A guide to Dookie's iconic cover, by the artist

[Trina]

Hey, not sure if this has been posted. Richie Bucher, the artist behind Dookie's cover gave a cool rundown of the different little references hidden throughout in honor of it's 20th anniversary.
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-22020-where’s_angu.html

"Where’s Angus? An annotated guide to the cover of Green Day’s Dookie.
Green Day’s Dookie turned 20 this month. With more than 20 million copies sold, it’s the best-selling punk-rock album of all time. It’s also probably the best-selling record illustrated entirely with colored pencil, and definitely the best-selling album with a cover featuring poop-throwing dogs, an American Gladiator or a Chia Pet.



The cover features a scene of shit-covered chaos on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue drawn by East Bay punk Richie Bucher. Bucher—who plays bass in a band called Courtney and the Crushers fronted by his girlfriend, Portland native Courtney Castleman—was connected to Green Day through its pre-Tré drummer and his work for the zine Absolutely Zippo.
“Their first drummer was John Kiffmeyer,” Bucher says. “My band Soup used to play with his old band a bunch. So when Green Day first came around, we said, ‘Oh, John’s new band! They’re supposed to be really good,’ and they were. Right away you could tell.”
The rest was left to Bucher.
“All I had to work with was that it was Green Day and the album was called Dookie,” he says. “I used to listen to the Kerplunk! album all the time, and the first two songs especially just sounded to me like a fighter plane swooping down. That was the way in for me, the anchor for building the rest of the drawing. They didn’t give me a lot of guidance, which was nice, and I just sketched out the basic design and brought it to them. Once they approved the sketch, I went back and fleshed it out with the crazy stuff in my head.”
Here, for the first time, Bucher talks about the illustration.



“That was from the Ramones’ record Rocket to Russia, drawn by John Holmstrom. Holmstrom was a cartoonist and magazine publisher, and he did a lot of artwork for the Ramones. I just wanted to give him a shout-out in there. ‘Eat at Chef Wong’s’ was on a T-shirt in the cartoon in the art from Rocket to Russia.”


Oil refineries in the Northeast Bay. “That’s where the Green Day guys are from. It’s just part of the landscape—and part of what I wanted to represent. Something we drove past every day…. It never would’ve occurred to me to have the Golden Gate Bridge or San Francisco in the background. I grew up in Berkeley going to San Francisco a lot, but it just wasn’t a part of what this record was about.”


Free Huey Newton. “More Berkeley shit. There was all kinds of political stuff around town. That kind of graffiti was pretty common. It was part of growing up on Telegraph Avenue. When you were in ninth grade, you had the Revolutionary Communist Party trying to recruit you.”


Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue. “It was there since the early ’50s and was kind of a hippie place. We used to hang out there in high school, smoke cigarettes and stuff. Supposedly, it’s the place where Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl, but I don’t know to what extent that’s true. But apparently he used to hang out there, too. It was that type of place.”


From the cover of Black Sabbath. “It’s a really spooky picture, a vaguely witchy Ozzy. That little snippet is a line from a song on that record.”


“Those dudes were a depiction of people who’d come to hang on Telegraph from the other suburbs. They pretty much all looked the same, with baseball caps and goatees.”


University of California Marching Band. “They were always marching around playing. I thought they were pretty great.”


Local photographer Murray Bowles. “He was a really fantastic photographer who’d take pictures of all the bands playing in the ’80s up until now. He had his own style of taking pictures: right in the pit, hold his camera up and just shoot. Really fucking awesome stuff.”


“The girls loosely represent girls in a band called Raooul.”


“Winchell’s Donuts on San Pablo, near Marin [Avenue], is where we used to go after shows. I just wanted to throw in a fat cop and somebody ripping him off, which was sort of a reference to this band the Rip Offs that used to play around that time. They were a garage band and they used to wear masks. I thought I’d throw a guitar on that guy and make him a Rip Off, specifically Jon Von.”


Twisted Dog Sisters was a group of teenage girls in Berkeley. “Not really a gang, but a group of girls who’d hang out on Telegraph.”


Angus Young, from the cover of Let There Be Rock. “That was stuff I was listening to at the time, probably while I was drawing this. That album cover was one of my favorites, so it’s a shout to that.”


Alex Chilton of Big Star.


Patti Smith from the cover of Easter.


The logo for the band Filth, drawn by Jesse Michaels. “They were punks from the East Bay. He’s got a brick, ready to throw.”


“My emblem, which I used to draw every day on my hand in high school because I was just fucking angry. A year or two later, it became part of the logo for my band Soup.”


You might recall having seen a larger version of the Dookie art, a poster-sized version that expounded upon the original scene. The original album cover wasn’t a cropped version of this, as it turns out. Rather, it was added by Bucher later at the request of Green Day’s record label.
“They had me do the cover first and then asked me to add on for a poster. I probably would’ve done it a little more cohesively if I had done it the opposite way around,” he says.
Here’s what the posted included.

• A bottle of Mad Dog bum wine. “Occasionally, yes, we would drink Mad Dog. But in the poster it was because of the dogs. I thought it was kinda clever.”

• The Hello Kitty Kitty cat. “I was in a band for a little while called Here Kitty Kitty—it was around that time, and I use to draw flyers and stuff for that band. That cat was sort of like an icon that I used for that band. The cat’s actually in a few different places on the cover. It was more throwing that in because it’s my own personal thing.”

• Lulu the snake and Keeton the cat. “That was my pet snake LuLu. She was pretty awesome and the cat was my roommate’s cat, his name was Keeton.”

• A Mercedes and a woman yelling at a man with a car phone cord around his neck. “A lot of the stuff—maybe half—is really specific and others is just cartoons I dreamed up. There’s no real story behind that except for hating yuppies and me making idiots out of them.”

• Santa and the streaking dunce. “I drew this around Christmas time—the record cover itself I finished in October of ‘93 and then they wanted me to add on for the poster so I was doing that during the Christmas months that year.

• Rick Star. “The guy singing ‘Moon River?’ His name was Rick Starr, he was a street performer.”

• The pig’s head from The Lord of the Flies.

• The guy in a tutu. “Berkeley was just kinda filled with freaks—awesome freaks. That wouldn’t be terribly unusual to see: some old balding white haired dude walking around in a tutu.”"

[iScottie]

Neat stuff!

[Travis.]

Oh hmm I thought the poster was the original artwork and the album was cropped

[Spike]

This is awesome! I always wondered who the photographer was. It's interesting that he talked about the extended version too. Thanks for sharing!

[Sarcasm]

I would have read this 8 years ago

[Clean Cut Asshole]

Thanks for sharing this, that was quite interesting.

[beejeezee]

Awesome!

[Heather.]

Wow, never spotted Patti Smith on there before!

[BeachBum]

Interesting read. Thanks for sharing!

[Karol Oliveira]

This is great! Thanks for sharing!

[Florence]

That's awesome! Thanks for posting!

[Cath]

wouah it was cool to read

[Pieces of Truth]

That's awesome! Thanks for posting!

Off topic, but can I just say that your sig is yet another masterpiece? Billie's head on Misha Collins. Jesus.

I would have read this 8 years ago

that's exactly what went thorugh my head when I saw this.

[Iva]

Thank you - I had figured some of these eons ago, but it was great to learn about the others.

[DookieLukie]

This is awesome! I always wondered who the photographer was. It's interesting that he talked about the extended version too. Thanks for sharing!

Extended version?

[Todd]

Extended version?

Did you even read the article?

[DookieLukie]

Did you even read the article?

Yes. I must have missed it...

Oh extended version of the cover. Gotcha.

[Pat1308]

Thanks for posting this. It was really interesting, learning all these references from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

[beejeezee]

I always wondered about those cats!