by Marc Spitz
Kiffmeyer’s stage name was Al Sobrante, a winking alteration of El Sobrante, the suburban town where he lived, as had Pritchard and his mother. Nobody called him John. At Gilman, and everywhere else really, he was “Al.”
“I met Al in fuckin’ soccer camp, when I was like nine or ten or something,” remembers Jeff Ott of Crimpshrine. “I was a weird kid, but when I met him I was like ’whoa, this kid’s really weird.’ He was just super intense about trivial, unimportant or bizarre things or just whatever. He was just like really overly enthusiastic about anything he was talking about all the time. And he was just kind of odd in that way. Really eccentric.”
From the moment he joined, the high-strung, fast-talking Kiffmeyer considered himself to be the band’s leader and used his age and hard-core credibility as a means of asserting his control. “Al’s was a very type-A personality,” recalls Patrick Hynes, a future employee at Lookout Records, although he was just nineteen years old. “He had to be in charge.”
Kiffmeyer, it should probably be noted, was contacted several times with interview proposals for this book and declined to participate—at least we assume so since he didn’t answer any of the e-mails we sent. For what it’s worth, Green Day doesn’t discuss him either.
“John deserves a lot of credit for getting [Sweet Children] out of the garage,” current road manager Bill Schneider (then a member of Gilman punks Monsula) stresses. “Isocracy had been a very popular band. Their shows at Gilman would sell out, and they’d be the best party you could go to. They were already a really big band at the time but I think John knew, ’Wow these guys have something.’”
Still, Kiffmeyer’s personality caused friction between the two unlikely matched parties. Armstrong, who considered himself the band’s leader, let it slide at first since Kiffmeyer’s membership nearly guaranteed them that coveted Gilman slot. Without him, Sweet Children were considered overly soft and young. With Kiffmeyer behind the drum kit, they became an interesting amalgam, with Isocracy’s built-in fan base.
“That’s when I first heard of them,” says Christopher Appelgren, the current president of Lookout Records (and, at the time, sixteen-year-old Gilman-er). “There was a certain kind of social hierarchy, and all these people were really young in the Berkeley Gilman scene. John took Sweet Children from being these kinds of kids who maybe sort of hung out at Gilman the same way a lot of us did to actually being a real part of the scene.”
Kiffmeyer influenced Billie Joe and Mike more in terms of punk ethics than musicality, which was natural at this point for the pair. He taught them to be fair and up front and brutally honest in their business dealings. Sweet Children would draw up a Xeroxed contract that they would send to people before shows. This was virtually unheard of on the local, small-time punk scene at the time. “It was a ’this is not a contract contract,’ ” Appelgren says, clarifying. “When they’d tour they’d be prepared. ’This is what we would like, if you have any food or beer, or if you can help us out with a place to stay, that would be great. We’re asking for, but not requesting, at least $100.’ Once they started playing, it was John who showed them how to deal with stuff like that. He played the dad role a little bit.”
Sweet Children finally got their shot and landed at the bottom of a Gilman bill headlined by a bigger local act named Neurosis over the Thanksgiving holiday of 1988. Armstrong, Pritchard, and Kiffmeyer played a warm-up show at the restaurant where Billie Joe’s mother worked, Rod’s Hickory Pit—attended mostly by Armstrong’s morally supportive family.
“It was definitely more of a family thing,” David Armstrong recalls. “But the crowd was big. My mom had thirteen brothers and sisters. There were maybe a handful of punks there.”
Their Gilman set was short and fast: a selection of originals, including “Sweet Children,” “Strangeland,” and “The Best Thing in Town,” and covers like “Johnny B. Goode” and The Who’s “My Generation.” The gravity of the moment got the better of Armstrong that night. He was all but mum throughout the set. Fortunately, Kiffmeyer provided shtick and drum fills.
“I was at Sweet Children’s very first Gilman show,” Portman recalls. “And I thought their drummer talked too much. Giving the drummer a mic is never a good idea. I remember thinking they were good. They were a garage band, but they clearly had one thing [that set them apart from] a lot of punk bands: They could actually play their instruments. That was certainly rare in my experience. They were schlumpy, kind of dressed down, almost hippie kids. Scruffy, unkempt kids, but they had their act together.”
“Compared with a lot of bands, they sort of made an instant name for themselves because everyone was surprised by how young they were. And because their music was on the polished side. They sang harmony, which was totally unusual,” Jeff Ott says.
Sergie Loobkoff of Samiam, yet another beloved Berkeley cult act, tends to agree with Portman and Ott’s descriptions. “I thought they sounded like REO Speedwagon,” he says, laughing.
The Gilman set was well received and led to various house party slots. Armstrong, encouraged by the reaction to their first real gig, focused 100 percent of his energies on the band. He informed his mom that he would not be completing his senior year of high school. Pritchard remained enrolled. Armstrong was one day shy of eighteen. By the following morning, he’d no longer be a minor. The decision was all his. “I’m sort of a self-educated person,” Armstrong says. “The only thing I really wanted to do was live up to our potential, and that was it. We suddenly had this band that musically became pretty powerful, and we made a big noise. We just wanted to see where it could take us.”
It’s not that Armstrong was lazy, but there was a certain disconnect between working to make money and working for the sake of a band that could one day make him a lot of money. It seemed like a no-brainer to him. To his family and certain friends it seemed somewhat eccentric. Nobody was in doubt of his talent, but in Rodeo, everybody worked somewhere.
“Mike always wanted to make sure he paid his own way,” David Armstrong says, and laughs. “Billie could give a shit. He was the baby. But Mike understood early. He made sure he graduated too. One night I was picking him up from guitar practice in my mom’s station wagon. He was saying, ’I don’t know about this.’ It wasn’t a big band breakup talk. The thing with Mike is that he’s a worrier. And I think we was looking at it like ’Man, it’s tough being a musician.’ He wanted a fallback. Mike grew up faster than Billie, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t left out in the cold. But he stuck with it.” Billie Joe, on the other hand, had no fallback. He’d muse aloud about how if it didn’t work out, he’d become a pool cleaner, but it was clear, especially after the encouragement from admirers like Erica Paleno and John Kiffmeyer, that Sweet Children, in his mind at least, were going to work out. “Billie wasn’t going to be happy doing anything else,” David says.
“At that age, Billie was so into music that he was distracted by the rest of his life—the rest of his life was a distraction from him doing his music,” Bill Schneider agrees. “He didn’t have jobs—he was so content to sleep on somebody’s couch. He just waited for Mike to get a place to live and then go sleep on the couch there. He was just distracted with having to live an ordinary life.
When necessary, Billie could choose from a number of punk rock crash pads. Many of them, however, were in dangerous parts of the city. “I would stay with him sometimes in these warehouses full of crusty punks,” Paleno says. Small and slight, Armstrong walked the dark, broken glass–covered street with one eye perpetually fixed over his shoulder. Although terrifying, these stays were usually temporary, and one of them (at a particularly unsavory warehouse space, above a West Oakland brothel) inspired him to write what became one of Green Day’s best-loved early songs, “Welcome to Paradise,” which appears on both Kerplunk! and Dookie, in a rerecorded version. Armstrong learned in his preteens how to write himself out of a bad situation and continued to do so as he approached his early twenties. Any number of bad situations
could equal a great song; and if that was the case, how bad could they really be?
Dear mother,
Can you hear me whining?
It’s been three whole weeks
since that I have left your home
This sudden fear has left me trembling
cause now it seems that I am out here on my own
And I’m feeling so alone
Pay attention to the cracked streets
and the broken homes
Some call it the slums
some call it nice
I want to take you through
a wasteland I like to call
my home
Welcome to Paradise
—lyrics reprinted by permission
Even as late as 1992, when he had two indie releases under his belt, Armstrong was essentially an extremely talented homeless kid. “I’m not living anywhere,” he told Flipside that year. “I have my stuff at my mom’s house. I drive around and hang out with my friends and kind of end up where I end up that night. I don’t live on the street. I hang out. I have places to go.”
No matter where he was sleeping, Armstrong would always make it to band rehearsals or shows on time, even when he had no money for the transit fare or gas for the ’77 Datsun he’d purchased and nicknamed “Thor.” Although Mike had grown much more successful at balancing the band with a necessary paying job and school, he was in many ways still as troubled as he was in his early youth. He would have had to bottle up his feelings had Armstrong, and their music, not been such a constant presence, helping him to process them.
“I think we’re the first ones to yell at each other,” Mike has said, “but we’re also the first ones to be there when the other’s life is totally falling apart.” Mike had good reason to focus on the band in addition to the practicalities (working, studying) which always threatened to distract him. Sweet Children, who were at first beyond the pale, were developing a surprisingly large following at 924 Gilman Street as well as on the house party circuit. Six months earlier, they were the kiddie band. Now, on the basis of their live set as much as Kiffmeyer’s local cred, they were a bona fide draw.
They were also a trio. The addition of a real drummer was, perhaps, a factor in Sean Hughes deciding that playing in a band was not his forte. “I left and Mike switched to bass,” he recalls. “He was definitely more talented than I was. I wasn’t trying that hard. I took lessons, but I never practiced. They were gunning to switch up anyway, and I just dropped out. By then, they were really organized. They were definitely cruising.” Mike learned the rudimentary details of bass playing in even less time than it took him to learn rhythm guitar. He’d carry his bass case with him to school and spend lunch hours and breaks plucking the heavy strings. Unamplified, the instrument emitted a sound soon to be familiar to many of his friends and Pinole High classmates: Dirnt . . . dirnt, dirnt, dirnt, dirnt. The noise was so prevalent that Michael Pritchard soon became jokingly referred to as Mike Dirnt. In classic punk-rock fashion, he took what might have been a slight (albeit an affectionate one) and turned it into something proud. From then on he was (and for the duration of this biography, we will refer to him as) Mike Dirnt, bassist extraordinaire.
In Northern (as in Southern) California, house parties were almost constant in the Oakland and Berkeley suburbs and a vital source of exposure, food, beer, and cash for young bands. Keggers with kids kept many of them alive long enough to sign with indies and record. “House parties were important to the scene. They were everywhere. NOFX, in 1986, did an all house-party U.S. tour. Mostly they were like two dollars to get in, and there would be a keg, and we’d end up with fifty bucks a night, and it was perfect,” Fat Mike says. “I saw Sweet Children at a backyard party in Berkeley, probably 1989,” Fat Mike recalls. “There were probably forty people there, and one of them was standing about four feet in front of Billie and spit right in his face. And Billie just kept playing! He didn’t even wipe it till the song was over. I always thought that was crazy. I hate getting spit on. I guess he was trying to be punk.”
“For every show you played at a real club you played five parties,” Schneider says. “Everybody just had parties so the bands could play. And you all toured [house parties] at the same time. We’d go around the country, and there was a real strong network—it was a really interesting time because there was a lot of young people into music so we could travel around the country and we could play in people’s backyards and basements and at vet’s halls. We’d still make enough money every night from selling T-shirts, demo tapes, and maybe we’d get paid eighty bucks from the door and we could go on tour for a few months. It was even easier after getting signed to an indie. Having 7-inch singles out that people could buy kind of almost made you a rock star in that world.”
It was at one of these house parties that Armstrong, Dirnt, and Kiffmeyer first caught the attention of Lawrence Livermore, then thirty-two and a former hippie turned mountain-dwelling punk entrepreneur. As he would with several key Gilman acts, Livermore would prove to be Sweet Children’s first and most important supporter: a friend and a label boss.
Like Tim Yohannan, Livermore was too old to pass for a Generation Xer but still too vivid, angry, and ambitious to cede to yuppiedom as most of his peers. He still related to the youth mentality. “I’d always tended to look and act younger than my actual age,” Livermore says today. “That might be a nice way of saying that I was immature. If anything, though, I’d say it was an asset; having already been through one countercultural experience with the hippies, I’d had a chance to learn from the mistakes and excesses people are prone to when they get caught up in what seem to be vital social movements.”
Lookout, the Xeroxed ’zine that Livermore began circulating in the late eighties, had little to do with punk rock. At first, it was merely a newsletter for the community of Northern Californian oddballs who’d retreated from the city for one reason or another and took to the mountains to homestead it. “[The magazine] was for misfits, pot growers, and back-to-the-landers in a remote area of Northern Mendocino County,” Livermore remembers. “It was actually the pot growers who helped drive me into turning it into a punk rock ’zine. They threatened to burn my house down if I didn’t stop writing about local stuff.”
Unlike MRR or Search and Destroy, Lookout had an air of a manifesto about it, with subjective rants about the environment and politics. Livermore was, after all, its sole contributor (call it a proto-punk blog). “My punk rock readers in the Bay Area probably saw Lookout as more iconoclastic than the standard punk ’zines,” he theorized. “That probably gave me a credibility that the others lacked, so when I started writing about East Bay bands and the Gilman scene, I think they took it as more than just ordinary hype and attached a lot more importance to the developing scene than they might have otherwise.”
Lookout Records, which grew out of the ’zine’s unlikely popularity, was initially just a venture designed to release an album by The Lookouts, Livermore’s punk band, which featured a drum prodigy from nearby Willits, California, named Frank Edwin Wright. Born December 9, 1972, Wright was only twelve years old when he first became a punk drummer. By seventeen, he would replace John Kiffmeyer and help lead Green Day into history. At the time, however, he was studying clowning with tie-dyed icon Wavy Gravy and banging on pots and pans with sticks.
“Nobody called him Frank,” says Cathy Livingston, Tre Wright’s schoolteacher. “Willits is a little town not far from my ranch,” Winston Smith says. “There’s no electricity, no running water. Just kerosene lamps. Tre definitely grew up in that situation.”
Tre’s father, Frank Wright II, had served as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. When he returned home from duty, he relocated his wife, Linda, daughter Lori, and young son to the mountains of Mendocino. Like Billie Joe’s father, Frank Wright II drove trucks for a living and, like most people in the mountains of Mendocino, he had rumored ties to the Grateful Dead (who on occasion were ostensibly the cargo in one of Mr. Wright’s r
igs).
Wright often noticed his son banging on rocks, tree trunks, rusting bicycles.
“I thumped things,” Tre Cool recalls today with typical wit and brevity. As a child he was hyperintelligent and the bashing of inanimate objects was more likely the product of an overactive and understimulated brain. “Tre’s family lived sort of off the grid up above Laytonville,” Cathy Livingston says, “and so did we for a while. Up in the mountains. No power, no phone. You had to make that yourself.”
Tre’s penchant for acting out and the humor that results from his dark side are likely because he was exposed to his father’s postwar mentality at such a young age. “His dad was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and had some pretty hard-core experiences and definitely has scars, mental scars, from it still to this day,” Bill Schneider says. Happily, by the time he was twelve, whenever Frank would have his dark moments (he was by all accounts easy-going otherwise), Tre would retreat to a neighbor’s house, where he would play on a vacated drum kit. Like Billie Joe with his guitar and Mike with his bass, mastering the drums made Tre feel capable and safe.
