But politics were very much on the American agenda in 2004, another presidential election year. The results of the 2000 election had been (and remain) much disputed, and there was a new divisiveness among the population that spanned generations, as opposed to the anti-war movements of the 1960s that were dominated by younger people — many of whom were not even eligible to vote at the time (prior to the American voting age being lowered to 18 in 1971). In fact, those aged 18 to 24 were now the least likely to vote. In a presidential election year, generally between 50% to 60% of those eligible do cast a ballot, while among 18-to-24-year-olds, the percentage is 20% to 30% less.
In an effort to raise awareness about not only the importance of voting, but also the need to defeat Bush, Green Day contributed the song ‘Favorite Son’ to the compilation Rock Against Bush Vol. 2, released August 10 on Fat Wreck Chords. The label, run by “Fat Mike” Burkett of NOFX, had released Vol. 1 of the series in April. Proceeds from both CDs were earmarked for Punkvoter, an organisation Burkett had founded, that, in the words of Vol. 2’s booklet, was formed to create “a united front in opposition to the dangerous, deadly, and destructive policies of George Bush Jr. [sic].” “I hope that Punkvoter makes [the democratic process] seem a little bit cooler to some of these kids,” Billie Joe volunteered by way of endorsement.
Vol. 2 featured a total of 28 bands, including Foo Fighters, Sleater-Kinney, and Bad Religion, among others; “28 more Bush-hating bands give you a slew of unreleased and rare songs that will make you wanna march on D.C. with pitchforks and torches,” boasted the label’s website, adding the humourous cautionary note: “We don’t suggest you do that however, ‘cuz they’ll come get you and torture the shit out of you.” ‘Favorite Son’ opened the album with an invigorating blast of pop-punk, even as the song disparaged the title character’s life of privilege. ‘Unity’, from Operation Ivy’s Energy album also appeared on the compilation, with Jesse Michaels writing in the CD’s booklet, “George Bush and his administration are responsible for the most destructive pattern of arrogance, corporate servitude, and belligerent warmongering in recent history.” The set also came with a DVD featuring a number of short documentary films, including Unprecedented, about the 2000 election in Florida; Independent Media In The Time Of War; and Honor Betrayed, a documentary about US troops fighting in Iraq.
The band played a handful of other preview shows showcasing American Idiot in its entirety, before the first US leg of the official American Idiot tour began, including shows September 18 at The Vic in Chicago and September 24 at Toronto’s Phoenix Theatre. A two-day stretch in New York saw them making a number of appearances. On September 20 they taped an appearance for Sessions @AOL, which aired Oct 1, followed by an appearance on The Late Show. They were photographed with Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry, who was also a guest on the program, and performed ‘American Idiot’, of which Salon noted, “Green Day played as if their music had the power to pick up Bush and Cheney by the throat and shake them lifeless.”
On September 21, they appeared at Irving Plaza, a show that was also filmed and recorded, the songs used for single B-sides and film clips appearing on TV music stations. The performance, said Rolling Stone, “felt like it was shot out of a circus cannon.” While admiring the high-energy songs on the album, reviewer Pat Blashill also noted, “The real beauty, however, could be found in the pathos the group wrung between the power chords, especially in wistful tunes such as ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’… Armstrong, who usually mugs like a silent-film villain, played it straight as he sang the beautiful lyric … At moments like this, the band achieved the sort of punk-rock greatness some critics have accused it of merely imitating. Green Day, surprisingly, have become sublime.” It was as clear a sign as any that their days as “snotty-nosed punks” were over. From hereon in, it would be taken for granted that the band had finally achieved unqualified artistic credibility.
The first leg of the American Idiot tour began October 19 in Fort Worth, Texas. Before heading out on the road, the band made their next two videos, ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’ and ‘Holiday’. Both videos were shot at the same time, as ‘Boulevard’ was meant to be a sequel to ‘Holiday’, though ‘Boulevard’ would be released first. “If you think about our country and the specter of war and the problems we’re having, then ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’ is the state of the union,” Sam Bayer told MTV.com. “And ‘Holiday’ is the wild trip that got us here.”
Both videos show the group passing through two different landscapes, but where ‘Holiday’s’ is the garish neon-lit world of the Las Vegas Strip, ‘Boulevard’s’ is desolate and barren. Both were shot in the same fashion, at an airplane hanger in LA, with the group walking on a treadmill, with moving footage projected on a screen behind the band, conveying the impression they’re driving or walking. This technique, called rear-screen projection, has been used in countless older movies and Bayer liked what he called “the surreal and dreamlike” effect it could create. The footage used in the rear-projection shots was filmed by Bayer, shooting out the window of a van driving through the nearby desert, and the streets of downtown Los Angeles.
As ‘Boulevard’ begins, the open-topped convertible the group was roaring down the road with in ‘Holiday’ comes to a rolling halt on a deserted road. The band gets out of the car and walks down a “lonely road” of empty houses and urban blight, populated by defeated, broken-down souls; underscoring the overall bleakness is a shot of a vulture (actually a King vulture named Ethel) perched on a post between battered mailboxes. Given that the song’s lyric is one of despair, the video becomes a sad travelogue of that other America its citizens don’t like to think about — not the land of opportunity, but a wasteland of shattered hopes. In a final touch, Bayer mutilated the film, scratching it with a razor blade, burning it with cigarettes, even throwing it in his shower: “I dare any other directors to try and rip me off on this!” he declared in a documentary on the making of the video. Bayer’s handiwork emphasised the video’s raw feel, capturing a world on the verge of disintegration.
The video debuted on AOL on November 13, then premiered on MTV2 November 15, as part of a “Making The Video” program. The single proved to be an across-the-board smash, going all the way to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, and topping the Modern Rock, Mainstream Rock, Pop 100, Pop 100 Airplay, Adult Top 40, Top 40 Mainstream, and Hot Digital Songs charts, reaching number 30 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and number five on the Hot Ringtones chart. The single’s cover, a spray-painted image of a downcast young man with wings on a fading blue wall, readily matched the desolation of the song. The man was actually Chris Bilheimer, and the image was inspired by a painting he’d seen of a homeless man with wings done by Banksy, the UK artist whose work Bilheimer (and Green Day) admired. “Since the song says the line, ‘I walk alone’ 5000 times, it seemed the obvious element from which to base the content of the cover,” he says. “I had very little time to pull this package together, so I photographed myself, cut a stencil, ran down the street and painted it, photographed it and laid it out in a matter of two hours.” Royalties from the song’s sales on iTunes later went to the Red Cross International Response Fund, benefiting victims of the tsunami disaster in Thailand at the end of December 2004.
By the time the video was released, President Bush had been reelected, to the band members’ dismay. Billie Joe had taken to wearing a Bush mask onstage at concerts, and was particularly disappointed that so few young people had turned out to vote. The turnout ended up being 17% in some places, he told ContactMusic.com, but optimistically added, “But of those people, 54% ended up voting for Kerry, which is pretty overwhelming” The same interview also quoted him as saying, “I think George Bush is more of a threat to the freedom of America than Saddam Hussein ever was,” a sentiment he continues to voice.
By November 2004, American Idiot was certified Platinum and the fall tour was in full swing. During the tour, the group also made two rare i
n-store appearances, signing memorabilia at Circuit City electronic stores in Rochester, New York and Lynnwood, Washington (a suburb of Seattle), on November 5 and November 16, respectively. At the latter event, teacher John Goar finally managed to meet up with his one-time student. “When I found out he was doing the in-store signing, I jumped at that,” says Goar. “I wanted to see if he would recognise me and remember me.” Goar brought a Frank Kozik-designed poster of the October 17, 1995 show he’d seen in Seattle, as it featured three bunnies and Goar liked the tie-in with the person cavorting onstage in a bunny suit at the start of Green Day’s recent shows.
“I put it down in front of Billie Joe, and he goes, ‘Oh, nice poster,’” says Goar. “He hadn’t looked up and looked at my face. I said, ‘Hey, Billie Joe, do you remember me from John Swett?’ and then he looked up and said, ‘Mr. Goar!’ That was really cool! I kind of half expected that he wouldn’t remember me or recognise me, but he did. He reminded me that he got a D in my class. That was something I didn’t remember. He indicated that he considered it a gift, that maybe he really didn’t even deserve the D — he was thankful I showed him some mercy!
“One of the band members made a joke like, ‘Hey Billie Joe, why didn’t you try to sell him drugs?’ something like that,” Goar continues. “He asked if I was going to the show, and I go, ‘Oh, yeah!’ Each guy signed one of the bunnies on the poster.”
The show that night was at the Everett Event Center in Everett, Washington, “a very large indoor venue,” says Goar. “Like all the Green Day shows I’ve seen, it was awesome. This was the first live rendering I experienced of American Idiot, and was nearly the same set as the show I would see a year later at Tacoma Dome [on September 26, 2005].The Tacoma show was the first Green Day show for my daughters. They both love Green Day, especially my youngest, 13-year-old Julia. Green Day is her favourite band.”
On November 22, the group appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, performing ‘Boulevard’ and ‘American Idiot’. Following a November 24 show at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, there was a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, then the band went right back to work with a hectic two weeks of performances and appearances. On December 1, they taped an appearance for VH1’s Big In ’04 show at the Shrine Auditorium in LA, which would air December 5. On December 3 and 5 there were two shows in Mexico. They then returned to the states where they played a show at The Joint in Las Vegas on December 7, where journalist Jonathan Cohen found Mike in enthusiastic spirits, telling him, “Our shows are bigger than they’ve ever been. We just played to 18,000 kids in Mexico City. I feel honored by our fans, especially those who have stuck around since the beginning. The fact that this album has done so well really verifies their belief in us.” That night they would again play American Idiot in its entirety. “This is something we want to revisit the rest of our career,” Mike told Cohen. “It’s like a new bullet in our arsenal, and it’s great to step outside of our regular tour set.” The same day, it was announced that Green Day had been nominated for six Grammy Awards, the most nominations they’d ever secured. American Idiot was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Rock Album, while the title track was nominated for Record of the Year, Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal, Best Rock Song, and Best Short Form Music Video. Rob Cavallo was also nominated for Producer of the Year.
They remained in Las Vegas another day to appear at the Billboard Awards, then returned to Los Angeles on December 9 (Tré’s thirty-second birthday) for an appearance on The Tonight Show, followed by an appearance at KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Xmas show on December 12. New Year’s Eve found them in New York, where they appeared on MTV’s Iced Out New Year’s Eve. The group’s mood was giddy, with Tré excited by the blinking ice cubes specially designed for people’s drinks at the event (“These things are Satan!”), while Billie Joe blithely smoked backstage in violation of the “No Smoking” rules. The group performed ‘American Idiot’ and ‘Longview’ (with Snoop Dogg joining in on the latter number), then got up to more hijinks during the commercial breaks, performing quick cover versions of such unexpected choices as Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Push It’ and Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ode to women’s posteriors, ‘Baby Got Back’. As the ball fell in Times Square at midnight, marking the start to another new year, American Idiot had sold 1.8 copies in the US — an average of 17,476 copies a day.
On January 3, they returned to The Late Show, performing ‘Boulevard’ and two days later were in the studios of MTV, taping a short live set for the music channel. Billie Joe was also a participant in The Fourth Annual New York Times Arts & Leisure Weekend, held January 7 at CUNY (City College of New York), interviewed before a live audience by Jon Pareles, the Times music critic. Other participants included Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, and Keifer Sutherland.
The week of January 9, American Idiot returned to the top of the Billboard charts; sales of the album had reached two million domestically and five million worldwide. Then, on January 11, the first tour of the year began (and the group would play shows every month throughout 2005) with a month-long European/UK tour starting in Berlin. Along the way, there were further TV appearances, including Germany’s TV Total on January 13, performing ‘Boulevard’ and Britain’s Top Of The Pops on February 6, performing ‘American Idiot’. On February 9, they appeared at The Brit Awards ceremony, held at Earl’s Court in London; nominated for Best International Group, they lost to Scissor Sisters. The tour concluded with a February 10 date in Glasgow, Scotland, by which time American Idiot had hit number one on the European Top 100 albums chart for the first time.
Then it was back to the US for the Grammy Awards, held at the Staples Center in LA Green Day turned in an especially tight performance of ‘American Idiot’; Billie Joe had told Inside Bay Area they planned to “kick some major ass, even if we lost.” But this night they wouldn’t go away empty handed, taking home the Best Rock Album award. “Rock’n’roll can be dangerous and fun at the same time,” Billie Joe assured the audience as the group collected the honor. He later admitted to Inside Bay Area he’d been “stunned” at winning, adding, “The reason why I appreciate it so much is just because I feel like all the hard work that went into it was real. There wasn’t anything fake about it, so I felt like they were appreciating something for the right reasons.” He also participated in the All Star Tsunami Relief Tribute during the ceremony, which had artists including Bono, Alicia Keys, Stevie Wonder, and Norah Jones performing The Beatles’ ‘Across The Universe’. The song was later offered as a download on iTunes, with the proceeds going to the Red Cross for Tsunami Relief.
On February 15, the group appeared on Last Call With Carson Daly, performing ‘Jesus Of Suburbia’; again, the studio audience was treated to a few other songs that were not broadcast. On the same day, the group taped a set for VH1 Storytellers, a program that features a musical act performing before a live audience, taking breaks in between to talk about the creation of the songs. The band performed the entire American Idiot album, and a number of the questions were not just about specific songs, but also about the band’s own viewpoints. One attendee asked if the band felt “that anyone who voted for Bush is an ‘American idiot.’” Billie Joe smiled and replied, “No, no … Just a misinformed idiot.” The album’s politics were downplayed in places, as when Mike asserted that the record was “speaking from an individual standpoint. It’s not pointing fingers necessarily.” And during the intro of ‘Holiday’, Billie Joe announced that the number “is not anti-American, it’s anti-war,” though the force with which he screamed out “waaaaarrr!” left no doubt about his anger regarding the issue. But the group also addressed the record’s potential for controversy. “What you going to do?” said Tré. “Are you going to lay down and roll over and be safe and put something out that no one’s going to have any questions about being safe? Or are you going to stick your neck out, and let them bleep out what they want to bleep out, and say what’s supposed to be said?” Mike also expressed his belief in the power of music;
“People say rock’n’roll can change things. If it changes your mindset for one second, or makes you question anything then, yes, I think so.” Storytellers later aired April 2.
‘Holiday’ was the group’s next single, which continued the group’s winning streak, performing well on the various US charts; peaking at number 19 in the Billboard Hot 100; it also topped the Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts, reached number five on the Adult Top 40 chart, number 18 on the Pop 100 chart, number six on the Hot Digital Songs chart, and number 35 on Hot Ringtones. In the UK, it reached number 11. The cover was a photograph of Billie Joe with dynamite strapped to his chest, meant to symbolize, Bilheimer explains, “How everyone has felt, at some time in their life, as if they were going to explode.”
The video debuted on MTV2 on February 5. The video’s ominous opening shot is that of a bomb labelled “Green Day” being dropped from a plane (also bringing to mind the cover of Dookie).Then the band is seen seemingly cruising down the Las Vegas Strip at lightning speed (in reality, it’s another rear-screen projection trick).The band’s cavorting in the car is intercut with scenes from one of the best sequences in any Green Day video — a bar full of colourful characters, each one played by a different member of the band: Mike plays a long-suffering bartender and a cop who hauls a drunken Tré out of the bar. Billie Joe plays a variety of bar patrons, two of whom get in a fight with each other. Tré gets into drag once again, becoming a floozy blonde in a tight, blue-spangled dress. But the group’s fun comes to a grinding halt when their car rolls to a stop — the point at which the ‘Boulevard’ video began.
A more off-the-wall-venture also had its premiere in February, when John Roecker’s film Live Freaky Die Freaky, which featured voice-overs from each of Green Day’s members, debuted at The Roxy in San Francisco on February 17. The film utilised stop-motion animation and grotesque puppets in relating its story of the power of myths — in this case, the mythology surrounding Charles Manson. Manson, a convicted criminal, and his mixed-gender gang who dubbed themselves “The Family,” gained international notoriety for their crime spree on the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969, when The Family (minus Manson) murdered a total of seven people in their Los Angeles-area homes (including actress Sharon Tate, the wife of film director Roman Polanski).There has long been an inextricable link between Manson and the rock world. Manson was an aspiring musician (an urban legend persists that he auditioned for The Monkees TV series) and he finally released an album, LIE, after his arrest. He and his “Family” had lived with Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys for a time; Manson’s song ‘Cease To Exist’ was re-written by Wilson, and, retitled ‘Never Learn Not to Love’, was recorded and released on The Beach Boys’ 20/20 album. Manson has since been referenced in numerous rock songs and controversy still erupts when artists cover his own songs, as when Guns N’ Roses recorded Manson’s ‘Look At Your Game Girl’ for their 1993 album The Spaghetti Incident?
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