What got you into Green Day?

[whatshername0303]

In 2004, I heard about American Idiot and I thought the songs were good, but I didn't buy it. In 2007, I knew a band who did a tribute to Green Day and they wrote their own songs. I loved their compositions and they were inspired by Green Day. So, I bought International Superhits and American Idiot. I have started listening to Green Day at that time and, now, I have all the cds.

[....................]

I remember that I had listened to 21 Guns and American Idiot before, but it was like when I was ten and and afraid of being different. Three years later I discovered them again, and actually fell in love with the same songs. It just somehow exploded my mind like nothing before. Can't describe it, but the same day I got an awful fever and I just thought it was discovering a new way of life and music. I know, I'm weird.

[!]

Constantly hearing 21 Guns, and eventually liking the song a little bit made me check out all of their other stuff.

[yuan]

i can't remeber, maybe 21 guns( i know..), i never knew who sang BoBD, WMUWSE and Good Riddance on the radio because english is not my first language but i have been living in different country... so i've got into english songs.. however GD is my first crush of any musicans.. i have never been a big fan of any particular person or group..

i think what really got me into them besides music is their personalities and relationship, i went through all their interviews, stories and i love their pretty from inside out.. and i need someone to look up to from time to time.

[ZSebs]

It all started in 2009. I got this free song download from this website (it wasn't anything illegal) and I wanted a song that was a hard rock song. I originally listened to bands like Queen, and I wanted to listen to some songs that are faster. So I searched Green Day because I had heard parts of American Idiot a few years before, and I wanted a song like that. The song I chose was "Static Age," and I was hooked immediately. I decided to get the 21st Century Breakdown album, which I really enjoyed, and now I have songs from every album on my iPod.

[ChelseaDagger]

Oh goody, I love telling this story. Even though it makes me sound like a total idiot.

The first song I heard from them was "All By Myself"

I was with my friend, we were babysitting at her aunt's house. Dookie had just come out and she was really into it, and she played "All By Myself" for me. I looked at her and asked "do all their songs sound like that????" she laughed at me, then played "When I Come Around", and the rest is history..........

[Awesompawsome]

When I was 11 I somehow started listening to 21cb but other than that I'd only heard the AI singles when I was young and then I just started listening more and more over the past 3 years

[localinsomniac]

Green Day.

[EggMong]

I always used to have all the singles from American Idiot plus Basket Case (which I got from my brothers - it was all the Green Day they had too). I used to listen to them every now and again and that was it (it was probably like that for 5 years or so). For some reason I never listened to JOS for most of that time - it is now one my favorite song ever! Being 9-minutes put me off, I don't know why.

Anyway, in July this year I thought "why don't I get more of their music if I love these songs so much?"...So I did. I got American Idiot and 21CB and listened to them absolutely loads on a 2-week holiday (just after I got them). I loved it so much I got Dookie and Warning when I got home - which were both amazing. That's pretty much the only music I've listened to up until now and I'm still not tired of them at all! I got Uno! and Dos! and will be getting Tre! (unfortunately I have to wait till Christmas though!). I bought their 1990-2009 studio album boxsets a few weeks ago and I listened to Nimrod about a week ago - I love it!

I've still to listen to 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, Kerplunk and Insomniac and I can't wait!

Green are my favorite band for sure now. Some of their lyrics fascinate me so much, especially American Idiot (as in the whole album) and I love how they have such a diverse range of music. They're all I listen to and with four albums for me yet to hear coming up I think it'll stay that way for a while!

Plus, this is my first post so Hi.

[.Holly]

2004. I heard American idiot on the radio and liked it, then they released boulevard and I fell in love and have been hooked ever since. I'd heard of green day before, but I couldn't have named any of their songs.

[stuffismessedup]

Well my parents had listened to green day casually and i had heard alot of the singles on the radio but didnt really pay any attention. One song that i had heard millions of times, as it was everywhere, was good riddance but when i got nimrod and found out it was green day, my mind was blown. (i was only four when it was getting heavy radio play) Plus i was always fascinated with the cover of dookie that i would find in my dad's collection of cds, but i never listened to it. Then in late 2004 i saw the video for American Idiot and had to go tell my mom about this "new" band with an amazing sound. She then told me they had been around for years and she and my dad even had a cd, and got dookie out and again, my mind was blown. But still i didn't listen to dookie, i dont know what it was but American Idiot was calling my name i guess and i waited until my 11th birthday in january of 05 to finally buy this album and i listened to it on the way home and i was amazed. To this day it is still my favorite album of all time, not only because it is so good, but because it opened so many doors musically for me and it was what introduced me to my favorite band. After a week straight of listening to American Idiot i finally gave dookie a proper listen and knew that Green Day was my favorite band. What really skyrocketted this was being in a weird place and trying to make friends with the "popular crowd" in fifth grade. Well it turns out the one guy who was nice and i became friends with really liked green day and we really formed a friendship out of that. always sneaking listens of my cd player while we were in class and got a chance. For him green day was just a phase, as he now listens to rap and i havent talked to hiim in five years. But when i got the chance to see them live in october of 2005, i had experienced something that would change my life and went out and bought 1039, kerplunk and warning, completing my collection and from that point on got every album on the release date. Now my favorite thing to do is go to shows and listen to music. As cheesy as it sounds Green Day has really impacted who i have become and its scary to think about what i'd be like if i hadnt become a fan.

[Annie, get your gun]

What got me into GD was a tiny article from a kids' magazine Their faces were what made me want to know more. And then I couldn't stop; Green Day was everywhere and I did nothing but enjoy it The first song I heard was Boulevard Of Broken Dreams. But it was Holiday the one that settled my love forever

[uhleckseee]

I talked about this before in the debate topic about the band selling out, but now for the specs. I love recalling all of this, so it's a lot of text. Thus: Spoiler!

I've always known of the band because my mom was an avid radio listener and I was raised on rock, metal, and punk (other than GD, I'm a huge Metallica freak). I think I remember calling Green Day "dweebs" at some point, just because of the When I Come Around video. I always remembered that video, but never payed attention to the music. I saw their little grungy sweaters and they looked so little, so, "dweeb." I also knew of Brain Stew as well. Then when I finished 6th grade and was going on to Jr. High, they made us sing Good Riddance, which was my first real introduction to the band. They were still always just acknowledged, never enjoyed (granted, I never gave them a shot because I wasn't into music).

At the time I was really not my own person. I followed trends. Since I listened to the radio, I started to lean more towards the pop stations and started liking what was popular. In my neighborhood especially, it was pretty ghetto. I was the only white chick in most of my elementary school classes, mainly hispanic, so the popular music around that time was rap and hip hop as well as R&B (I still like me some R&B...that shit is smooth).

Anyways, so I never was INTO music that much. Then my family got satellite TV and I found music video channels like Fuse, so I started to know the new rock bands and all the music that was out. This was it.

2004 comes along, I'm 14, going on 15. The video for American Idiot comes out and I was stopped in my tracks. Was this the same band?! My cousin was over with me and I remember us both commenting on the band's looks (being very pleased). haha My cousin says that she thinks she has a compilation album of theirs at home and would let me borrow it. This was, of course, International Superhits!

So I got a hold of American Idiot as well as International Superhits, and it was done from there. I began to pick up all of their albums as I fell in love with them. I was literally obsessed. I wore red and black for the album, I drew heart grenades everywhere, I wrote lyrics constantly, I couldn't get enough. I was on the internet for hours a day just learning about the band and talking to people.

Before coming to GDC, I was an avid member of GeekStinkBreath.net's boards. I forgot about those boards until I just typed it now, but I spent so much fucking time on those boards and met so many awesome people. I got into the whole slash thing for a while (weird phase), and even met someone on MySpace who shared the obsession. She lived in Pennsylvania and we both had dial-up internet. We wanted to talk more, so we got permission and started to actually write to each other. I still have piles of letters we would send to each other, decorating the envelopes and every page. We'd send pictures, poems, everything. We were best friends.

I first saw Green Day live October 8th, 2005 at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California. It was the second leg of the American Idiot tour, a few months after Bullet in a Bible was filmed. The seats we got weren't that great, but it was one of the best nights of my life.

Everyone thought it was a phase. People at school, family, everyone. They would make fun of me for liking this band and I would have to constantly defend myself. Never before were my eyes opened so much. I was able to question everything and make my own decisions in life. I was really religious in Jr. High before I became a GD fan. I'm not saying GD is the reason I'm an atheist, but it opened my eyes and allowed me to question what was in my life and what kind of person I really wanted to be.

This band has been with me during my best of times when I went to CIF for Water Polo (King for a Day before EVERY game, no matter what. It got me PUMPED). They have been there for me during my worst times, struggling through depression and anxiety to this day. Laughing, crying, driving, wasting time, having the best time of my life...this band has been there for me during all of it.

Now we're here, 8 years later. I've seen the band over 5 times live. I also won tickets to see BIAB with the band, to see Heart Like a Hand Grenade, I went to a KROQ "breakfast" with the band (it was an afternoon show, recorded for Breakfast with Kevin and Bean)...and I've met Billie Joe briefly. I'm thankful that I've had all of these opportunities and my love for this band keeps growing with every year that passes.

I have a beautiful tattoo on my side of the lyrics, "To live and not to breathe is to die in tragedy," which symbolizes my love for this band and everything they've given me. They helped me breathe on my own when I was just living the day-to-day and following what everyone else had set for me. Now I am living my own life, I'm fucking happy, and I have this band and an amazing community of fans by my side. Excuse the pun, but I'm having a blast.

[Tussnelda]

Back in the year 1996, my friend gave me a self recorded cassette, she said I might like it, it was Dookie. (talk of copyright infringement back then ) I thought, “Oh well, not too bad”. Back then I always listened to music while falling asleep, since Dookie was still in the player I listened to it. After the last song faded out (were only 1 or 2 left) I dozed away….then hearing a very strange song and thought “hey that sounds cute”, I thought it was from an older recording my friend had on the cassette. So next day I asked her about that song. She burst out laughing and said “no no that’s also GD, it’s a hidden track”. So I listened to the full cassette and really liked it (tho no more Tre Cool songs were on it). Yeah, so my first song I liked is All by Myself…

Since then I haven’t missed an album, and always felt cool to listen to “good” music, especially during the boyband era… Also while AI came out and more people around me seemed to like GD to say “Yeah Yeah I’ve known them for years” and introduced them to older stuff...

The first song I heard from them was "All By Myself"

I was with my friend, we were babysitting at her aunt's house. Dookie had just come out and she was really into it, and she played "All By Myself" for me. I looked at her and asked "do all their songs sound like that????" she laughed at me, then played "When I Come Around", and the rest is history..........

[BJA TC MD]

May 2nd 2009: I saw the Know Your Enemy video on TV. I liked the song.

Then 21 Guns came out and I fell in love with it. Then I started listening to some more songs of Green Day's (like the 90's stuff) and everything just went on from there

[whatsername35008]

my mum and i were driving in the car and she played Boulevard of Broken Dreams off her iphone and then i made her keep playing it for the rest of the two hour car journey then when i got home i watched the music video, bought the song and listened to only that for about a month then i realised they had other amazing songs aswell.

[Yaz.]

I started getting into bands properly when I was about 10 or 11. I'd heard Time of Your Life on the radio somewhere down the line, but I never took much notice. I was also pretty big on Busted at the time and reading about some of their personal influences they mentioned Dookie, still I didn't take much notice ¬__¬. I'd have Kerrang! on constantly, but this was around 2003 maybe. So the bands I got into were blink 182, Good Charlotte, Linkin Park, Sum 41 etc. because their videos were being aired a lot. Then eventually in 2004 when American Idiot dropped, it just stuck. I went out and bought the single, and christmas that year I received the album. It was love from then onwards

[NotTrain]

For me, it was 2005, I was in Year 4 (Don't know what grade it is, sorry) and we had Golden Time, the most popular kid at school, Samuel, brought a CD for the class to listen to, it was American Idiot. He only played the song American Idiot and replayed it and replayed it. Most of the kids loved it for the word 'fuck' (Being 8 and 9, fuck was like the world) but to me the song hit a chord that no other band had ever done before.

I got home and nagged my mum to buy me American Idiot and she did. I skipped American Idiot and listened to Jesus of Suburbia. That first line shook me to my core. For the first time in my life, it really felt like someone else understood me and my life. And it kept getting better, Saint Jimmy was my alter-ego and the person I wanted to be, when the line 'The Jesus of Suburbia is a lie' entered my ears, I was shook again, but with a strange grief. The one person I thought I could relate to wasn't that person at all. Then Homecoming played. Well, that did it, even my alter-ego was dead. It was like I didn't know who I was any more. The two people that made me were gone. By Whatsername I was alone once again, to this day when I listen to American Idiot I go on that journey of self realisation and self destruction. I then listened to everything else by Green Day and became a massive Idiot.

I guess you could say that's my story

[Guest DisapppearingBoy]

AI was the one. But later i loved their early records.

[xLumian]

LOL, back in 2005 when I was 11 years old, my friend came up to me and said, "DUDE take a look at this song, they say fuck america in this". Little did I know that I would love this band

[PigSniffingGlue]

now LET ME TELL YA....

ok, it all started from this:

yes, surf's up, a cartoon movie about penguins (which I still like ) introduced me to Green Day for the first time (fuck yeah.) I heard Welcme to paradise in that movie when I was ..about 12 and I liked it a lot, I've spent hours trying to find it (it's not on the official soundtrack album) and it was the only song by them I knew, but somehow because of their looks I thought they were emo (silly me), I even remember telling my friend one time "have you seen I've posted a Green day song on facebook?? haha that's so weird but I liked one of their songs"

At age of 16, when I was listening to random songs on youtube, I saw a song called "Nice guys finish last", I put it on and was simply blown away by it's awesomeness, I was amazed by both the sound and the free, relatable lyrics. I got addicted to that song, was still weirded out that I like the "emo" Green Day, but I got curious and decided to check out another song by them..and another one.. and another one... and here I am

[Jean]

When I was 12, I saw the American Idiot video for the first time (so it was back in 2004) and had a major crush on Billie because of it. A few weeks later or so, I went to the Mac's Milk store in my town (it's like 7 Eleven) and bought a Teen People magazine because it had a tiny picture of him on the cover. I thought there was going to be a poster inside so I was disappointed when it turned out to be a small pic.

It was this one.

I had a bunk bed at the time so I just stuck the picture of him to the bottom of the top bunk so every time I went to bed, he was above me (embarrassing, I know...)

It was shortly after that, Green Day became HUGE and so I was hearing Boulevard of Broken Dreams everywhere and I loved that song so much. I was begging my parents to get me the CD (which they never did ) but around early 2005, I went to my little cousin's house (he was about 8 at the time) and he had the American Idiot album and let me borrow it. I instantly fell in love with the album. He didn't get it back until months later.

Later, around May, they did a concert about an hour away from where I live and a few kids I went to school with all went and I was so jealous. One kid is blind so he got to sit in the handicap area of the concert and his sister got Tre's autographed drumstick, which he brought to school and passed around. I got to hold it and it was like touching gold, I didn't want to let it go (but I did because I'm not one of those people who steals from the blind). I remember his name was written on it in green ink and there were chunks of wood missing from hitting the drums so hard.

Around June, my class went on a field trip to Niagara Falls and we were allowed to bring CD players and mp3 players with us. I brought my CD player with me and I noticed a girl on the bus brought hers and a CD case, which I asked to look at. I noticed inside she had International Superhits so I asked her if I could listen to it and she said yeah. She was one of the kids who were lucky to go to the concert. Anyways, I listened to it and it was like I knew every song without ever hearing them before. I knew Good Riddance (it was everywhere in 1997 and 1998 when I was a kid) but the rest I didn't. I became so obsessed with it and listened to it pretty much the whole way there.

It was then I got into all their older albums, starting with Dookie then Nimrod then the rest.

At school, I was known as the girl who loved Green Day. I had a bunch of posters on my walls thanks to teenybopper magazines. lol I even wrote a poem about how much I love Billie Joe. I vaguely remember it but I'm not going to repeat it now, it's awful and too embarrassing. I wrote it down and my friend found it and showed to everyone at school and was made fun of because of it. I ended up tearing the paper up and throwing it in the garbage in the school's bathroom.

After American Idiot, everyone at my school got over Green Day but I never did.

[jacknovella]

After American Idiot, everyone at my school got over Green Day but I never did.

This.

[Green333Day]

My first memory of Green Day I think was when I got in a record store and saw Warning, but at the time I didn't know who Green Day were. I just remember it 'cause I thought to myself that I tought I had heard of them and that they were good, but I really didn't know..so I walked a away and didn't think much more of it.. Stupid me!

It was only later when my younger sister discoverd American Idiot I really got to know who they were.. at the same time she also bought Dookie, so I some times feel Dookie was the first album I listened to.. anyway, the rest as they say is history and I now own every album myself!

[Jason Fox]

Oh lets see... when I was little(ish) in '04, my dad just bought American Idiot, and he would always drive me into school, I ended up learning about Green Day by listening to AI in the car. The funny thing is, later on my dad burned me a copy of AI, and at the time my sister liked Green Day, and I started to listen to them so much, It made her stop liking them. Of course, I don't see how that's possible, because the way I see it, there's no such thing as too much Green Day, not to be too cliche.

And then for my birthday my dad took me to the local record store, where he bought me Nimrod, which nowadays is my favorite album, by far (I even have the same copy I got all those years ago). And from there, I worked my back, and bought Dookie, Warning, Kerplunk, Insomniac, and then got 21st CB as it came out, and then you probably now the rest.

So GD is still my favorite band, and always will be, and I'm glad I heard their music when I was little.