Random Green Day Thoughts

[That Dude]

3 hours ago, Mollyluna said:

That really changes but right now most of Kerplunk. As mentioned sometime ago, I‘m listening to the Green Dudes podcast and at the moment I‘m in their Kerplunk section…

As yes, the Green Dudes.  I still listen to those guys quite a bit - and got mentioned in one of their shows. I shouted them out in the comments section of the youtube video of the song they were going to be covering, and sure enough they saw it.   I don't remember what song it was, but yeah.  I'm in there somewhere.   

[jengd]

I like the Green Dudes podcasts but just never seem to have time to listen, they are quite long.

[Mollyluna]

1 hour ago, jengd said:

I like the Green Dudes podcasts but just never seem to have time to listen, they are quite long.

You could skip the first fifteen to twenty minutes. That’s usually some personal banter, funny but not concerning the song. AND I often listen to them while doing some boring housework. Makes this work much more enjoyable!

[Clockwise]

1 hour ago, jengd said:

I like the Green Dudes podcasts but just never seem to have time to listen, they are quite long.

 

37 minutes ago, Mollyluna said:

You could skip the first fifteen to twenty minutes. That’s usually some personal banter, funny but not concerning the song. AND I often listen to them while doing some boring housework. Makes this work much more enjoyable!

Highly encourage this for anyone who doesn't want to listen to our insane ramblings lol. Maybe I'll start adding timestamps to the episode descriptions. 

[pacejunkie punk]

4 hours ago, jengd said:

I like the Green Dudes podcasts but just never seem to have time to listen, they are quite long.

They speak slowly too so to help me focus I listen on 1.5x speed and that also saves time, it makes the episodes shorter. 

[Dingle]

9 hours ago, pacejunkie punk said:

They speak slowly too so to help me focus I listen on 1.5x speed and that also saves time, it makes the episodes shorter. 

Thanks for that. 1.5x is well better.

It's restored my sanity. lol.

They are very good though. Currently listening to Stuck With Me.

These GD podcasts are also available on Amazon Music.

[nowshesgone]

yknow i genuinely wonder at this point how well C&V would sell if we get it as a "fuck it release" sometime in the coming months

[Dingle]

After living through the release of another awesome GD record and witnessing another amazing live tour, my mind suddenly remembered another amazing album released not too long ago. No, not FOAM, but GD BBC Sessions released December 2021.  It consists of live recordings for the BBC from 1994 to 2001 held at the Maida Vale Studios in London as you know. There's nothing to compare seeing GD live and being there. But the next best thing is GD live in the studio. And I really love this one. Songs from Dookie, Insomniac, Nimrod and Warning. 16 tracks in all on the record. Although two other tracks from 1998 sessions, "One of My Lies" and "Scattered" where not included. But can be downloaded. You can almost feel you are there in the studio sensing the electric atmosphere and knowing that the band are really enjoying themselves. But the best way to explain and share this feeling is from an article from Steve Lamacq, which was part of an insert that came with the gatefold cover. This album is one of my most treasured GD records.

GREEN DAY – BBC Sessions

It’s really quite difficult now, given the phenomenal success they’ve achieved, to conjure up images of Green Day before they were famous. Mind you I do vaguely remember that they played an early London show in 1993 at the Dome, a vintage, dimly lit, boozer of a venue in the north of the capitol. The next day, I was sat in the offices of the music paper The New Musical Express when my friend and writer colleague, Simon Williams, arrived looking strangely unkempt muttering about what an odd morning he’d had. Williams lived in a slightly worn-out looking shared house with a collection of nurses, one of whom. Aidan, also happened to be in a Slint-style punk band called Joeyfat.

“I went to go to the kitchen, but the door to the front room wouldn’t open,” Williams opened. Turns out there was a band sleeping on the floor in there, wedged up against the door. Impressed by this, I asked who they were. “Oh, some of Aidan’s mates… I think they’re called Green Day?” Out of curiosity, I went out and bought the album Kerplunk and then repeatedly kicked myself for not having been to the gig.

Fast forward 18 months and I was rifling through the post at my new job, hosting a radio show called The Evening Session, when an envelope fell open revealing an advance cassette of an album called Dookie by the same Green Day. It was the record that would change everything. The record some of us had been waiting for.

The Evening Session was a two-hour show on the national pop station Radio 1, which sort to champion the ever-rising tide of alternative music from across an array of genres. Airing Monday to Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. – and at its height luring an audience of 2 million listeners a week – we’d already has success with the burgeoning Britpop bands of the time like Blur and Oasis and new urban artists Massive Attack and The Prodigy. The missing part of the jigsaw – especially as a former punk rock fanzine writer – was where American rock music would venture next, following the fractured implosion of the Grunge movement. The answer came in that envelope. Since The Dome, Green Day had returned to the UK a couple of times winning new friends on both occasions. They just needed the right record. Two days later I arrived back in the office waving the cassette in my producer’s face as if I’d invented penicillin or was declaring world peace, and pleaded with her to book Green Day for a session the next time they were in the UK.

Tucked away in a sleepy, but desirable North London back street, lies one of the most influential recording complexes in the world: the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios. A former indoor ice rink, the BBC had taken over the huge but anonymous looking building in the 1930s where it had primarily housed its classical orchestras until the launch of pop station Radio 1 in the 1960s. From then on, its seven studios played host to a who’s who of rock bands, with most of the biggest names in music recording there.  The Beatles, Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Joy Division, Nirvana…all of them, plus hundreds of others, has passed through the building on route to fame or obscurity. In fact, by the 80s and 90s, the “Maida Vale session” had become a rite of passage for any aspiring artist looking to promote a new record or unleash new songs onto the radio. Maida Vale became a kind of Holy Grail.

            Big or small the sessions followed the same routine. Load in late morning or lunchtime; set up and sound check. And then bash through four songs, which would be mixed at a casual sprint in the early evening – possibly interrupted by an excursion to the local pub, the Truscott Arms. It was here, to this grand, labyrinthine sprawl, that Green Day came for the first time in June 1994, to record their debut session for us.

            “I remember it was very much an old school session,” says the BBC’s Mita Adhikari, who produced their first appearance. “We recorded the songs live, followed by a few overdubs, hardly anything, and it was done. Although they were a very three-way unit, Billie Joe was definitely the unspoken leader. Tre liked to clown about, and Mike was the guy who was sort of serious, but everyone took notice of him when he spoke because he had a very dry acid wit.”

            Green Day, though no one probably knew it at the time, had found a new home away from home. The pace and spontaneity of the BBC sessions suited them perfectly. There is no time to muck about.

            Some bands struggle in the session environment; they hate being rushed and miss the gloss and sheen that a weeklong recording session gives them. Green Day, however, absolutely thrived, as you can hear on these recordings. They sound like you’re in a good rehearsal room with them; nosily intimate and unselfconscious.

            The first session was broadcast a full three months before Dookie was released, unveiling “Basket Case” and “She” to radio listeners for the first time. It went down a storm. The songs sounded infectious and impulsive, and the performance was just what you want a session to sound like; it was in the moment, yet still ultimately timeless.

            As soon as they were finished, they loaded their gear back in the van and went off to play London’s prestigious Astoria 2 later the same night. Buoyed by the first session, they returned to Maida Vale around the release of their next three albums. With no gig to play after the second session, they agreed to stay on and perform live to air for us later that night. Just to check that the transmission line to Maida Vale was working, I prefaded the studio, to hear them happily thrashing along to the records we were playing on the show before they came on.

            By the 90s, it was customary for bands to simply turn up and record their required four-song set. Green Day, though, brought back the spirit of the late 70s and early 80s John Peel sessions where artists would also use the free studio time to record or rehearse new tracks.

            During the second session, they played around with, in Billie Joe’s own words, “an unreleased song called ‘Good Riddance’,” while also admitting on air that they’d recorded but discarded a new song during their first session.

            ME: “Is it true that you recorded a song and then got the engineer to throw it away?”

            BILLIE JOE: “Yeah, he erased everything. But I found the title for the first song here… I went to the bathroom and saw the words ‘Armitage Shanks’ (famous UK urinal manufacturers) and that’s what we called it.”

            Interestingly, they didn’t record ‘Good Riddance’ for the Nimrod session, but did do a great version of ‘Nice Guys Finish Last,’ complete with the F-Word, which I’m surprised they got away with. Famously one inhouse engineer once lectured an up-and-coming Britpop band about the language they could use, revealing tersely: “Shit, OK. F---er… no good.”

            The final session, you’ll note, comes sometime after the album Warning was released. But there was a good reason for this. Off the back of Nimrod’s commercial success. Radio 1 decided to pitch in properly and we broadcasted the band’s low-key UK album launch gig at Kings College in London on September 14th, 2000 instead.

            We couldn’t not let them do a session though at some point. And I’m glad they came back. For one, it includes a terrific version of ‘Church On Sunday’ which sounds like a punk rock E-Street Band in full flow. And secondly, it would have been like having a photo album with four pages missing.

            Because hard though it is to remember Green Day before they were famous, these sessions are evocative first-hand reminders of some important moments in their career. They are wonderful, unedited, snapshots of the time.

 

-Steve Lamacq