‘Homecoming’ is the second of the album’s nine-minute-plus song suites, opening with ‘The Death Of St. Jimmy’, as Jimmy’s bright spark is laid to rest for good. The music surges neatly into ‘East 12th St.’, which has Jesus, personality whole once again, stuck in an anonymous office building, already missing his previous existence, squalid as it was living among those in the “underbelly”. And ‘Nobody Likes You’ (written by Mike) suggests Jesus is as lonely and alienated as ever. There’s a momentary upswing with ‘Rock And Roll Girlfriend’, written by Tré, a succinct slice of autobiography that tells his story in less than a minute. But the concluding ‘We’re Coming Home Again’, which has the sound of triumph in its ringing bells and bold tympani, also carries with it a sense of defeat; Jesus, back in Jingle Town, may be older and wiser, but not necessarily happier or better off. Especially as the song’s last words repeat Whatsername’s parting taunt: We’re having fun — and you’re not.
The final song, ‘Whatsername’, provides a resigned postscript to the story. The song begins with a restrained, melancholy musical backing, breaking out halfway through in a rush of emotion, a desperate desire to hang on to a memory that’s already fading. Jesus looks back at the love of his life, but can’t even remember her name anymore. And if the passing of time has meant the pain is no longer as sharp, the regrets still remain. It’s on this despondent note that American Idiot comes to an end.
The story is almost an hour in length, making American Idiot nearly twice as long as Green Day’s debut album, 39/Smooth. And not only is the record the band’s most thematically cohesive album, it’s also a work that — aside from some moments of anger and elation — is surely the saddest release in the group’s canon to date.
All of which made American Idiot quite unlike anything the band had previously released. “It’s weird; when they first started playing me the songs, I was blown away, but I didn’t know what to think,” Lucasey confesses. “I thought they were fantastic, but I was really nervous for them. Because it was so different from what I was expecting. When you think about what Billie Joe wrote and how it all comes together, it’s crazy. These rock operas or concept albums — we’re in a time where a song’s got to be three minutes and it’s got to be set so you can make a short, cute little video to it; it’s a turn ’em and burn ’em kind of time. But yet, they did the most punk thing you can ever imagine. They did the opposite of what everybody’s doing, and they just said, ‘We don’t care if it flies or if doesn’t. This is something that’s in our hearts.’ That’s what I saw out of it.”
It was also ironic that the most outspoken album of the band’s career initially came together at a studio where American flags are so conspicuous; an enormous one covers an entire wall of Studio 880’s large Studio A (a shot of which can be seen in the Warning EPK). “I’m very patriotic,” Lucasey says “Maybe I’m the American Idiot!” He also readily admits to not sharing the group’s political sensibilities. “I don’t like the political part,” he says. “When they were here there were a lot of anti George Bush stickers everywhere. They were definitely anti-Bush, and I wasn’t playing into that at all — I wasn’t going go to there, as they say. But I saw history in the making, which is just fantastic for me. That’s why I’m in this business. It’s not for the money, because I could make a hell of a lot more money doing something else. But to be a part of musical history, that’s fantastic.”
Billie Joe acknowledged the album’s political angle, but emphasised that it was only one element of the overall story. “The atmosphere can be anti-Bush, and I definitely had that in mind, but when you get down to it, it’s a human story,” he told Rolling Stone. “This album is about feelings. I didn’t want to make a rage against the machine record. I wanted to make an album of heartfelt songs.” Because the record’s influences were so far ranging — everything from Tommy and Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars to more traditional musicals like Grease, to name a few (“I think this whole record has more in common with The Rocky Horror Picture Show than it does with The Clash’s London Calling,” Billie Joe told Kerrang!) — any number of interpretations could be given to its story. There were autobiographical elements as well. But at its core, American Idiot’s political commentary just provides a backdrop, a context, for the larger tale, one that’s been told before and will be again — the story of the protagonist’s coming-of-age. It’s a story that can be endlessly retold, for while the emotions felt while growing up are similar for every generation, the times in which those emotions are experienced are different. Thus, each generation feels compelled to tell the story in its own voice. And this is the key to why American Idiot became a classic album; it tells a story that’s both of its time, and is timeless.
By the time Green Day left Studio 880 to record the final versions of the American Idiot songs in Los Angeles, they were as tight a unit as they’d ever been, even getting the same tattoo — the letters E.B.P.M. (for “East Bay Punk Mafia”) — to illustrate their renewed bond. They also left some new graffiti on 880’s walls: the words “Green Day” written in gold.
The group’s excitement continued to mount as they worked on the album in LA, especially at the prospect of playing the new songs live. Already sensing the album’s importance, the band arranged to have the sessions filmed by John Roecker for a later documentary. Some of the footage was aired as part of a “making of” program on the fuse network; one sequence shows the group parodying Bob Dylan’s classic ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ proto-video, the different band members seen standing next to a building holding up signs with lyrics from ‘American Idiot’, as a go-go dancer, clad in an American flag-patterned bikini, dances in the background.
As the sessions were coming to a close, the group had yet to decide on cover art. Chris Bilheimer had previously been contacted to do artwork for the band’s earlier, aborted album. “Billie called me and said, ‘Hey, we’re just finishing up this record, why don’t you start working on some covers?’” he recalls. “‘And I think maybe a band photo on the cover again.’ So I came up with a couple of ideas and sent them to him and he liked them. That’s when the record got stolen. Then he’s like, ‘Oh well, we’re not putting this record out. I’ll let you know what’s happening.’ Then I didn’t hear from him for a year. I was kind of like, ‘Oh, that’s weird.’ Then I heard they actually hired a couple of other people to come up with ideas for American Idiot. And when I heard that I was like, ‘That kind of sucks.’ I was pretty bummed out for awhile. But I’m not on any kind of retainer, or any kind of employee of theirs; I work project to project.”
But after assuming he wouldn’t be working on the album, “The same thing that happened with Nimrod happened,” he says. “They said, ‘Hey, we’ve gone through a couple of people and everything they’ve done has been terrible and we don’t like it. Can you help us out?’ So I was going into a pretty difficult situation because they’d already seen a bunch of stuff and they hated it — it was kind of daunting.”
Bilheimer flew to Los Angeles, where the group was now working, to listen to the record. It didn’t take him long to realise that American Idiot was not just another album. “I was really blown away,” he says. “I was like, ‘Holy crap, there’s not a bad song on the record, there’s not any filler. This is a really tight concept, from start to finish.’ Not to sound like a know-it-all, but when I heard that record I thought, ‘There’s no way this can’t be huge! If this doesn’t do incredibly well, all hope is lost for our culture. If people don’t recognise that this is a phenomenal album, then we’re in trouble.’ I had my doubts that in the Britney Spears world we’re living in that, God, maybe this record won’t do well. But then when I heard it, I was like, there’s no way that it can’t do well. They were so focused in the studio; they were so focused, they really seemed like they were on a mission. They were getting along better than I’ve ever seen them get along. They just all seemed to be on the same page. I’m not surprised that it created what it did.”
Billie Joe called Bilheimer’s attention to an image he liked; a hand grenade shaped like a heart that he’d seen on friend Jim Theibaud’s Real Skateboards website. “He’d given me this heart/hand-grenade idea, and I’d done some stuff that looked vaguely like Banksy, a phenomenal British artist, one of my favourite graffiti artists of all time,” says Bilheimer. “Thinktank had just come out, by Blur; that’s a Banksy image on their cover. I was thinking, ‘Well, we can’t put out a record that looks a lot like the Blur record that just came out two months before.’ It just wasn’t working. That’s when I thought, ‘God, I’m going to get fired!’
“Then Billie Joe called me up one night and said, ‘You know, I just saw this movie poster by a graphic designer,’” he continues. “‘Have you ever heard of an artist named Saul Bass?’ Saul Bass is my favourite graphic designer. I have tons of books of his work. He could not have said anything to make me happier than Saul Bass. I drove to my office, did one comp and e-mailed it to him and within 45 minutes of that phone call we had the cover.” The end result went on to be the most widely reproduced graphic image associated with the band; against a black background, a white hand holds up the red heart/hand grenade, which is oozing blood onto the palm. The image was so strong that it immediately resulted in a lyric change in the song ‘She’s A Rebel’ that directly referenced the image.
“When we got the cover done, Billie Joe was just so excited,” says Bilheimer. “He was like, ‘This is it, this is absolutely it!’ The colours [red, white, black] were a somewhat obvious choice, since they are the colours you think of when you think about communist propaganda posters. It seemed to fit the theme of American Idiot perfectly, a big theme of the title song being governmental propaganda.” Saul Bass’ movie poster for The Man With The Golden Arm was another influence, its central image being a crooked arm and hand. “That’s one of my favourite movie posters,” Bilheimer says. “A little of the style is referencing that. And I had actually designed an entire typeface font that was based off of the lettering Saul did for the movie Vertigo. Apparently the Warner Brothers legal people thought it was too close, so I had to scrap it.” The lettering of the words “Green Day,” which are worn through in places, was “vaguely inspired by the letters of the West Side Story poster,” says Bilheimer. “I liked the idea of this record being a rock opera, and West Side Story also being a musical.” Even the way the album’s name is presented echoes the movie poster idea; the cover reads, “Green Day Presents American Idiot,” like the opening credits of a film. “It was about making this its own entity,” Bilheimer explains. “This album exists as its own piece. They definitely wanted you to think of the record as a whole. It isn’t an album, it’s a production. It’s not about the band; it’s its own entity.”
The lyrics in the booklet are dated to create the impression that the booklet is the journal of the main character. “They basically span a year of his life,” says Bilheimer. “They’re kind of chronological; you’re looking at this person as he’s going through this journey. That’s why the pens change, the style of writing changes; sometimes you write ‘harder’ when you’re really angry, like for ‘I Don’t Care’. I really wanted it to look like you found someone else’s journal.” Tellingly, the date for the last song, ‘Whatsername’, is January 1, indicating a new beginning in the lead character’s life. The lyrics were also all handwritten by Bilheimer, “Which sucked,” he says. “Every time there was a title change, or a lyric change, or a spelling change you had to start over. I would start writing it and all of a sudden it would take up 18 pages and we only had 16 pages for the booklet so I’d have to start over again and try and cram in more and more. I probably wrote it out six times.”
The journal idea was expanded on the limited-edition version of the album, packaged as a hardcover book. The book’s style was inspired by Jim Goldberg’s book, Raised By Wolves. “He’d spent years living with the kids who live on Hollywood Boulevard, the gutter punks, and documented their life,” Bilheimer says. “He’d have all these Polaroids of the kids, and then there’ll be a studio portrait of their jeans jacket with all this shit written all over it, and blood on it. It’s sort of a mix between a diary of time passing and living with these kids, and then these objects, representing certain parts of the journey. You read some of the stories in the book and you go, ‘Oh, he got knifed out in front of Pink’s,’ and then 20 pages further in the book you actually see the guy hanging out in front of Pink’s Hot Dogs two weeks after and you’re like, ‘Holy crap.’ There’s this weird connection to the story when you actually get to see a little element from it. That’s sort of what we did with the special package. Billie Joe wrote a bunch more journal entries from the point of view of the characters that are interspersed with the song lyrics. And there’s just a lot of photos, and things like pieces of bus tickets that makes you feel like you’ve been part of the journey. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s really what I’m most proud of in my whole career.”
Bilheimer admits it’s “a little weird” to realise how widely produced the cover image has been. “I’m pretty isolated down here [in Athens, Georgia],” he says. “It’s like, I’ll draw something and I’ll e-mail it. Then maybe I’ll see a poster in the corner record store and I’ll go, ‘Oh hey, there it is.’ I’m pretty isolated from the fact that, ‘Wow, they made a million of these billboards, it’s in all these magazines.’ I don’t really see it that often, so it’s pretty much a shock when I do. I’ll go to New York and I’ll see it on the side of a 20-story building, and I’ll just kind of go, ‘Holy crap.’ Like those large foam heart/hand grenade oversize gloves that people wear; I didn’t know that they were doing those, that’s one of the few merch items I didn’t design. I saw those and I was like, ‘Oh my God, amazing!’ It is very weird. It’s not something I’ve gotten used to, I try not to think about it very much.”
While working on the cover, Bilheimer had told Bangs the new album had a song called ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’ and Bangs was somewhat concerned. “In my mind, I thought that meant Billie Joe had written a song about the character or the movie,” he explains. “I thought it was a little weird. I haven’t really circulated that film that much. I showed it a lot as a teenager, then gave copies to people and bands back at that time, but since then I’ve been kind of protective of it. I’ve never been super self-promoting with it; I’ve never tried to show it at film festivals or gone out of my way to call attention to it. And I just had a weird feeling, like it was going to get turned into a title or phrase that other people were going to have access to, that it wasn’t my little precious thing anymore. I thought it was going to be a rock opera about this character that I identified with and that was now being co-opted or turned into this huge thing, without anyone bothering to ask me about it or mention it to me.”
Bangs was in Portugal working on a film at the time and he and Billie Joe played a frustrating game of phone tag for a few days. “I was just getting weird voice-mail messages that I wasn’t able to return,” he says. “It would be like a day
later in the middle of the night when I would get the message, and I wasn’t able to talk to them directly or use a pay phone there on a phone card. I left messages back and forth, saying, ‘Do I understand you right, is this the whole record?’ Eventually, I got this message where Billie Joe said yes, he’d written the song and called it ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’, and he’d been wondering where the title came from. Then he came home and was going through all his old video tapes, and he found my tape, and he was like, ‘Oh, that’s where that name came from!’ So he explained that he had definitely come across the title because of that, and that it had been more subconscious than deliberate. In the end, of course, it turned out that the record wasn’t called ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’ and there were lots of other characters and stuff. It’s a great record and when I finally heard it was like okay, this isn’t as weird of a deal as I thought it was originally.”
With the music and cover art in place, the last step was making an equally exciting video to give the album an appropriate launch. The group found exactly the right man in Sam Bayer, who would ultimately go on to direct all the American Idiot videos. Bayer’s first major piece of work, the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, had been key to that group’s massive success. But Bayer had eventually stopped making videos. “I felt I’d outgrown it,” he told Adweek. “It wasn’t the medium I grew up with. And I think MTV had outgrown me. I didn’t like the music I was being sent; I didn’t like the images I was seeing on MTV. I felt like it was a bad marriage and time for a separation.”
Green Day had been soliciting treatments from directors for over a year. Bayer, who cited Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Fritz Lang as influences, impressed the band by coming in with ideas not only for the first video, but the album’s subsequent videos. “It showed us he was emotionally invested in the record,” Mike explained to MTV.com. “We didn’t know if we wanted to switch directors from song to song, it just worked so well with Sam, it just seemed like he was really progressive with his ideas,” Billie Joe said in the same article. “There is a thread with all the videos, as with the album. They don’t look alike, but there’s something that ties them all together.”
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