by Marc Spitz
“What do you do if your kid can only count to four?” Cool joked to Flipside in 1992. “Buy him a drum kit and call him gifted.” It was a good drummer joke, as far as bad drummer jokes go; but Livermore saw that Tre had genuine musical talent and labored to place his manic energy in some practical context. Livermore’s girlfriend, Anne, had recently left him and, up until that point, had been the drummer in his fantasy band. Eager to replace her and keep the band going, Livermore didn’t see Tre’s age as a liability. His behavior was a different story. “He was loud, obnoxious, ebullient, unruly, and hyperactive. At the same time, he had an undeniable charm that enabled him to get away with what might be considered unbearably bratty behavior,” he recalls. “It sometimes took a certain amount of patience to deal with him, but for the most part it was a real joy working with him. He was so enthusiastic about learning to play music.”
Another local kid, a fourteen-year-old homesteader named Kain was recruited to play bass, even though he lacked Tre’s natural ability and rhythm. Although it may seem suspicious today, at the time, it didn’t seem odd that a grown man was spending so much time with the neighborhood kids. “I wouldn’t say that Larry was a mentor,” says Wendy Norris, another childhood friend. “I just think that because he had a youthful spirit, [Tre] and everyone else was really comfortable about it. It wasn’t like he was this lonely old guy who hung around with little boys.”
Happily, nobody in Willits complained of the noise, and young Tre could bash away at his kit at all hours. People in Willits and neighboring Laytonville minded their own business anyway. “Half the town was loggers, ranchers, and truckers,” says Zan Cannon, a classmate of Tre’s. “And the other half was hippies, growing things and smoking things and living barefoot. There was a lot of marijuana consumption. Not down in town. But I mean, everybody knew what was going on up in the hills.”
“All you do is get fucked up,” Cool confirmed in a 1994 interview in Spin. “There’s nothing else to do. It’s like ’What’d you do yesterday?’ ’Smoked a fatty and drank a six-pack.’”
“The band jelled really quickly,” Livermore says of the Lookouts’ early practices. “I wanted to call us the Lookouts because of the magazine, which was, in turn, named after the fire lookout tower that was one of the most visible landmarks in our canyon; by then it had achieved considerable notoriety, and I thought it would be an asset to the band to have an immediately recognizable name.” Livermore was genuinely ambitious and would be quick to tell any of the locals that the band was a serious enterprise, not some novelty act or weekend hobby. This was vital punk rock for all involved.
“It was a little funny,” Wendy Norris says. “Punk rock just wasn’t big up there. I think that was more of an urban thing. People up there were listening to the Grateful Dead. You know, mellow stuff.”
“I didn’t treat him like a little kid unless he was acting like one, and as time went on, that happened less and less often,” Livermore says, recounting Tre’s slow but sure progression toward serious and disciplined musicianship. The Lookouts, like Sweet Children, practiced long and often. “By the time he was fourteen, he was a highly skilled drummer and performer and very mature in his own loud, obnoxious, ebullient, unruly, hyperactive way.”
The Lookouts performed one of their first performances “off the mountain,” as the locals say, at Grapevine Station, a gas station/general store off Highway 101 with an outdoor picnic area. Not many saw this historic event, but those who did were forever changed. “I remember them playing a song called ’Fuck Religion,’ ” Norris says. “And we were all laughing because Tre was singing and his voice hadn’t changed yet. He was really young. And so he had like this little Judy Garland voice, singing ’Fuck religion! Preachers are whores!’ “
Livermore is the one who christened Wright “Tre Cool,” shortly into his tenure with the band. With his new moniker and an integral role in Willits’s only multigenerational punk combo, it wasn’t long before Tre started looking beyond the mountaintop. He took his equivalency exams, got his GED, and left high school early.
Tre’s parents knew that if he was going to make it, he would need to leave Willits. They knew he was special, so they supported his decision. “Everybody knew he wanted to be a drummer,” Cannon says. “That day he was going to head down to the Bay Area.” “He talked about his band and cut this record and sold me a tape for four bucks. I still have that,” remembers Livingston. “I understand that at the high-school level he lost interest. And probably properly so. He had other things to do.” By sixteen, Tre Cool was already a regular on the Gilman scene, sitting in with bands, attending parties, and gaining notoriety for his unruly sense of humor, serious drum skills, and youth.
“I don’t want to say everybody hated them, OK? I don’t want to say that at all,” Jeff Ott says. “But people didn’t take the Lookouts seriously because Lawrence was older than us, or something like that. At the time Tre was just an anomaly. He was the little kid in the Lookouts.”
Tre knew Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt. He understood that they were in a band; but perhaps because he was self-conscious about their ages, he never really socialized with them. If they did find themselves in the same crowd, they exchanged friendly nods of acknowledgment. None of them could have guessed the effect they would soon have on one another’s lives.
Chapter Four
OP IVY
Lawrence Livermore didn’t start a label to gain respect for his occasionally maligned punk band, but that’s what happened nonetheless. Livermore was so inspired by the bands he’d see at Gilman that, after a while, both the ’zine and the band took a backseat to the daily operation of the indie label he cofounded with David Hayes, who would leave to form his own label a few years later. Livermore and Hayes called the label Lookout—same as the ’zine and the band—and it became a ticket to the world for Green Day and their fellow Gilman Street punk bands. It would not be Green Day, however, who would put Lookout on the map.
Without Operation Ivy, a short-lived but brilliant ska punk quartet, there may not have even been a Green Day. Op Ivy, made up of guitarist Tim Armstrong (who used to go by the punk name “Lint”), drummer Dave Mello, bassist Matt Freeman, and singer Jesse Michaels, became Billie Joe Armstrong’s favorite band and biggest influence. Musically, Op Ivy were tight and raw at the same time; aesthetically, they looked great and had iconic graphics and cool clothes; and politically, they were activists but didn’t preach. It was enlightened music, but it was also fun.
“Everyone’s got their band,” Billie Joe Armstrong said during our 2005 Spin interview, “and I’ve got to say Operation Ivy was definitely one that changed me. And it’s a proven fact that music can change people.”
Armstrong found Op Ivy at the right time, just as his own band was beginning to feel their own power and draw crowds. Op Ivy was slightly older than Sweet Children, but it didn’t matter. Op Ivy exploded onto 924 Gilman Street fully formed, and they drilled into Billie Joe’s head that a local band could accomplish a lot, go very far, and move people a great deal.
“Operation Ivy was one of the bands that quite literally formed in and around Gilman,” Livermore says. “One day [Tim] came running up to me saying, ’Larry, I’m in a new band. We’re called Operation Ivy, and we’re playing tonight!’ So I watched them, and before they’d finished their first song, I decided I wanted to do a record with them. I think they were a little shocked but that’s how I made most of my decisions to sign bands. I’d just see them, be excited, and spontaneously ask them to do a record. Half the time I didn’t even know I was going to ask them until I’d already done so. Screeching Weasel came out to California from Chicago and played a gig with Operation Ivy—that’s how I ended up doing their records. In turn, I got to work with the Queers because Screeching Weasel singer Ben Weasel kept bugging me to listen to their demo. I listened, I loved it, and the next thing I knew, we had yet another great band.”
Just as with Billie Joe and Mike Dirnt, Op Ivy’s core
members had known one another since they were kids and, therefore, shared a similarly intense bond. “I first met Jesse in early 1983,” Tim Armstrong says. “He was thirteen and was playing in a band with Jeff Ott. Jeff was twelve at the time. I would see Jesse hanging around Telegraph Avenue. We played video games a few times together at Universal Records and liked each other. Then one day he just split town. The rumors were that he went to live with his mom in Pittsburgh. Then out of nowhere I started to see him hanging out again. It was one of those cold, gray East Bay afternoons in February 1987. We were hanging out at the downtown BART station in Berkeley with nothing to do. I told him that me and Matt Freeman were starting a band. We had the same influences and listened to the same records. Stiff Little Fingers, Social Unrest, the Specials, Bad Manners, and Discharge, to name a few.”
Op Ivy played their first show at drummer Dave Mello’s parents’ house in nearby Albany, California, in April 1987. The following night, they made their debut at Gilman Street and were instantly the talk of the scene. The difference may have been simple personal chemistry: the energy and interaction among the members onstage. Whatever it was, Op Ivy were close to being an overnight success like none Gilman Street had ever seen before.
“Me and Tim used to fight a lot,” Michaels acknowledges, “but we were a really good team in terms of creating music. I don’t know how the chemistry works, but it seems like something about the fighting was a part of it. We wrote better stuff than I’ve been able to write since then. So I think we had a really good group even though sometimes we couldn’t stand one another. It was a fortuitous gathering of the right people.”
“Operation Ivy was everything you really wanted,” recalls David Katznelson. “You know, it was that wonderful side of reggae ska mixed with pop and punk; it was killer. And they played everywhere.” Sweet Children marveled not only at Op Ivy’s ability to destroy a crowd but also at the band’s reach. Throughout their two-year existence, Operation Ivy was one of the few Gilman Street bands that made it to the East Coast: They played in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.
“We’d travel to play anywhere,” Michaels says, “like community centers. It was just constantly going on here, so the thing to do was to get in a band, hopefully a decent band, although it almost didn’t matter, and then play these shows. It was just the raddest thing in the world. We played one show in a barn.”
“It was in Hillsburg, California,” Tim Armstrong confirms. “We played in front of a handful of punks and farm animals.” Op Ivy not only toured, but also recorded, and sounded great. Their first released recordings, “Officer” and “I Got No,” appeared on the 1987 Maximumrocknroll compilation EP Turn It Around (along with tracks by Isocracy, Sewer Trout, Soup, No Use for a Name, Corrupted Morals, Stikky, Nasal Sex, and the all-female rap parody act Yeastie Girls).
Despite their success, Op Ivy weren’t making much money. “Our first tour, in 1988, paid seventy-five dollars,” Tim Armstrong recalls. “The only time we received more than that was after playing with Fugazi and Verbal Assault at the Rocket in Providence. And that was because Ian [MacKaye, Fugazi’s leader] split the band’s money with us. We got a hundred and fifty dollars.”
Still, from the other side of the stage, it was easy for smaller bands to believe that Operation Ivy made it, and for them to make it too they had to get in the van. They needed a record deal. They needed everything Op Ivy had. And they needed to be that good.
There were some punks who resented the band’s skyrocketing popularity. Dismissive cries of “ska boy” or “pretty boy” could be heard between their sets. “They were a little more cute,” Gina Arnold explains. For the most part, however, they were beloved: the scene’s first organic phenomenon. “We were humanistic,” Michaels says. “At the end of every show we would grab people from the audience and just put them onstage until the stage was really mobbed up with people. It was mainly just for fun and a good set closer, but it was also about the whole thing being a big party and not a rock-star thing.”
It was too good to last. And it didn’t. Many people widely blame external pressure for Op Ivy’s premature end midway through 1989.
Armstrong famously provided an official eulogy for his old band in the song “Journey to the End of the East Bay.” It appears on . . . And Out Come the Wolves, the 1995 release from his more popular and long-running, but less influential, post–Operation Ivy project, Rancid. “Too much attention,” he explains in the song, “unavoidably destroyed us.”
Sweet Baby Jesus, the scene’s less popular ska-punk band, had signed a deal with Slash Records, which was distributed by major label Warner Brothers. Everyone was looking to Op Ivy to do the same, although it wasn’t necessarily an option then, as far as Michaels remembers. “Major labels back then, they were just not interested in punk. Pre-Nirvana and pre–Green Day. It was kind of a different world. I think the whole time we played, I honestly don’t think we talked to more than two or three label people; and if we did, they were probably pretending to be more interested than they actually were. Now when a band plays they’re talking about, ’Well should we shoot for Warner Brothers or Reprise?’ At that time, without any value judgment, you could’ve been playing for five years and never had a single conversation like that. You’d just go, ’This rules!’ Not, ’Well, we’ve made it.’ “
“There’s always a beginning and an end to everything,” Tim Armstrong says. “We had just run our course. We were a band for exactly two years, twenty-four months. Like putting flame to gasoline, Operation Ivy burned bright from its inception. We just stopped before it dimmed.”
“They broke up way too soon,” Billie Joe lamented in the 2005 Spin interview, but as far as the preservation of a near-perfect band myth, Op Ivy broke up at just the right time. Their Lookout single and full-length releases are considered classics of the modern rock era—musts for every college record collection or indie bar jukebox.
“Operation Ivy would have been huge if they’d stuck around,” Lawrence Livermore theorizes. “They’ve sold well over half a million records without even being around—pretty remarkable for a band that broke up the same month their first and only album came out. But I don’t know how long they would have lasted in any event; the chemistry within the band was probably too volatile for that.”
It was rumored that Michaels dropped out of modern society to become a Buddhist monk. This is not entirely false but somewhat exaggerated. “I was kind of falling away from it all. Didn’t go to Gilman as much,” he says. “I went away for a year and studied Buddhism at local Zen centers. A lot of Green Day’s ascension happened while I was away. I missed a lot of it. I was pretty surprised.”
Tim Armstrong began a long bender in the wake of Op Ivy. “It got really bad. I almost died a few times. In 1991, my brother found me on Telegraph Avenue really fucked up. He dragged me into his car, where I passed out. He took me to the hospital; I had a .39 blood alcohol level, which kinda scared my family. It took me four years to make another record.” By the time Rancid’s self-titled 1993 debut (on indie label Epitaph) was released, the world would be ready for Armstrong, his disciples, and punk rock in general. The world changed, but it was bands like Op Ivy on the West Coast, and Fugazi on the East, who paved the way for it all.
“You could say that when Op Ivy went away, Green Day became the biggest band on the scene,” Jeff Ott theorizes. Tellingly, Green Day supported Operation Ivy on their final Gilman show. That night, May 28, 1989, was also Green Day’s debut as Green Day. Sweet Children had grown up, and a new and more powerful incarnation was about to take over.
Chapter Five
HUGE IN PETALUMA
The surprise success of Operation Ivy’s 7-inch single “Hectic,” which was released in January 1988, brought unforeseen funds into Lookout Records and gave Livermore confidence and momentum. Still, he wasn’t expecting very much from Sweet Children when he signed them to a modest record deal.
“They played a show with the Lookouts that only
five kids turned up for,” Livermore says. “They played by candlelight, too, because it was in a mountain cabin with only a generator for power. But, as I’ve often said, they played for those five kids as if they were The Beatles at Shea Stadium, and just as with Op Ivy, I knew before they finished their first song that I wanted to do their record. They were way more pop than the other Gilman bands—too pop, I thought, to have much of a chance at doing well on that scene. But I thought the songs and the performances were so good that they deserved to be captured on vinyl, even if I did end up losing a little money on it.”
Livermore could not have guessed that as Sweet Children prepared to record their first EP for Lookout, 39/Smooth, it would be a band called Green Day that would deliver the record. To this day, the band tends to agree with people who think their band name is goofy. In an interview that took place in a New Orleans hotel room in the late fall of 2004, they seemed grateful that Hoobastank had a big hit that year. “At last a band with a worse name than us,” Mike Dirnt said joking.
The record deal prompted the band to visualize their name on a CD or a vinyl EP, and “Sweet Children” seemed to remind everyone just how much of a baby band they still were. Green Day was a signal to all on the scene that they were older. And very, very stoned. As with Sweet Children, the name “Green Day” also comes from a Billie Joe Armstrong original. The song is a slice of after-school special, gateway drug rock about the discovery of an alternate dimension via smoking out in your bedroom.
A small cloud has fallen
the white mist hits the ground
My lungs comfort me with joy
verging on one detail
The rest just crowds around
My eyes itch of burning red
Picture sounds
of moving insects so surreal
