Green Day: Best New Band
Not long after Green Day played Woodstock ’94 – a performance that scored the band mass adulation – singer Billie Joe Armstrong received a letter from his mother.
“It was a hate letter,” says Armstrong.
It seems Mrs. Armstrong ordered the concert on pay-per-view and had settled in to watch the event with a friend. That’s when the melee occurred. Onstage, the Green Day set culminated in a titanic mud fight; Armstrong yanked down his pants; and bassist Mike Dirnt had his front teeth smashed when he was tackled by a security guard who thought he was a fan storming the stage. Finally a mud-covered Armstrong asked the fans to shout, “Shut the fuck up,” and the band exited.
Photos: A Look Back at Green Day’s Career
“She said that I was disrespectful and indecent,” says Armstrong, “and that if my father was alive, he would be ashamed of me. She couldn’t believe that I pulled my pants down and got in a fight onstage.
“Everything’s fine now, but her letter was just unreal. She was not happy with my performance at all. She even talked shit about my wife, Adrienne, and said how she’s supposed to be my loving wife, but she’s never even come over and visited.”
He pauses.
“It was pretty brutal.”
Billie Joe Armstrong is not a tidy man. It’s late in the band’s never-ending tour, an entire season since Woodstock, and Armstrong is holed up in Los Angeles for a three-night stand. He is standing in the doorway of his hotel room – a landfill of dirty laundry and the occasional empty – talking excitedly. He is small and appears even younger than you would expect – more like a character out of Oliver Twist than like a 6-year veteran of the rock circuit. As he speaks, his eyes continually grow wider.
Armstrong leads his guest into the chamber like a kid hurrying to get to the front of a line. Across the room, Adrienne is lying in bed, wearing a pair of boxers and a bra. Destination complete. Her husband kneels next to her and rests his ear on her stomach. “Come on over here,” he says, flashing his visitor a jagged smile. “Listen to the baby.” Adrienne hoists herself up on her elbows and thrusts her stomach out. “We’ve been lying here all day,” she says. “We’ve just been watching him move.”
The him in question is the future Joey Armstrong, the son that will be born to Billie Joe and Adrienne sometime in March. It is Joey’s impending arrival along with that of Ramona, the daughter that will be born to drummer Tré Cool and his girlfriend, Lisea, in January – that stands as the most life-altering event in a year that has seen the lives of the Green Day members forever altered. Just when you thought nothing could be stranger than three American kids who look and sound like they should be railing against Queen Elizabeth, circa 1977, being named 1994’s Best New Band by both readers and critics – not punk rock but a remarkable simulation – the very same kids are having kids.
All three band members are 22, and sometimes it seems more like they’re 17. Bodily functions, for instance, are seen as a laugh riot. At the same time, having spent the last five years touring, they can seem world-weary and savvy. When they are together, which is almost always, they fall into roles. Tré keeps a running, hyperkinetic commentary on all proceedings, replete with the appropriate dudes and mans of the native California skate punk in its natural habitat.
Dirnt, the one Green Day constituent not to have gone forth and multiplied, vacillates between being the voice of reason and nervous comic relief. In one moment he seems like a young man on a job interview, trying desperately to appear serious. The next he is the same kid, unable to contain himself and making sound effects in the back of the classroom. Armstrong, while he remains mostly silent, is nonetheless always the center of attention. Offstage he is quiet, projecting the shyness of a kid on his first day at a new school. He laughs easily, mostly with his band mates, but will then quickly grow solemn. Still, for all his adolescent sheepishness, Armstrong retains a subtle charm that is as omnipresent as his stage demeanor is over the top.
Despite Green Day’s snarling image, all are unfailingly polite and likable. “There’s nice guys trying to be assholes and assholes trying to be nice guys,” says Armstrong. “I’m an asshole trying to be a nice guy.” All came to the punk life out of an early feeling of isolation, and all possess attention spans so short they have probably already stopped reading this sentence. The line between band and audience is blurry at best.
“I don’t want to grow up too fast,” says Armstrong. “And I don’t think having a kid and being married means that has to happen. My biggest fear is becoming domestic. It seems like when people get married, they don’t have fun anymore. I totally want to walk around the streets with Adrienne. We like to Dumpster dive. That’s the funnest thing in the world.”
Ah, to be young and all the world’s your Dumpster. It is precisely this attitude – exercising your right to be immature – that has captivated the more than 3 million fans that have snatched up Dookie, the band’s major-label debut. Green Day are the nation’s favorite cartoon characters. And like every great cartoon, the band has it all: exaggerated insanity, video images in brilliant, primary colors and an underlying unexplainable innocence. Not to mention the sheer speed and ferocity of the Green Day pop experience. From Dookie‘s opening chord, the band sets an exhausting pace and pop-punk tone that never wavers. And embedded in the breakneck noise are lyrics that talk about mass destruction (“Having a Blast”), self-loathing and insanity (“Basket Case”) and hatred of the elder class (“Burnout”). It’s a parent’s nightmare. Which is, of course, a teen-ager’s dream.
“I blow things out of proportion,” says Armstrong. “When you dwell on something for a really long time, that happens. Say you hate somebody, and you sit and think about every single possible way that you could kill them. You’re like ‘I fuckin’ hate ’em, I fuckin’ hate ’em.’ That’s what I like to write about. Blow it out of proportion and then come back to it later and think, ‘That’s kind of silly.’ It’s a good way to get over it fast.”
The irony of the Green Day revolution is that the songs on Dookie sound exactly like the tunes on 1990’s 39/Smooth and 1992’s Kerplunk, the group’s first two albums on Lookout! Records, a small Berkeley, Calif. indie label. It’s just that Dookie has sold approximately 2.95 million more copies than the first pair combined. Even stranger is the fact that Dookie‘s first single, “Longview,” was an ode to two time-honored but none-too-marketable standbys: apathy and masturbation. Lost amid the overanalysis, however, is the fact that every selection in the Green Day catalog, despite the snotty exterior, contains a heart that is unapologetically catchy and ripe with addictive melodies and naive harmonies.
So now, since the release of Dookie, the band members have gone from living together in the basement of a student-dominated Victorian home just one block from the pristine entrance to the University of California, Berkeley – the very same dungeon shown in the “Longview” video – to being triple-platinum rock stars in a day and age in which the idea of rock stardom is seen as the equivalent of selling out or martyrdom or both, if only to rock stars themselves.
“I’m not going to say that I don’t want to be a rock star,” says Armstrong. “If you don’t want to be a rock star, then quit. That’s your best answer. Don’t be one. But if I was to do it again, I’d do it differently. I want to try and make some sense of all this and not become a parody of myself. I never really thought that being obnoxious would get me to where I am right now. When I play, I’m not a nice guy. You know when you get really drunk and it’s like this person inside you that wants to come out and be obnoxious? It’s kind of the same thing. And then people like you for it.” He smiles and shakes his head. “I don’t get that.”
Not that Green Day walk through this world showered in love and devotion. If they attempted to go home to the small club scene that spawned them, it’s a fair bet that the prodigal sons would be pelted with rocks and garbage. Even during their tenure in Berkeley, the band was often chastised in Maximumrocknroll – the bible of everything Punk Correct in the Bay Area – for being too pop based. In these circles, and among purists nationwide, Green Day are accused of playing the kind of punk rock that could probably be purchased at the Gap.
“There’s punks who know where we came from, and then there’s the people whose rich parents pay for them to be degenerates,” says Dirnt of his band’s detractors. “They feel it’s all right to feed us shit. It’s funny how PC people can be when they have money. We got these fliers that said, TELL GREEN DAY TO FUCK OFF FOR BRINGING MTV INTO OUR SCENE. I’ve never seen one TV in the punk clubs we’ve played. I think your mother and father need to take your cable away, is what they need to do.”
Green Day: Best New Band, Page 1 of 4