Billie Joe Armstong's Rock Revolution - The Times - 30.10.16

[Rumpelstiltskin2000]

Billie Joe Armstrong’s rock revolution

After a drug-fuelled meltdown and a triple-album flop, Green Day are back to their riotous best

Dan Cairns

October 30 2016, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

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‘I hated that we had all this fat’: Billie Joe Armstrong on Green Day’s career wobble

There have been periods in Billie Joe Armstrong’s life when the location we meet in — a hidden-away hotel off Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip, beloved of the rock aristocracy, and the scene of many a lost weekend — would have been party central. The Green Day front man, now in recovery after problems with drink and substance abuse derailed the band in 2012, is an altogether calmer and more centred individual these days, turning his anger outwards after years where he directed it at himself.

Evidence of this can be heard on the trio’s blistering new album, Revolution Radio, which holds up a mirror to contemporary America in much the same way that their 2004 opus American Idiot did during the dark days of George W Bush’s presidency. The new album entered the charts here and in America at No 1, and the British leg of the band’s 2017 world tour sold out in minutes.

In the distance, a member of One Direction sits under a palm tree, his retinue spread out around him, signalling his status. Armstrong, by contrast, nestles in a booth at the back of the hotel’s deserted restaurant, and sips water. Images of music and film icons cover the walls. “The thing about addiction,” says the 44-year-old, “is that the only people who tend to empathise are addicts; and I say that as we’re sitting beneath a photograph of Robert Downey Jr.”

One of the endearing things about the singer is that he has rarely, if ever, seemed comfortable in his pop-superstar skin. When he, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool first broke out of Oakland, California and stormed the charts with Dookie in 1994, Armstrong played the role — pop-punk rabble-rouser for the disaffected, eyeliner, sexual ambiguity — with aplomb, but you always sensed an unease lurking beneath the performance. That sense only increased when American Idiot’s success thrust upon him the mantle of spokesman for a generation, the album’s conceptual, rock-opera takedown of venal politicians, opportunistic wars and ruthless corporations propelling it to sales of more than 15m copies. The band, he says, became almost like a corporation itself.

Realising the police have the power to do that stuff, I thought it was terrifying

“You get into the habit of going, ‘But this is Green Day. So we need a really big studio, we need to bring in such-and-such, we need the big ... force.’ That was the part of Green Day that I didn’t want any part of any more. I hated it, hated that we had all this fat. All of a sudden, you look round and go, ‘There are way too many people here.’”

The fat Armstrong refers to didn’t prevent the band from making their second, state-of-the-union rock opera, 21st Century Breakdown (2009), which returned them to the top of the charts. It was the hubristic decision, three years later, to stagger-release three albums — Uno, Dos and Tre — over a four-month period that confirmed fans’ worst fears. Then, of course, the wheels came off.

It could be a question in an existential pop parlour game: where do you go after your career-torpedoing triple album? Back to basics, that’s where. Which usually means: the label has pulled the plug, the artist is creatively numbed by antidepressants or the band can barely look each other in the eye but can’t think of anything else to do — or all three.

Thankfully, in Armstrong’s case it meant jumping off the gravy train and seeing where his impulses took him. He recorded a spare and beautiful Everly Brothers tribute album with Norah Jones; built a (tiny) studio in Oakland; wrote songs for, and acted in, a film. And he started looking around him again, rather than at his navel. Twelve years on from American Idiot, and seven since 21st Century Breakdown, the societal and cultural issues that had inspired him to write those albums were, he says, “worse, if anything, than ever”. His own response was to write, but what about his country’s?

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Fsundaytimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F74ccee82-9b74-11e6-9ade-40205ec87f4c.jpg?crop=2250,1500,-0,-0&resize=498 - photo here

Rabble rouser: Armstrong performing at Brixton Academy, London, in 1995HAYLEY MADDEN/REX/ SHUTTERSTOCK

“I do think that, with a lot of kids, it’s about escapism at the moment. They grew up in the Bush era — the Iraq War, Afghanistan, the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression. And now they’re in the middle of the biggest cultural divide that I’ve seen in my life. Yet, socially, America has come a long way. We have an African-American president, gay marriage has been legalised, we have transgender rights. Culturally, we’re moving towards the left.

“At the same time, with the working classes, there are a lot of people my age that are stuck in the industrial era, where the attitude is, ‘I want to go in there, punch in, do my f****** job, go home to my family, drink beer, play poker with my friends.’ But with technology advancing so rapidly, there’s a new way of looking at jobs that normal working-class people just don’t get.”

And into that chasm walks Trump? “Exactly. You have this guy coming along and saying, ‘The boogie man is coming for your jobs,’ and, well, you can understand why people might believe him — even though he’s completely psychotic. It’s a form of mass manipulation, trying to target the last angry white man. I can’t believe that there’s a big disagreement when it comes to racism, or sexism, or sexual assault — now, here in 2016.”

Armstrong is confident, almost convinced, that, nine days from now, Trump will be vanquished. But it’s what happens after that, he counsels, that requires the same sort of vigilance and should induce a similar degree of fear. “He’s got so much shady shit up his sleeve right now. What I think is going to happen is that, because he’s got that Breitbart guy [from the conservative news site], and he’s got Roger Ailes [former boss of Fox News], they’re going to start a right-wing network — so far to the right, a new white nationalist party. Trust me, there’s more to come.”

Armstrong resists the notion that Revolution Radio can be seen as a sequel to American Idiot, though it does, unquestionably, see a reawakening of his anger. “Look, I wrote [the key early Green Day song] Welcome to Paradise when I was 18. I’d just moved out of my mum’s house into a squat, and that was a reality check for me. So I reflected that — what it was like living on the streets, in this broken community. But at the time I didn’t know that was what I was doing. And with this album, it comes from the same sort of place, that sense of, ‘Where am I in all of this mess?’ It’s about that confusion.

“Besides, Bush wasn’t necessarily the American Idiot, it was more a feeling of, ‘I don’t want to be part of this idiocracy.’ There was a lot of it around, but there’s a lot more of it now. If you reflect on what’s going on, watching this almost military state, with tanks and tear gas, and this is just the police, and realising they have the power to jump into any community and do that stuff, I just thought it was so terrifying, it had to be written about. You know, ‘Has this become so common that it can happen anywhere?’ And the answer is, ‘Yes, it can.’”

So, no chance of pipe-and-slippers complacency just yet? “That’s the thing about getting older I’m fighting the most,” he laughs. “I’ll take the rest of it, that’s fine. I still don’t know what the f*** is going on. That’s where I’m coming from.”

Revolution Radio is out now on Reprise/Warner Music

[stories and songs]

1 hour ago, basketcase4933 said:

“The thing about addiction,” says the 44-year-old, “is that the only people who tend to empathise are addicts; and I say that as we’re sitting beneath a photograph of Robert Downey Jr.”

Even unrelated to Billie's struggles, it makes me so sad that addiction has such a stigma attached to it. A lot of wonderful people struggle with this disease. My grandmother was a recovering alcoholic and she was my favorite person in the world. I just hate that people think of addicts as just being careless or selfish, when mentally it is so much more consuming than that. I can remember when it first came out that Billie was going to rehab, my dad (who likes Green Day) was like, "He's too old to be doing this stuff" and I was heartbroken that he wasn't more sympathetic. I've always been understanding toward these issues (especially given my own experience with anxiety, which I imagine can be a pretty nasty cocktail when mixed with drug or alcohol abuse), but I think Billie's problems with it have definitely amplified that. 

Anyway, end rant. I adore this dude. Thanks for sharing!

[BilIie Joe Armstrong]

2 hours ago, stories and songs said:

Even unrelated to Billie's struggles, it makes me so sad that addiction has such a stigma attached to it. A lot of wonderful people struggle with this disease. My grandmother was a recovering alcoholic and she was my favorite person in the world. I just hate that people think of addicts as just being careless or selfish, when mentally it is so much more consuming than that. I can remember when it first came out that Billie was going to rehab, my dad (who likes Green Day) was like, "He's too old to be doing this stuff" and I was heartbroken that he wasn't more sympathetic. I've always been understanding toward these issues (especially given my own experience with anxiety, which I imagine can be a pretty nasty cocktail when mixed with drug or alcohol abuse), but I think Billie's problems with it have definitely amplified that. 

Anyway, end rant. I adore this dude. Thanks for sharing!

Yeah, there's a huge stigma attached to it. Mom actually would refer to him as "that drunk" for quite some time. It wasn't until a few months ago that she started using his name. It's kind of surprising that so many people associate addiction with being dumb/white trash/being a shit person in general and automatically condemn it when so many people who actually acomplished a lot had that desease.

I agree this was a great article. 

[UNICORN VOMIT]

Robert Downey Jr & Billie Joe Armstrong

[BilIie Joe Armstrong]

2 minutes ago, Tinkle said:

Robert Downey Jr & Billie Joe Armstrong

Sound good, right?!

[UNICORN VOMIT]

1 minute ago, Jane Lannister said:

Sound good, right?!

Perfect actually.

[MaraGreenDay]

Nice interview. Love the mention of RDJ, not just cause I also love him so much lol, but even more cause since Billie went to rehab and after how he had said that he's been sober for 4 years, I keep thinking about RDJ, he's been clean for more than 10 years, he's acting career it's better than ever and he looks so good and that makes me very happy, so I really hope that, in a few years, we can still say the same thing about Billie 

[Grinch]

link to original article: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/billie-joe-armstrongs-rock-revolution-fqr8dhjdn

edit: you do have to register to see it I guess but still didn't expect the entire article to be posted in here