Prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi wrote the best-selling book Helter Skelter about the trial, which further popularised Manson’s story and eventually provided the kernel of the idea for Roecker’s film. Roecker had noticed how prevalent copies of the book were in used book stores and later speculated that “when the apocalypse comes, all they are going to find is a copy of Helter Skelter and the new inhabitants on the earth going to make this their bible.” Live Freaky opens with just such an post-apocalypse survivor discovering a copy of the book buried in the desert; the film then flashes back to the Family’s murder crimes, though the characters are renamed Charlie “Hanson” and Sharon “Hate”. The film ends with the apocalypse survivor convinced of the wisdom of Charlie’s “message” and he returns to his tribe of fellow survivors, determined to spread the word.
The film’s message, Roecker explained to Filmjerk.com, was “how you can read anything and make it your own. Good or bad. Take for example, the Bible. A book that was supposed to make people come closer together but more blood was shed from that book than anything else”. Indeed, Manson’s Family had done just that, interpreting The Beatles’ songs ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Revolution 9’ as foretelling “an impending race and nuclear war, based on Biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelation.” Roecker insisted that Live Freaky’s message was “think for yourself,” but it was a message that was arguably buried underneath the unabashedly profane and scatological antics of the film, which were replete with crude stereotyping, foul language, gory violence, and “explicit puppet sex.”
Unsurprisingly, Roecker had difficulty raising money for his film; even Troma Entertainment, known for producing such low-budget cult film fare at The Toxic Avenger, turned him down. Eventually, Hellcat Films, the film division of Hellcat Records — run by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong — put up the funding. Armstrong also provided the voiceover narration for the film and soon other musicians signed on to participate as well, including one of Armstrong’s Rancid band mates, Lars Fredrickson, Jane Weidlin of The Go-Go’s, Benji and Joel Madden from Good Charlotte, John Doe from X, and Kelly Osbourne (credited as “Nelly Posbourne”) as Sharon Hate, among others.
Actor Viggo Mortensen was originally planned to voice Charlie, but his work on the Lord Of The Rings films precluded his participation, so Roecker approached Billie Joe, who readily agreed. Billie Joe recorded his lines in one day, turning in a very convincing performance; “I don’t know where that voice came from” he told Rolling Stone. “It was like I was possessed by the character.” He also recorded a song for the film, ‘Mechanical Man’ (itself the title of a Manson song, though the song in the movie is a completely different number written by Faith No More’s Roddy Bottom). Mike and Tré also had small parts in the film.
When it was completed, Roecker then had more trouble in getting his film seen. It was rejected by every film festival he submitted it to; “I was told I was morally irresponsible,” Roecker told the LA Weekly. After the film’s premiere, it played at a number of independently owned theatres and was finally released on DVD on January 31, 2006. US chains like Wal-Mart refused to carry it, but at least the film had received stateside distribution (as well as release in Canada and Japan); as of this writing, no UK distributor had been found.
In March came a story that was nearly as bizarre as the antics in Roecker’s film — the news that Green Day’s music had actually awakened a boy in a coma. Nine-year-old Corey George of Aberaman in Aberdare, South Wales, had been hit by a car on his birthday and spent two weeks in a coma on life support. Knowing that Green Day was George’s favourite band, his parents played American Idiot at his bedside. “He loves Green Day and is always playing their records,” said George’s father Martyn. “The title track we played is his favourite — he listens to it all the time.” In less than an hour, it was said, George emerged from the coma. The band sent George a get-well package of Green Day items and one of the band’s representatives stated, “The boys are incredibly pleased that one of their tracks has brought Corey out of his coma. They hope he continues with his recovery and makes a full return to health.”
The group played Japan and Australia in March, picking up two more prizes at the MTV Australia Awards on March 3, for Best Group and Best Rock Video for ‘American Idiot’. The following month, they picked up two more, winning Favorite Music Group at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice awards, and International Album of the Year at Canada’s Juno Awards. On April 9, they appeared on Saturday Night Live, performing ‘Boulevard’ and ‘Holiday’. The entire band was in black, for a change (aside from Tré’s striped tie), which struck a somber note during the first number, though Billie Joe broke the mood by shouting “New York City!” during the instrumental break. That same week, the Marriott Marquis in New York’s Times Square refused to allow a promotional banner advertising American Idiot to be hung on the side of the hotel. In the words of a Marriott representative, “We have the right to review all advertising that goes on our buildings, and if we feel it has any political, pornographic, or inappropriate content, we have the right to reject that ad.” The nearby W Hotel had no such reservations and displayed the banner instead.
Then it was back to touring. On April 15, the band began another leg of the US tour in Miami, which ran until May. Another European tour began in June, which ran until July. The highlights included two sold-out shows before a total of 130,000 people at the Milton Keynes National Bowl in England, Saturday June 18 and 19. “A lot of bands have a problem with playing in front of that many people and trying to create intimacy,” Billie Joe told NME. “But you just try to create an effect. You try to create a spectacle or a splash. It’s about just having something that’s massive.” Still, Mike admitted the band had momentarily wondered if they’d be able to attract a sufficient audience — until both shows sold out. Both concerts were also filmed for the documentary DVD/CD, Bullet In A Bible, released that November.
Though Green Day’s set — and concluding fireworks display — could be scaled down to accommodate an arena with a capacity of “only” 20,000, the Milton Keynes performances gave the shows the space to live up to their full potential and the group showed they had little difficulty in commanding such a huge stage. Certainly American Idiot’s dramatic songs were tailor-made for just such an enormous setting, and live favourites like ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ and ‘Brain Stew’ translated to the big stage just as easily. Flashpots, explosions, and fireworks routinely drew screams of approval from every audience; at Milton Keynes, as the sun set and darkness fell over the enormous field, the effects were even more impressive. And certainly a call to “sing so loud that every fuckin’ redneck in America hears ya tonight!” was going to be warmly received in a country where even respectable daily newspapers referred to Bush as a “war criminal” in their pages.
As usual, the first part of the show consisted of the American Idiot songs, then reached back into Green Day’s extensive catalogue. Longtime fans might have noticed, as ‘Longview’ began, that Billie Joe was playing the guitar he’d named Blue when he first received it, all those many years ago. In a nice nod to the British audience, Billie Joe began singing the chorus of ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian during the ‘little bit softer now’ part of ‘Shout’ as he lay face down on the stage, his head hanging over the steps leading down to the catwalk; the crowd quickly joined in. ‘Minority’ closed the main set, with Billie Joe proclaiming, “I just want to say that England is now the official home of Green Day from now on!” during the song’s instrumental break. He also interjected his standard message of self-empowerment: “Regardless of who the powers that be are — the people that you elect, the people that I elect into office — remember you have the fuckin’ power, we’re the fuckin’ leaders! Don’t let these bastards dictate your life or try to tell you what to do!” It was a message audiences were hungry for; as one young man who was interviewed at the show said, the release of American Idiot “proved that rock bands can b
e honest again. And people want to hear it. People want the voice.”
The encore of ‘Maria’, ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’, and Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’ followed, with red and white confetti flying after the latter number. It was almost anti-climactic to see Billie Joe return alone, accompanying himself on guitar on ‘Good Riddance’, but the song had long since become Green Day’s equivalent of ‘Yesterday’ — it was impossible for them to do a show and not perform it. On the last chord, a spectacular fireworks show filled the sky, and Mike and Tré joined Billie Joe on the catwalk to take their final bows, and the show that NME’s readers would later vote Best Gig Of The Year came to a close.
Green Day then faced a worldwide audience on July 2, when they played a short set at the Live 8 concert staged at Berlin’s Siegesse Victory Column. (There were a total of ten Live 8 concerts held in nine countries.) The Live 8 event was organised by Bob Geldof, who had also organised the landmark Live Aid concerts of 1985. The Live 8 concerts were intended to draw attention to global poverty and the AIDS crisis, especially in Africa, and were held the same week world leaders were meeting at the G8 summit in Scotland (July 6 through 8). The London concert generated the most excitement, opening with Paul McCartney joining U2 for ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (whose opening line about “20 years ago today” provided an appropriate nod to Live Aid), and also featuring a reunited Pink Floyd, together for the first time in 24 years. Only one song from Green Day’s set, ‘American Idiot’, would be featured on the four-disc DVD set of the event released in November, so fans would miss out on what Entertainment Weekly called the “most winning musical statement” of the day. It was Green Day’s closing song of the set, ‘We Are The Champions’, with Entertainment Weekly saying of the performance, “From what we saw of Live 8, they really were.” It had been a bright, sunny day and the audience needed little encouragement to raise their arms and wave them back and forth as Green Day performed the anthemic song that had also closed Queen’s Live Aid set 20 years before. Just before hitting the final chord, Billie Joe looked up at the audience and went, “I say heeeey-oh!” “Heeeey-oh!” the crowd shouted right back. The band finished the song, and Billie Joe held his guitar up over this head, like the champion he was.
CHAPTER 12
And Into The Future
“My goal is to be one of the biggest bands in the world, and I have never been bashful about saying that.”
— Billie Joe to Alternative Press, June 2002
In early August, it was announced that Green Day had reclaimed the rights to the recordings they’d released on Lookout Records, citing lack of royalty payments. Other artists on the label had similar complaints, and the previous few years had seen a number of Lookout acts (including Pansy Davison, Screeching Weasel, and Blatz) leaving for other labels. Green Day had apparently let the matter go in the hopes that it would one day be sorted out, but eventually grew tired of waiting. “There comes a time where you’re like, ‘Okay, how long do you want to support your record label?’” Mike said to the East Bay Express.
Losing Green Day was indeed a blow for Lookout. At the time Green Day reclaimed their recordings, 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours had sold over 550,000 copies (and was averaging sales of 900 copies a week), and Kerplunk! had sold over 650,000 copies (averaging sales of 800 copies a week). The year after Dookie’s release, sales of the two albums had resulted in Lookout being awash in cash, with a reported $10 million in sales in 1995. At one point there were as many as 18 staffers — who enjoyed full health benefits and a 401 (k) plan — working for the label, and the company even owned its own record shop on University Avenue in Berkeley. As noted in the East Bay Express, the label “seemed financially set for life.”
But ironically, the influx of cash played a role in the label’s later troubles. The label began sinking money into various promotional efforts that never paid off financially. And Lawrence Livermore became increasingly unhappy at having to deal with the pressure of trying to run an unexpectedly successful label. “I was sick of it, partly because I was feeling like Lookout was turning into something very different from what I had intended,” Livermore told journalist Rob Harvilla. “I didn’t enjoy … sitting in an office fielding requests and demands to spend ever-increasing amounts of money on what I thought was a foolish attempt to mimic the bloated excesses of the major labels.” In 1997, he turned ownership over to another employee, Chris Appelgren, Appelgren’s now ex-wife [and Bratmobile drummer] Molly Neuman, and Cathy Bauer.
In an open letter posted on Lookout’s website on August 2, Appelgren admitted to “bad decisions and poor judgment” leading to Lookout’s current problems, “most strikingly in hoping that things would all somehow magically work out, that the shortcomings in operating income, and the fact that our new bands were not selling as many records as we hoped would all somehow just turn out okay on their own if we just kept working hard and doing the best job we could.” He added there was no undue animosity between the parties, and indeed, Green Day has not, as of this writing, filed any legal complaint regarding their unpaid royalties. In the meantime, most of Lookout’s staff was laid off, as part of a major reorganisation to keep the label afloat. By the end of 2005, the company had moved out of its office on Adeline Street.
On a more positive note, the video for Green Day’s latest single, ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’, had its US debut on AOLMusic.com on August 8 (it was released earlier in Europe).The seven-minute version of the video, which had been shot by Sam Bayer the previous March, had an extended prologue before the music even began, making it something of a mini-movie; indeed, Bayer later said he approached making the video “exactly like a major motion picture,” taking a month to cast it (a five-minute edit was also put together). The prologue featured two young actors, Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood (the latter of whom had appeared in the indie film, Thirteen), exchanging their vows of love in what was meant to seem an archetypical field somewhere in the American Midwest (in reality, Ojai, California). Bell enlists in the army to his girlfriend’s distress; the final shots have him battling in (presumably) Iraq while Wood pines for him at home, sitting on the high-school bleachers. Shots of the band are intercut throughout, each member (including Jason White) on his own raised white circle, as if in some darker version of a 1960s TV variety show.
The end result conveyed a decidedly mixed message; though RollingStone.com had Green Day “making their most powerful anti-war statement yet” with the video, the New York Times’ Kelefa Sanneh noted that “it also works pretty well as a support-our-troops statement for the emo age.” Certainly, the “protest” seemed to be aimed more at the unfairness of the young lovers having to be separated; there was no explicit dissent expressed regarding any particular war. One could even argue whether the video had an anti-war message at all. Bayer felt that it did. “I’m not taking a political stance about whether the war in Iraq is right or wrong,” he told writer Steve Knopper. “But I’m definitely saying war is a terrible thing.” The band members agreed. “The video is like a commercial for free thought — or peace — using the same tactics that the government uses to get people in the Army,” Tré told Rolling Stone. “We turned the machine on itself.”
The song itself did nearly as well on the US Hot 100 as ‘Boulevard’ had, peaking at number six. It also landed at number two Modern Rock, number four Pop 100, number 12 Mainstream Rock, number 13 Adult Contemporary, number four Hot Digital Songs, and number 14 Hot Ringtones, along with appearances on the Hot 100 Airplay, Pop 100 Airplay, and Top 40 Mainstream charts. In the UK, it also hit the Top 10, peaking at number eight.
On August 10, Green Day kicked off an arena tour in Chicago, and they’d remain on the road for much of the rest of 2005. But the tour schedule was interrupted by plenty of other appearances, particularly at an increasing number of awards shows, with a new award of some kind being given to the band nearly every month for the rest of the year. The US tour precluded their appearance at
the Kerrang! Awards in London in August, where they won Best Live Act and Best Band On The Planet. But they had arranged to attend that year’s MTV Video Music Awards ceremony, held at the American Airlines Arena in Miami on August 29. They arrived in style, driving up in the same green convertible that had appeared in the ‘Holiday’/‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’ videos, and, on entering the Arena, each received a specially designed Gap Weekender bag given out to attendees, containing such souvenirs as an iPod (bearing a VMA logo), a solid gold Shu Uemura eyelash curler, a Frederick’s Of Hollywood bustier, a Paul Frank orange vinyl Moonman watch, and a paid vacation to South Carolina’s Inn at Palmetto Bluff, among other luxury items.
The band also had the honour of opening the show, which they did with a flourish, performing ‘Boulevard’ utilising a dazzling array of flashpots and fire and water effects. The song’s video then went on to receive an impressive number of honours: Video of the Year, Best Group Video, Best Rock Video, Bayer winning both Best Direction in a Video and Best Cinematography, and Tim Royes winning Best Editing in a Video. The ‘American Idiot’ video also won the Viewers’ Choice award. The only category in which they lost was for Best Art Direction in a Video, which was won by Gwen Stefani’s ‘What You Waiting For?’ “It’s nice to know rock music still has a place at MTV,” Billie Joe said while accepting the Best Rock Video award. He later dedicated the last award the group accepted to the US troops, saying, “Here’s to our soldiers, let’s bring them home safe.”
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