by Marc Spitz
Once you cross over into Old Rodeo, however, you get the eerie feeling that things have not changed in decades. It’s very much a small town with one Chinese restaurant, one liquor store, a taxidermist, a bait shop, and many ball fields (one road sign informs visitors they’ve entered “Baseball Town U.S.A.”). There are no real yards to divide each small, stucco home. The sun seems to hang lower and heavier than anywhere else on the map, and you can taste chemicals in the air. Drive a little farther past the Carquinez Bridge and you will soon see why. In the distance, about a mile and a half from the fields where the kids play, is a vast block of towering stacks. Oil refineries that turn crude oil into gas and diesel fuel twenty-four hours a day shoot smoke into the air. “Refinery Row,” the residents call it, and its proximity to the residential area may seem normal to them at this point, but it’s shocking to people who visit from San Francisco (or anywhere really). “They have to refine oil somewhere,” one reasons. They do it here.
“When we were young, and we’d be driving home from someplace, the refineries would be right there and we’d go, ’Oh, look at Disneyland,’” jokes Anna. “It was killing us, but we didn’t think about it.”
Armstrong, of course, got out of Rodeo—pronounced row-day-o, not like the bronco riding competitions for which the town was originally named. But there’s still some Rodeo in him. “It’s like I am those refineries,” he once told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I am the suburbs.”
Rodeo’s size and limitations wouldn’t matter for years, of course. Discounting the compromised oxygen, it was as fulfilling a place as any for a child to grow up.
Billie Joe Armstrong, born February 17, 1972, in Oakland, was by all accounts an adorable child.
“He was real cute,” concurs his older brother David. “Long, curly hair. Girls loved him. My sister’s girlfriends just adored him. Even as a kid he had a lot of charisma.”
Billie Joe was the youngest of Andy and Ollie Armstrong’s five children (in addition to David and Anna, there was older sisters Holly and Marci, and older brother Allen, who at twenty-two had already moved out of the house by the time Billie Joe was born).
Both parents came from remarkably large families, so the Armstrong brood didn’t seem at all odd. “My mom is one of twelve kids,” Anna says. “My father was one of eight. So there are a lot of aunts and uncles, and I think at this point twenty-three or twenty-four grandkids. Big family gatherings.”
Ollie was a part-time waitress at local eateries like A Place at the Point in nearby Richmond and later Rod’s Hickory Pit in addition to being a homemaker. She was already used to the work required to run such a substantial home. She arrived in California by train as a teenager in the late forties (by way of Sperry, Oklahoma) after her father (who arrived on horseback) settled and sent for her and her mother. By the time her youngest, with his cherubic face and mischievous smile full of crooked teeth, began walking and talking, she considered herself semiretired when it came to discipline. “My mom got less and less strict with each kid,” Armstrong told the Alternative Press.
Andy, a bearish former boxer, was born and raised in Berkeley. He was an amateur jazz drummer, and met Ollie during one of his sporadic gigs. They shared a love of music and dancing. Like his soon-to-be bride, however, Andy knew what it was like to work hard with little relief. “My father had been driving trucks since the fifties. Cement trucks, any kind of truck,” David remembers. Andy had found steady employment driving big rigs for the Safeway grocery chain, and when the family settled into a three-bedroom house in the Rodeo suburbs, after stints in Fairfield and Richmond, they were enjoying a more or less middle-class existence (the real estate cost around 70,000 dollars at the time, and remains to this day, the Armstrong family house).
Although Billie Joe and his brother David shared a pair of bunk beds, and Anna and her sisters shared their one bedroom (prompting not a few fights), life in Rodeo was comfortable for the close-knit Armstrongs. “I never remember us struggling for money,” David says. “We always had what we wanted. My dad would have to go on an overnight every couple of weeks, but he was home mostly every night.”
The family wasn’t especially political, nor were they religious. “My dad was Catholic,” Billie Joe says, “and my mom was, I don’t know. Some kind of Christian. It was never really forced on us.” Music, however, was a different story. While Andy had his modern jazz favorites, Ollie was a serious fan of classic country music like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline (as well as some modern classicists like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson). Andy’s drum kit had a permanent space in the family sitting room. “Unless my dad was playing a gig somewhere,” David says, “then he’d take it apart and take it with him. But he’d always set it right back up when he was done. Me and Billie learned how to play drums early.” Once they were old enough, the children were encouraged to structure some of that free-form expression.
Fiatarone’s was, and still is, the local music shop, run by Marie Louise Fiatarone and her husband Jim. Jim Fiatarone (now deceased) was the first person outside the family to notice that Billie Joe Armstrong was special and the first ever to preserve it on vinyl.
“Billie Joe’s mother brought him and [two of his sisters] in because she was signing them up for piano lessons,” Marie Louise recalls. “Jim took one look at him and said, ’He looks like he really belongs in show business. Why don’t you take him in the studio and see if he can sing.’ ” Marie Louise, always one to encourage young talent, asked Billie Joe if he would be interested in singing for her. The response was quick and affirmative, as if he’d been waiting to perform outside of the family living room. When Fiatarone sat Billie Joe down in the back room and lead him through some rudimentary standards, she was shocked by the results.
“We did ’He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,’ ” Fiatarone remembers. “And he could just move and change keys and sing right on pitch. This is very rare. It’s rare for boys particularly because they don’t listen as well as girls do.”
David Armstrong remembers the formative event a little differently [Fiatarone might have politely blocked him out of her memory]. “We all went in that day.” He laughs. “All us kids, and they put us all in the room together to sing. And I got pulled out. Billie was obviously the singer in the family. Right from day one. Mrs. Fiatarone took to him right away.”
Ollie Armstrong was proud that her son’s abilities were recognized by these professionals and happily signed Billie Joe up for singing lessons at Fiatarone’s, as well as piano lessons, once a week. The cost might have been prohibitive had Mr. Fiatarone not suggested a way for the two families to help each other out. Fiatarone’s was something of an indie record label as well, and Jim Fiatarone was its chief producer, songwriter, and distributor. He’d previously released a single called “Make My World Beautiful,” a self-penned original, interpreted by a Japanese singing star named Yukiko.
“My husband thought it would be a great idea for this little guy to sing the new song that we wrote,” Fiatarone says. “We took him to Fantasy Studios [in Berkeley]. And he just put the earphones on and we did it right there. My son Jim played guitar, and I played keyboards.” (Armstrong obviously did not know it at the time, but he would record Dookie in that very building sixteen years later.)
Although nearly impossible to find (an eBay copy will set you back at least fifteen hundred dollars), Armstrong’s “debut” single, a vinyl 45 with a print run of only 800 copies, was a pleasingly bouncy bit of sunshine pop called “Look for Love.” Armstrong’s adenoidal tone reminds the listener of the young Donnie Osmond: not exactly soulful but certainly dead on pitch. The B-side is a patient and sweet interview with the eager, and very young song stylist.
JIM FIATARONE: Billie Joe, you’ve just made your first record. How does it feel?
BILLIE JOE: Um . . . wonderful!
You can hear a sampling of the interview at the beginning of Green Day’s 2001 International Superhits! CD. In the age of Fleetwood Mac and Elton John, “Loo
k for Love” didn’t change the pop landscape forever. It did, however, earn Armstrong his first bit of press: a 500-word item in the local newspaper, titled “Billie Joe Armstrong, 5, Might Be on His Way to the Top.” A nifty partnership with the Fiatarones also ensued. Armstrong was entered into dozens of regional songwriting contests.
“I would do the background cassettes he’d use,” Fiatarone recalls. “He’d sing a lot of Broadway show tunes. George M. Cohan. We did the theme to ’New York, New York’ once.”
Armstrong’s knack for live performance inspired his father, and soon the pair were touring convalescent homes and Shriners Hospitals across Northern California, putting on monthly feel-good pageants for the elderly and infirm. Billie Joe sang, Andy Armstrong played drums, and the Fiatarones and their other students filled in on everything else. “I learned a lot about how to be onstage,” Armstrong says. “[Since then] I’ve always looked at it like I’m a showman.”
“The older ladies just absolutely loved him,” Fiatarone confirms. “He’d go out and shake hands with them and talk to them. For a while, I think there was a little concern that this image doesn’t go with his current image. But when you’re five it’s another story.”
“He was like Shirley Temple,” Anna says. “He definitely had a presence about him at that age, where he could go onstage and sing and it wasn’t cheesy. He came off very naturally and relaxed. It wasn’t this idea of ’Let’s have a famous kid’ or anything. Like [Mouseketeer-era] Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake. It was more of a fun thing for him to do, working with our dad.”
Billie Joe’s parents purchased a cherry-red Hohner guitar for him when he was seven, and the near-prodigy proved as equally quick a study with it as he had been with his vocal scales and tones. The remainder of the seventies were idyllic years for the Armstrongs. The eighties would be difficult. Billie Joe’s approach to music was passionate, but it also befit his youth and essentially happy-go-lucky air. He was a vessel, an entertainer. By late spring of 1982, however, he would begin to turn this energy inward in an effort to make sense of new and troubling emotions: confusion, anger, loss.
Andy Armstrong had always been physically strong. He was rarely sick, but he’d been feeling ill. After a trip to the doctor and a battery of tests, he was informed that he was suffering from esophageal cancer. The shock was extreme. The prognosis was poor. The family gathered around the kitchen table one night and Andy broke the news to them in a voice choked with sadness and fear. He was only fifty-one.
“We were all just shell-shocked,” Anna says. “Our whole lives just ended at that point, and a new life started for us.”
The reality of it all was almost inconceivable for the entire family but especially so for ten-year-old Billie Joe, who had been habitually sheltered by his parents and older siblings. This was something from which they could not protect him, and as Andy lost weight and strength, Billie Joe felt increasingly helpless. He couldn’t make this go away with a song and a charming smile.
“My dad said on his deathbed, ’Make sure you take care of Billie Joe,’” David recalls. ” ’Cause he was the youngest. And the creative one. After that I became the bug catcher. Whenever there was a spider in the house, my sister or my mother would run to me.” Indulging Billie simply because he was cute ceased as well. For a time, anyway, David assumed the role of strict (albeit still teenaged) disciplinarian. “I was hard on him,” he admits, “but it was because I was worried about him. I thought I was his father.”
Andy passed away on September 1, 1982, just four months after being diagnosed. During the funeral, Billie Joe broke down in tears.
“It changed him,” Anna observes. “It touched him in a way that made him become different. When I think about Billie in that time, I have an image and that was at the actual funeral. We were at the cemetery and he kissed a flower and he laid it on my father’s casket.”
The family went about mourning in their own ways. Ollie went from part- to full-time shifts at Rod’s Hickory Pit. “The whole dynamic of the family changed,” Anna says. “I think it was overwhelming for her. Her way of dealing with anything was, and is to this day, to work. To stay busy. And I think that kept her out of the house and allowed her to in some ways avoid what her children were going through. In a lot of ways, all of us kind of had to go through that grieving and mourning by ourselves. We didn’t necessarily know how to be with each other during that time. We didn’t know how to help each other, or support each other, because it was all just so foreign and strange.”
Billie Joe dealt with Ollie’s absence by assisting the family with laundry and dishwashing duties. He coped with the loss of his father by traveling deeper and deeper into the exploration of the one thing that made him feel strong and capable when so many situations around him now seemed foreign and frightening: music. By 1982, MTV, which had launched the previous year, was in thousands of California homes, including the Armstrongs’. Billie Joe would sit for hours in front of the television set with his brothers and sisters, trying to handicap which video would be selected next from the cable channel’s then paltry library: Rod Stewart or Duran Duran? Pat Benatar or Loverboy? Music videos excited him, but the Beatles records his older brother Allen handed down around this time obsessed, inspired, and healed him. “It all sort of happened at the same time of my father dying,” Anna says. “Not too many fifth-graders were writing songs. He really started exploring that part of himself, and creating his own music.”
Local guitar teacher George Cole picked up where the Fiatarones left off when it came to focusing Billie Joe’s raw ability without resorting to the kind of overbearing strictness that discourages many pupils from continuing their music studies. At first Billie Joe resisted learning music theory, and preferred to jam or play the Beatles songs that comforted him in his bunk bed. He could render these nearly exactly and by ear. To this day, they remain his favorite group, and their influence on Green Day, although not overt, is consistent and strong. Like the Fab Four, he held great reverence for classic pop-song structure. And also like John, Paul, George, and Ringo, he couldn’t (and wouldn’t) read a note. He didn’t even know how to write out the new songs that were coming into his head. Songs that took these thick, indelible Lennon/McCartney (and sometimes John/Taupin) melodies and adapted them, slightly, into something new and exclusive. Fortunately Cole had an easy shorthand with his student, not to mention a patient air. When Billie Joe presented Cole with the new Van Halen album Diver Down, Cole taught him how to approximate already iconic guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s hammer technique. Van Halen, with David Lee Roth’s enviable swagger (if you’re ten, anyway) and Eddie Van Halen’s awe-inspiring technical proficiency, would prove to be another great influence. Unlikely, if you employ some hindsight, but Green Day’s confidence in their musicianship and ability to make three-chord punk songs much, much bigger than they actually are, begins with Ed and Diamond Dave. Cole and Billie Joe would frequently spend afternoons jamming together, free-form style, with the teacher winging off as many odd notes as his pupil. Cole’s guitar was a powder-blue Fernandez Stratocaster (an expertly constructed copy of the famous—and much more expensive—Fender Stratocaster, played most famously by Jimi Hendrix).
Armstrong fetishized his teacher’s guitar, partly because the blue instrument had a sound quality and Van Halen–worthy fluidity he couldn’t get from his little red Hohner. He prized it mostly, however, because of his relationship with Cole, another father figure after the death of Andy. He let his obsession with the guitar, which he simply called “Blue,” be known to his family. Noticing how happy and alive the lessons with Cole made the still-grieving boy feel, Ollie made arrangements to purchase “Blue” from Cole as an early Christmas gift.
“I don’t know how my mom did it, but she got the money together and bought ’Blue’ from George,” David Armstrong recalls. “At that time we were struggling, and the three or four hundred dollars that it cost wasn’t money she just had sitting around.” Ollie’s investment has
since paid off, of course. “Blue” has appeared on every Green Day record and has been repaired and restored an incalculable number of times. When bands today try—and fail—to achieve that Green Day guitar sound, at once clean and, somewhere in the tone, a little broken and raw, what they’re missing is “Blue” running through their Marshall amps.
Armstrong would soon draw even more post-tragedy comfort from an unlikier source.
Eleven-year-old Michael Ryan Pritchard, with his scrawny limbs, goofy grin, and blond bowl-cut hair, could barely cross a hall without injuring himself. He seemed to be one of those kids just wired for trouble, the kind who would find the one unchecked glass filled with staining liquid and knock it over with what seemed like radar-guided precision. Pritchard hardly possessed a set of clothes that fit, much less the solidity needed to fill the void left by the death of a parent, but he could make Armstrong laugh until his jaws ached. He and Billie Joe became instant friends that winter after meeting at Carquinez Middle School. During every lunch hour, the two bonded over music. Pritchard was into Van Halen, but turned Armstrong on to even darker hard rock, like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.
The friends bonded over sadness as well. Born in Oakland, on May 4, 1972, Pritchard was given up by his birth mother, a Native American woman with a heroin addiction. At six weeks old, he was placed with Cheryl Nasser and Patrick Pritchard, registered foster care parents who lived in El Sobrante, a suburb about five miles from Rodeo.
As Armstrong’s was, Pritchard’s early childhood was untroubled. Sharp and pointed, he excelled in school, despite frequently missing classes due to the various illnesses that may have been a result of his birth mother’s condition.
