’re onto something,’” Billie Joe told a reporter. “At the same time, there was no looking back. It was scary. You can’t go, ‘Now I want to make a regular record.’ You have to keep going. As soon as you make the big leap, you’re looking at a bigger mountain to climb. It was really exciting and scary at the same time.”
The group were more than ready for the challenge, no matter how unlikely this new direction seemed: “We decided we were going to be the biggest, best band in the world or fall flat on our faces,” Billie Joe told Rolling Stone. And though he later said the songs for American Idiot were largely written in chronological order, a March 2004 RollingStone.com story said the group had 35 songs from which to choose when they recorded the final version of the album in LA, suggesting the album’s storyline was paired down from a surfeit of material (a handful of non-album tracks would appear as B-sides and on a compilation).
However it came together, the final line-up was judiciously chosen for maximum impact, making American Idiot an exceptionally well-crafted album. The opening, and title track, sets the stage much as an overture does in a traditional musical. The song grabs you immediately, with a few bars of opening guitar riff, the full band kicking in mere seconds later. As if to underscore the necessity of the lyrics being understood, the band uses an interesting technique during the verses, alternating between Billie Joe singing a line a capella (accompanied by a drumbeat) and the full band playing a line. This back-and-forth, ping-pong effect gives the verses an additional tension, making the resulting explosion of the choruses (which have the full band playing and singing together) that much more powerful.
And for all the debate about who the “American idiot” is supposed to be, the song’s broad appeal is because it doesn’t point to any one specific person. As the song would have it, an “idiot” is anyone who doesn’t question the manipulative power of the media and the government. ‘Warning’ and ‘Minority’ were similarly themed songs, but ‘American Idiot’ is a more invigorating and urgent cri de coeur, decrying aspects of modern-day American life anyone might object to; the heightened sense of tension and fear, coupled with the feeling of being blindsided by information from all fronts. Only Billie Joe’s allegiance to the “faggot America” and subsequent disavowal of a “redneck agenda” reveal his political stripes. Billie Joe said the title had a touch of self-deprecation as well, pointing out he’d worn T-shirts bearing the word “idiot” or “stoopid” in concert (indeed, he occasionally introduced ‘American Idiot’ in performance by saying, “It’s about me”).
Next comes ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’, which introduces American Idiot’s main character. In the key opening phrase, our suburban Jesus proclaims himself the “son of rage and love,” a push-pull dichotomy that runs throughout the album. Jesus is a true product of his culture, immersed in the kind of addictions that run in a straight line from childhood to adult life — soda pop, ritalin, alcohol, cigarettes, “Mary Jane”, and cocaine (the last word was often censored when the group performed the song on TV; presumably the censors felt the youthful audience wouldn’t recognise Mary Jane as being slang for marijuana).
After a brief musical interlude, the song segues into the next number in the suite, ‘City Of The Damned’; if part one of the suite deals with Jesus himself, ‘City Of The Damned’ describes his dead-end environment. Jesus’ hopelessness about his situation finally boils over into full on anger in ‘I Don’t Care’, which rages against the world’s hypocrisies. Another segue and we’re into ‘Dearly Beloved’, the most light-hearted number in the suite (complete with sweet harmonies and a touch of glockenspiel) — until you listen to the lyrics, which are a heartfelt plea for help. The tempo surges forward again in ‘Tales Of Another Broken Home’, which has Jesus shaking off his old world and leaving it behind, striking out for a new life in the city.
Next is ‘Holiday’, easily the most bitter track on the album (and, along with ‘American Idiot’, the most obviously political). While a denunciation of the high cost of war (the luckless souls who “died without a name”), it also lashes out against those who would silence dissent, in a sequence that’s also performed with minimal instrumentation to allow the words to be heard. Along with the potent imagery (e.g. the flag being used as a gag), the music is as harsh as the subject matter.
The album’s best segue is arguably when the closing guitar chord of ‘Holiday’ takes on a shimmering effect and becomes the opening of ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’ — not the Al Dubin/Harry Warren number written for the 1934 film Moulin Rouge, but a haunting portrayal of loneliness and desolation. Billie Joe said the title came from a picture of James Dean he’d seen captioned with that title, possibly referring to the cover of Paul Alexander’s 1995 biography, James Dean: Boulevard Of Broken Dreams. (Interestingly, the song’s opening line echoes the suicide note that inspired Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which read, “I walk a lonely street.”) ‘Boulevard’ makes a subtle use of the trademark alternative-rock formula of quiet verses/louder choruses, though one can easily imagine the number being played acoustically. It also features one of Billie Joe’s most evocative vocals.
Cavallo was immediately impressed when he heard the song’s demo. “I loved it from the first day I heard it,” he told MTV.com. “Just the nature of it and the tempo and the way he sang the opening part … I knew it was going to be a smash.” He also helped shape the song’s ending, which the band had originally envisioned as along the lines of the cataclysmic ending of The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’ from their landmark Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Cavallo persuaded them to use guitars and just pound out the final chords as hard as possible. There’s no segue into another song; ‘Boulevard’ simply crashes to a halt.
The next song, the anthemic ‘Are We The Waiting’, finds Jesus still stranded alone, until the track segues into the song that introduces the next character in the album, ‘St. Jimmy’. Or, more intriguingly, as some theories would have it, this is the moment when Jesus of Suburbia becomes another character — St. Jimmy — in a case of split personality à la Fight Club. Either way, St. Jimmy’s song is a rollicking, out-and-out stomper, painting a vibrant picture of a personality that’s brimming with brio — you can practically see him strutting down the street.
But the next track, ‘Give Me Novacaine’, slows down the pace, as Jesus/Jimmy seeks solace in numbing oblivion. The song dies down to a single drum beat, which leads — bam! — straight to Whatsername, the star of ‘She’s A Rebel’, a character whose love is the counterpoint to St. Jimmy’s rage. Billie Joe described Whatsername as representing “Every girl I’ve been involved with,” and in ‘She’s A Rebel’ she’s as daring and as bold as St. Jimmy is. It’s love at first sight and Whatsername sets up a new challenge Jesus/Jimmy can’t wait to try and live up to.
But the flipside of this new relationship comes all too soon in ‘Extraordin
ary Girl’. The bittersweet number pictures the couple at a turning point, where she’s tired of being disappointed and he feels like simply giving up. The final note hangs in the air, unresolved, and then, coming from a distance, is the mocking sound of Whatsername’s voice, taunting from the sidelines. The four-line sequence was sung by Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, a singer (and band) Billie Joe was a big fan of. “She’s one of my favourite singers in the world,” he told The Advocate. “If they made a car called Kathleen Hanna, I would drive one.”
But this relationship isn’t one that peters out quietly. ‘Letterbomb’ is Whatsername’s kiss-off letter, which starts out at a brisk clip, then appears to get faster and faster, as if the one who’s moving on can’t wait to leave this burning wreckage of a romance behind. The final break is even felt in the last chord, which slowly fades into nothing.
Billie Joe has said the next number, ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’, departs from the album’s narrative, for this song of loss was inspired by the death of his father, marking the first time he’d written about the event. But its placement on the album also means it serves just as effectively as a post-breakup song, crystallizing that moment when it seems things will never get better. It provides a more downbeat counterpoint to the Green Day song it’s most often been compared with, ‘Good Riddance’; where ‘Riddance’ looks back with nostalgia, ‘September’ looks ahead without hope.
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