Green Day - The Punk Years - 'One foot was at the party – the other foot was in the grave'

[Rumpelstiltskin2000]

Article from the Telegraph:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/0/green-day-punk-years-one-foot-party-foot-grave/

Green Day, the punk years: 'One foot was at the party – the other foot was in the grave'

Loaded guns, riots, body lice… Never mind their mediocre new album, or their record sales – Green Day are as punk as it gets

Last year, the three members of Green Day were interviewed in Los Angeles by the alternative-music radio station KROQ-FM. During the 13-minute exchange, front man Billie Joe Armstrong let slip a piece of information that apparently didn’t warrant further investigation by his interlocutors. His band’s next album, he revealed, would be their last for Warner Bros. After that, he said, lowering his voice in a theatrical manner, “we’re off our contract…”

By any measure, it has been a successful partnership. Since signing with Reprise Records, a Warner subsidiary, in 1993, Green Day have sold more than 85-million albums; with Dookie and the genre-defining American Idiot, they are one of a vanishingly small number of groups to have released two records that have each shifted more than 15-million copies. Along with The Offspring, in 1994 they became the first of two domestic groups to smash through the glass ceiling that separated punk rock from the American mainstream. 

It was a feat that had eluded all who had come before them, including the Ramones. When the New Yorkers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - in 2002, a year after the death of singer Joey Ramone - the band’s remaining members nominated Green Day to play Teenage Lobotomy, Rockaway Beach, and Blitzkrieg Bop in their honour at the ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. 

It’s the kind of detail worth mentioning to anyone who believes that Green Day are not a punk rock group. Just last month a number of the band’s many detractors stormed the barricades in response to an article for the Telegraph in which I nominated American Idiot as the world’s most essential punk record. "Green Day [at] No1 – you have no credibility whatsoever" and "Green Day suck. Get them off the list pronto" were just two of the many negative responses. 

But, indubitably, Green Day are a punk rock band. Last month, in Berkeley I attended a Sunday night concert at 924 Gilman Street, the not-for-profit all-ages venue at which the Oakland trio made their bones. A petri dish of political fermentation, it is the most significant punk club of the past 50-years. 

On the first Sunday of the year, tickets to see a four-band bill cost 10 dollars. A stenciled sign at the door read ‘no alcohol, no drugs, no violence… no f_____-up behavior.’ As I watched the impressive Kevin Nichols sing about his disappointing life, my eye drifted to a piece of graffiti written on a beam of wood in the rafters. It read ‘Sweet Children’, the name of a band of young teenagers that changed its name to Green Day. It had been up there for 30-years. 

“Gilman was my first real taste of what it was like to be a punk,” Billie Joe Armstrong told me. “It wasn’t just about music; it was about a community and a movement…. Gilman was the first time that I learned anything in my life. Before Gilman, everything I’d learned up until that point was bullshit.”

Green Day became 924 Gilman Street’s house-band and performed at the venue dozens of times. One of the club’s founding fathers, Lawrence Livermore, invited the group to make music for his tiny label, Lookout, on which they released two albums, both of which were recorded for less than a thousand dollars. The second of these, Kerplunk, sold more than a hundred thousand copies. 

Self-sufficient from the start, Green Day toured Europe in conditions so squalid that Billie Joe Armstrong contracted body-lice. Playing in squats and punk clubs, in Germany they found themselves at the business end of a loaded gun; in snowbound Copenhagen the three musicians slept in a room that housed a human head preserved in formaldehyde. For 10-weeks in the thick of winter, they rode from gig to gig in a van that blew up. One night, six people pitched up to see them play. 

“We were in the situation where a band on tour has to lose their mind, and be able to find each other to make life make sense again,” Armstrong told me. “That’s why people quit, because they start losing their minds. We felt like we were a bunch of clowns that were in a small car.”

But by the end of 1992, in the United States Green Day were playing to as many as 2000 people a night. They opted to sign with Warner Bros. after the company’s young A&R man, Rob Cavallo, impressed them with his ability to play Beatles songs while stoned. In the avowedly independent East Bay punk scene of 1993, such a decision was unconscionable. Overnight, the band were no longer welcome at 924 Gilman Street - the club denies access to any artist on a major label - and were dead to many.

“There were a lot of kids that had a lot of shit to fall back on who were really self-righteous,” bassist Mike Dirnt told me. “And I said, ‘Well you can be indignant when you’ve got a f______ trust fund.’ I was sleeping in the back of my truck half the time.” 

Green Day were offered a $200,000 advance, to which they requested an additional $25,000 so as to purchase a new ride in which to tour. Impressed by their self-reliance, and by the fact that they weren’t demanding a tour-bus, Lenny Waronker, the president of Warner Bros. Records, said “you know what, this is cool, let’s give ‘em the f______ van.” The band purchased and converted a mobile library, known to all in the scene as ‘the Bookmobile.’

Green Day’s first album for their new label, Dookie, emerged without fanfare. The LP’s distribution was hampered by a severe snowstorm in the US North East; after limping onto the US Billboard Hot 200 at a pallid 141, it suffered a drop in sales that Rob Cavallo, who also produced the disc, describes as “precipitous.” Barely a month old, the trio’s new release was in danger of failing to recoup its modest costs.

Dookie’s leadoff single, Longview, also failed to gain traction. The song’s fading hopes were kept alive only by the persistence of Steve Tipp, the head of alternative promotion at Warner Bros., who transformed an apparent flop into a staple of MTV and alternative radio. Each night Rob Cavallo rang up KROQ several times to request the track be played, adopting a different voice for each call. 

With Kurt Cobain’s  throne standing empty, and with audiences in the market for an equally credible but less oppressive sound, Green Day’s timing was perfect. In the United States alone, Dookie sold 10-million copies. By comparison, Nirvana’s breakthrough album Nevermind sold three million. 

“I thought, ‘Well if we’re gonna do this let’s make it as big as possible or else go down in flames,” Billie Joe Armstrong told me. “The last thing I wanted was to be anywhere in the middle.”

As Dookie hit like a meteorite, out on the road things were getting out of hand. The opening band on that summer’s Lollopalooza festival, Armstrong caused chaos and injury when he invited 10,000 fans to occupy the still-empty seats at the front of the stage. A free concert at the Hatch Shell in Boston in front of a crowd of 70,000 ended in a riot that saw a 100 people either under arrest or in the emergency room. An infamous appearance for half a million concertgoers at Woodstock ’94 was equally chaotic. 

“We were dealing with the repercussions of signing to a major label,” Mike Dirnt told me. “We were dealing with starting new families. We were dealing with alcoholism on the road. It’s like one foot is at the party while the other foot is in the grave.”

Green Day returned from the nine-month tour exhausted. On the Haight in San Francisco, Billie Joe Armstrong was accosted by a postcard-punk who accused him of being “a sellout” and a “rock star.” Drummer Tre Cool spoke of friends who said “you don’t have a problem in the world because your band’s on TV and you’re successful,” and, anyway, “it should have been some other band who became successful, not yours.”

The group spent the next nine years finding fascinating ways with which to escape the shadow of Dookie. In 1995 they released the coiled and twitching Insomniac, as pronounced a rejection of fame as Nirvana’s In Utero; two years later the band introduced the magnificently expansive Nimrod. Tracks such as Panic Song, No Pride, Nice Guys Finish Last, and Uptight are among the finest in the punk rock canon.

But it was with American Idiot, in 2004, that Green Day conquered the world for a second time. The band’s thematic, occasionally political, wildly adventurous punk rock opera was brought to life after Billie Joe Armstrong heard the Lynyrd Skynyrd song That’s How I Like It on his car radio. In response to such winning couplets as “[I like my] women hot and my beer ice cold, a real fast car and my whisky old,” he wrote the album’s incendiary title track. 

The impact of American Idiot can hardly be overstated – certainly not on me. I was the first person in the country to hear the album, at Warner Bros. headquarters in Burbank, on a stereo that cost as much as a family car. I interviewed the band afterward, at Ocean Way Recording on Sunset Boulevard, as they plied me with a 40-ounce bottle of Mickey’s malt liquor. It’s not the kind of thing you expect from people who are about to sell 16-million records.

“I just had a feeling about American Idiot,” Rob Cavallo, the album’s producer, told me. “I just knew that when we released it, people were going to respond and explode. I had this feeling of electricity in my body that was as intense as anything I’d had before. The only time that I’d had it like that was on Dookie.”

“The difference between Dookie and American Idiot is pretty simple,” Tre Cool said. “The first time, the success was an accident; the second time, it was on purpose.” 

In the years that have elapsed since the release of their highest-selling album, Green Day have tried various means of placing distance between themselves and their punk rock masterpiece. The most impressive of these was 2009’s ambitious and undervalued 21st Century Breakdown. The least successful arrives on Friday in the shape of the band’s new LP. 

By a distance of many galaxies, Father Of All Motherf_____s is the band’s worst album. Once the most fluent songwriter of his generation, in 2020 Billie Joe Armstrong appears content to knock out songs that could well have been salvaged from a skip at the back of Jack White’s home studio. “We thought, ‘Let’s make a mess and see where it goes,” he told Kerrang! last year. Save for the superior Junkies On A High, ‘it’ has gone nowhere. 

But the real problem with the Green Day’s 13th album is that it’s naff. Effortful, contrived, and archly self-conscious, it contains lyrics about teenage life from musicians who are pushing 50. On the front sleeve the word "motherf_____s" is of course obscured. But if the band intend to use this term, they should own it - blacklist from Walmart be damned. Most problematic of all is the curious decision to sample Joan Jett’s 1981 cover version of the Gary Glitter song Do You Wanna Touch Me. As has been proven in a court of law, the answer to this question is no. 

etting out in front of any controversy, the band tweeted that ‘since one of the writers on that song is a total asshole, we decided to donate our royalties from [the track Oh Yeah!] to @IJM [International Justice Mission] and @RAINN [Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network]. Green Day’s attempt to be both bad boys and good guys at the same time has rendered me queasy for a fortnight. 

There is a theory hard at work on internet forums that the 26-minute Father Of All Motherfuckers has been dashed off in a hurry so as to extricate its authors from their contract with Warner Bros. The album’s original title, Songs For Assholes, seems to support this, as do hints from the band that a second LP could follow later this year. 

But until then, Green Day are what they are, a group that aren’t as good as they once were. Twenty years ago Tre Cool remarked that “watching Billie write a song is the closest thing to magic that you will ever see,” a statement that seems no longer to hold true. But if the band are now free to reclaim their place on the stage of 924 Gilman Street, as they are at liberty to do from the end of the week, then perhaps they’re able, also, to reclaim the heights of their past.

[Todd]

Wow, what an article. It makes me anxious to see what the end of the week has in store.

[pacejunkie punk]

2 minutes ago, Todd said:

Wow, what an article. It makes me anxious to see what the end of the week has in store.

Most reviews so far has been positive. Then there are a couple like this that are vicious but hopefully that remains the exception.

[DookieLukie]

“The difference between Dookie and American Idiot is pretty simple,” Tre Cool said. “The first time, the success was an accident; the second time, it was on purpose.” 

Interesting line from Tre. Does it mean they made AI to appeal to the masses?

[Lenny]

1 minute ago, DookieLukie said:

“The difference between Dookie and American Idiot is pretty simple,” Tre Cool said. “The first time, the success was an accident; the second time, it was on purpose.” 

Interesting line from Tre. Does it mean they made AI to appeal to the masses?

No they were veterans the second time and were confident 

[Sanity Loan]

I'm curious about their line regarding Songs for Assholes. Is that something the band told them, or is it conjecture?

[Josh100_3]

The author sounds like a sook and sounds like they’re trying real hard to stir the pot.

[DookieLukie]

1 minute ago, Matt. said:

I'm curious about their line regarding Songs for Assholes. Is that something the band told them, or is it conjecture?

Did the band even talk to them for this interview? Seems like everything from it is general knowledge or dug from other sources.

[Yosuke Hanamura]

“Never mind their mediocre new album, or their record sales”

Why do people stress lackluster album sales? Doesn’t their pretty damn good stream count make up the difference? Considering most money in the music industry comes from digital sales, streams, and concerts, it seems pretty trivial to talk about album sales.

[pacejunkie punk]

54 minutes ago, DookieLukie said:

“The difference between Dookie and American Idiot is pretty simple,” Tre Cool said. “The first time, the success was an accident; the second time, it was on purpose.” 

Interesting line from Tre. Does it mean they made AI to appeal to the masses?

There was another interview I recall where Mike had told somebody that they wanted to play arenas next so they wrote the kinds of anthemic massive songs that would work in arenas. That part was intentional. It wasn’t about mass appeal or anything, they still made the music they wanted to make, but songs that would play well in a large venue.

[HAPPY ZOMBIE UNICORN]

4 hours ago, Matt. said:

I'm curious about their line regarding Songs for Assholes. Is that something the band told them, or is it conjecture?

In sounds more like someone that reviewed the record based on Reddit comments, but who knows 😂

[Beyza]

5 minutes ago, HAPPY ROOTING UNICORN said:

In sounds more like someone that reviewed the record based on Reddit comments, but who knows 😂

I’ve never seen anywhere said Songs for Assholes is the album’s original title but I hate that interview/review, another review that basically says they’ve never been that good again after AI and I think implying that they’re trying to stay relevant with teenage song lyrics but they are almost 50 and criticizing Oh Yeah with donating royalties and stuff ”their attempt to be both bad boys and good guys at the same time has rendered me queasy for a fortnight.”  I mean really? 

[HAPPY ZOMBIE UNICORN]

7 minutes ago, Beyza said:

I’ve never seen anywhere said Songs for Assholes is the album’s original title 

That sounds like an assumption based on the comments that were circulating in here/Reddit until a few months ago “this is a troll album to leave Warner, songs for assholes clearly refer to Warner, songs for assholes has 70 posts but FOAM has 10 songs how is it possible, etc etc”. But maybe I’m wrong. The few times Billie/the band were directly asked about songs for assholes (If I remember correctly on Kerrang or RS), they said something like “it was a space to share stuff with friends”, never referred to it as the original album title. Don’t this this guy would have exclusive news, and in that case I believe he would have quoted the band not the “Internet forums”. Which is clearly GDC. Hard to believe that “reviewers” are getting actually influenced by the bullshit someone spread in here for months, but that looks like it 😕 

[Beyza]

6 minutes ago, HAPPY ROOTING UNICORN said:

That sounds like an assumption based on the comments that were circulating in here/Reddit until a few months ago “this is a troll album to leave Warner, songs for assholes clearly refer to Warner, songs for assholes has 70 posts but FOAM has 10 songs how is it possible, etc etc”. But maybe I’m wrong. The few times Billie/the band were directly asked about songs for assholes (If I remember correctly on Kerrang or RS), they said something like “it was a space to share stuff with friends”, never referred to it as the original album title. Don’t this this guy would have exclusive news, and in that case I believe he would have quoted the band not the “Internet forums”. Which is clearly GDC. Hard to believe that “reviewers” are getting actually influenced by the bullshit someone spread in here for months, but that looks like it 😕 

Yeah, I think so it looks like his assumption based on what he saw on the internet forums etc. like a normal fan but I think it doesn’t look professional in that kind of article 

[michael1989]

It seems like the writer actually has a great deal of respect for GD. They just don't like FOAM.

[emenius]

Ian Winwood is a pretty well established music journalist in the UK- he’s written a lot for Kerrang and other music magazines, and also a number of newspapers. He also recently wrote a book on the 90’s punk explosion. He’s interviewed the band on many occasions, and I think he was one of the journalists they took out and got really hammered after one interview. He’s a Green Day aficionado so I think he has high standards for them and is just expressing his own genuine disappointment in the album, whether we agree with him or not!

[HAPPY ZOMBIE UNICORN]

36 minutes ago, michael1989 said:

It seems like the writer actually has a great deal of respect for GD. They just don't like FOAM.

Most probably, not denying that. He just loses credibility when the ground of part of his criticism are silly internet rumors and that lame controversy over the Oh Yeah! Jon Jett sample. I get that in the UK it is still a hot topic, but come on... 

[Alan86]

8 hours ago, pacejunkie punk said:

There was another interview I recall where Mike had told somebody that they wanted to play arenas next so they wrote the kinds of anthemic massive songs that would work in arenas. That part was intentional. It wasn’t about mass appeal or anything, they still made the music they wanted to make, but songs that would play well in a large venue.

I remember that. I think it could have been the guys in NOFX talking about Green Day. I think one of them met Mike before American Idiot was finished and Mike told them that Green Day are going to start playing stadium shows for the their new Album.

[Squashie]

25 minutes ago, Alan86 said:

I remember that. I think it could have been the guys in NOFX talking about Green Day. I think one of them met Mike before American Idiot was finished and Mike told them that Green Day are going to start playing stadium shows for the their new Album.

It’s Mike from NOFX in the Spotify “early years” doc that was released in 2017.

[Guest]

On 2/5/2020 at 3:16 AM, Rumpelstiltskin2000 said:

“The difference between Dookie and American Idiot is pretty simple,” Tre Cool said. “The first time, the success was an accident; the second time, it was on purpose.” 

I am LIVING for Trés confidence this era.