by Marc Spitz
lay around
Looks like I found something new
—lyrics reprinted by permission
“I think the general feeling was that the first name wasn’t a very good choice, and that the second one was better,” Jeff Ott says. “Plus, they were total potheads.”
The remarkable thing about listening to the pair of EPs that Green Day recorded for Lookout—“1,000 Hours” in 1989 and “Slappy” in 1990—is how ready the band sounds. It would be years before their songs were mixed up to arena-worthy power but even without the 20/20 hindsight, you can tell that this is a band that, at its best, was not afraid to get there. A strong sense of internal quality control made sure every song was fully formed.
“I give 100 percent [commitment] to a song [while I’m writing it],” Armstrong says, describing his process, “even if it’s 100 percent a piece of shit.” Fortunately, writing the latter seldom happens. Like Ray Davies before him, Billie Joe has a gift for mass-producing tunes that are similar yet distinctive enough to amount to a real style. Each one is vaguely melancholy, but they take on a spirited toughness when worked up with the band—his sounding board throughout the years. It’s as if he is a sensitive singer-songwriter at heart but somehow fell in with the punks and remained there. “I never purposely write sad songs,” he says. “It’s just something that naturally comes out. The way we do it, it becomes sad and uplifting at the same time.”
Unlike most singer-songwriters, however, Armstrong is a giver. He writes to reach others as well as to express himself. This is another reason why Green Day has enjoyed such loyalty among their fan base throughout the years. As a lyricist, he is inclusive and unpretentious. “Good lyrics have always been important to me,” he says. “Once somebody gets it, it’s like ’Oh that’s cool.’ “
During the 1989 Christmas holiday, when studio time was cheap, Armstrong, Dirnt, and Kiffmeyer recorded their full-length debut for Lookout: 39/Smooth at Berkeley’s Art of Ears studios. With 39/Smooth, the song craft takes yet another step forward, especially the lyrics. Although only eighteen, Armstrong delivers a striking, reflective track reminiscent of The Beatles’ “In My Life.” Amid the frenetic punk of “At the Library” and “The Judge’s Daughter,” “I Was There” foreshadows the introspective sensibility that would later set Green Day apart from other successful punk bands, and give us sensitive hits such as “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” “Waiting,” and most recently “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”
Looking back upon my life
and the places that I’ve been
Pictures, faces, girls I’ve loved
I try to remember when
Faded memories on the wall
some names I have forgotten
But each one is a memory I
look back on so often.
I look into the past
I want to make it last
I was there
I look into the past
I want to make it last
I was there
Looking back what I have done
there’s lots more life to live
At times I feel overwhelmed
I question what I can give
But I don’t let it get me down
or cause me too much sorrow
There’s no doubt about who I am
I always have tomorrow.
—lyrics reprinted by permission
In fewer than five years, they’d be banned from the scene, but by 1990, Green Day’s full-length debut 39/Smooth received acclaim both locally and, with Lookout’s ever-increasing reach, nationally. “Some of the bands that were coming through my studio were rocking it on a cassette and saying, ’Check this out, man. Have you heard Green Day? They’re really good!’” remembers Brett Gurewitz. “You know I liked how it was a little more pop, and it had like a sixties vibe.”
Green Day played dozens of Gilman shows, many of them benefit concerts for the label or local fanzines such as Cometbus, run by scenester/musician Aaron Cometbus (who would play in Armstrong’s side project Pinhead Gunpowder). But Green Day’s local popularity wasn’t enough to satisfy them. In June of 1990, they mounted their first van tour that year in support of the debut.
They left the day Mike graduated from Pinole High. “Billie and John were waiting for him on the street,” David Armstrong recalls. Billie Joe had purchased his older brother Allen’s orange Ford Econoline 150 van. The band gutted the back and outfitted it with lofts for storing their gear and sleeping. Sean Hughes joined them as de facto roadie. “We just loaded in our shit and took off,” he says with a laugh.
With Sobrante driving, the band hit forty-five stops along the way, from bars to house parties to small punk clubs across the country.
“The tour was awesome,” Hughes recalls. “We all got out of Rodeo, which we had all talked about: ’Man, I wanna do something. I wanna go somewhere besides here.’ We’d hung out in Berkeley, but we’d never seen the country. We were totally on our own. We didn’t have much money. The itinerary was set up through John, and we just headed out.”
At each tour stop, Green Day would encounter crowds of varying size, full of juvenile skate rats, indie-minded college kids, wastoids, and preppies looking to get blitzed and hear something loud. “Different cities, different states, different scenes,” Hughes recalls. “And we just passed through. We weren’t old enough to drink, so most of the shows were on college campuses.”
During a sparsely attended show in Minneapolis in 1990, Billie Joe, then eighteen, met an attractive twenty-two-year-old woman with brown eyes, olive skin, and dark hair that she wore in dreadlocks. Adrienne Nesser was enrolled at University of Minnesota, where she studied sociology.
Armstrong had never met anyone like Adrienne, even among the politically correct and progressive Gilman Street scene, which, truth be told, was largely boy-dominated. Although he was a high school dropout, Nesser didn’t make him feel intellectually intimidated. She was a punk rocker, after all, partial to hair dye and thrift store dresses. He was a punk. They had a bond and an instant attraction.
Unlike most stops, Minneapolis had a thriving indie rock scene, and the band was able to park the van and stay a bit longer than usual. Kiffmeyer was able to line up more than one gig. “We got to relax a little bit,” Hughes says. “We had a longer break.” Adrienne had a boyfriend (also named Billy, oddly enough) and Armstrong was still dating Paleno, so the pair did nothing but talk on that first trip but sometimes, given the right chemistry, conversation is plenty. When the band packed up the Econoline and headed east (they’d reach as far as Rhode Island and eventually as far south as Florida before returning to Berkeley), Adrienne’s face, voice, clothes, and smell were firmly rooted in the teenager’s consciousness. They exchanged phone numbers, and Billie Joe made a point to call her at various tour stops when he was feeling especially chatty or lonely.
“I remember on the way back, he was trying to take a picture of a road sign that said 80,” Sean Hughes recalls, “because he was thinking of Adrienne and he called her ’Aidy.’ “
As exciting as the tour was, it wasn’t without calamity and frustration.
“I saw Green Day on that first tour when they played Memphis,” remembers Jason White, who would later play with Pinhead Gunpowder and Green Day on their last three major tours. “They got to the venue late, showed up when we were already loading out. The promoter had already given people half their money back. [On] those early tours, you create ridiculous goals for yourself because you don’t know anything about traveling. You think, ’Well we’re going from New Orleans to Little Rock, and yeah we have time to make it there if we leave by noon or something.’ You just don’t realize how long it takes to get anywhere really. You’re a little green or whatever as far as touring goes.”
Armstrong and Paleno broke up shortly after Green Day returned to Northern California, but it did little to calm his restlessness or quell any longing thoughts about his new Minneapolis non-girlfriend, to whom
his mind kept returning. Home, alone, jobless, and conflicted, he’d sit in his room, smoke, and strum his guitar. Eventually, these feelings would be poured into a shimmering pop lament entitled “2,000 Light Years Away,” which is about missing a girl he barely knew but suspected he didn’t want to live without. It would become a mix tape favorite, embraced by dozens of young lovers separated by miles of road. Nesser continued to be Armstrong’s muse for the duration of his career, inspiring love songs both oblique (like track “80,” which was a winking take on his nickname for her) and direct (the 2000 track “Church on Sunday” is a harrowing account of a domestic rift).
In 1991, however, even with Paleno temporarily estranged (she’d continue to be a band supporter and friend), Nesser was not the songwriter’s sole inspiration. It was around this time that Billie Joe began a relationship with another Gilman Street punk rocker named Amanda. A bit of an iron-willed feminist, Amanda’s naturally rebellious character proved another great influence on Billie. He knew punk rock was supposed to be defiant, but he’d yet to be romantically involved with someone who embodied it. Paleno was too sweet and supportive. The original Maximum Rock and Roller females were a decade removed and many of them still considered Green Day eager children. Like Yohannan, Livermore, and Aaron Cometbus and, it seemed, any self-respecting, politically minded Bay Area punk, Amanda produced and distributed her own ’zine. She was fierce. She was also the first girl to dump him. “He got really into her, and she left him,” Paleno says. “She didn’t care about any of his success later, either. She bailed and joined the Peace Corps.” His inability to impress or ensnare Amanda for long wounded Billie Joe. She is the subject of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” one of Green Day’s biggest hits, and one of the most misinterpreted pop songs of the last two decades (a bitter kiss-off, heard by most as a sweet love song). Whether or not Amanda was the mythical “one that got away” is not really important. What’s interesting is that Armstrong has never stopped writing about her . . . or the idea of her. “She’s a Rebel” on American Idiot is also based on her influence. She made him tougher by sharing her feisty views, and somehow older by breaking or at least scarring his heart. To paraphrase Billie Joe’s beloved Replacements, color him sort of permanently impressed.
The debut tour was a personal and professional success, with the band enjoying enthusiastic crowds far from the familiar confines of 924 Gilman—it seemed, for a few weeks at least, as if it would be the band’s last. John Kiffmeyer decided that he didn’t really fancy a life of rest stops, crash pads, and haggling for their post-show fees. Kiffmeyer was planning to attend Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, in the fall.
Dirnt hadn’t planned on attending college, and for high-school dropout Armstrong it wasn’t even an option. While Kiffmeyer never actually informed them that he was leaving—and perhaps expected them to simply wait for him to join them on breaks—Armstrong and Dirnt realized that this was a serious threat to their hard-earned momentum. “Nobody was going to college,” Jeff Ott observes. “Nobody was doing any particular work. All they really had was the band. They had to keep doing what they were doing.”
Along with everyone else on the Gilman scene, Armstrong knew that Tre Cool was one of the best local drummers. As it happened, he was available. “By 1990 the Lookouts were playing only occasionally, and we were living in separate cities,” Livermore recounted. “We got together in July to record some new songs, and Billie Joe came along to play some lead guitar and sing backups. That was the first time he and Tre played together. Billie asked Tre to jam with him and Mike. They played their first show together in November, and it just sort of naturally evolved from there. John played a couple more shows with them that winter, but the band wanted to play all the time, and, to be quite blunt, Tre was quite simply a far better drummer.”
Armstrong also knew that Cool was a handful. “Tre kind of had a bad reputation for being a real prankster and a real jokester,” Paleno says. “And I remember Billie telling me, ’Well, he’s a great drummer and we like him, but he’s just one of those people you gotta keep an eye on because you never know what he’s gonna say. Whether it’s going to get you kicked out of a club or off a show.’ But when Tre joined the band, bam—they just took off. They were that much better. He was the missing element. Plus John wasn’t a pot smoker and Tre was, and that really was the Green Day common thread, the pot smoking.”
“I thought we were the best band in the world,” Cool said, describing the early sessions with Billie and Mike. Armstrong and Dirnt were amazed by Tre Cool’s confidence. Kiffmeyer had retained his place in the band through a steady process of subtle derision. Cool didn’t resort to power struggles because he was, at eighteen, content to kick ass and have fun. “Tre is the kind of person who walks through a party and fights will start behind him left and right,” Dirnt once observed, describing his bandmate’s anarchic energy. “And he’ll walk out the back door with a girl on each arm and say, ’So where are we going next?’ He’s unscathed. Totally oblivious.”
“He’s a rock star,” Armstrong agrees. “[He was] born a rock star.” “I think the biggest element Tre added in addition to being one of the best drummers in rock ’n’ roll was the whole zany, crazy thing,” says Chris Appelgren. “Billie and Mike always came across as a little more serious and quiet before Tre joined the band.”
Cool’s musicianship and spirit more than made up for his often erratic behavior and lack of an internal censor. “A few times Tre did say some things that were in poor taste,” Appelgren says. “I remember asking Billie, ’Is this going to work?’ And finally he told me, ’You know what? I love him. He’s my brother now. He’s in my band and he can do whatever he wants. We don’t need to make excuses for him. He is who he is and he’s here to stay.’”
With Tre Cool on board, Green Day were finally the Green Day we know today. It’s another example of that weird rock chemistry: Take away one element, add another crucial element, and the whole mixture becomes highly combustible. “There are archetypes for this kind of thing,” theorizes music historian Matt Pinfield. “Ringo replacing Pete Best. Dave Grohl replacing Chad Channing in Nirvana. There’s always that kind of synergy that has to do with people involved in anything that makes it a success or lack of success. And it absolutely happened with Green Day.” “When John was in the band,” Chris Appelgren recalls, “it was like Mike and Billie and then there was John. With Tre, it was the three of them.”
The only problem was that John Kiffmeyer still considered himself Green Day’s drummer. “Tre was the official sanctioned ’temporary’ drummer,” Appelgren remembers. “That was the original idea; Tre was not a threat because he had been friends with everybody for a long time, and John being the taller, bigger guy was not easily intimidated. But then there was a show in Petaluma with Bad Religion, and I remember John knew about the show and came down expecting to play it. And Tre was there expecting to play it, too, and it was sort of this showdown. I wasn’t at the show, but from what I understood, John did play. I think that experience of him wanting the band to exist at his convenience and on his terms made them realize they couldn’t do that. They weren’t at college, and they wanted to keep moving on. I think John thought, ’Well, this is my band. I’m gonna come down and play the show.’ He played the show, but I think it was his last one because of how he did that. I think they felt bullied by it.”
Armstrong had to struggle to assert his leadership over Kiffmeyer due to the latter’s age and experience, but now Green Day had their first major tour behind them as well as their first record. Armstrong was eighteen going on nineteen. He studied and absorbed what he could use from Al Sobrante and moved along. This was, in many ways, a pattern for his ongoing informal education. “I think artistically and musically, Billie Joe was always the band’s leader,” Chris Appelgren observes. “And there was always a real understanding that the music came from him.”
Kiffmeyer stuck around long enough to help with the production of Gr
een Day’s next Lookout full-length album Kerplunk! He would later play drums in local act the N’er Do Wells, but as Green Day went on to fame and fortune, Kiffmeyer slowly receded into civilian life, which is, by most accounts, quiet and happy. “He’s married and has a family, a son, and a good life,” Appelgren says. “He does some film production; I think he does lighting out of San Francisco. He was in another band that was on Lookout a while ago, and they moved on without him. He might have held a grudge for a time and his ego was bruised.”
The DIY punk spirit Kiffmeyer helped imbue them with via his own influence and by virtually chaperoning them into the Gilman Street scene sticks with the band to this day. “What Green Day was ultimately able to do is take [punk] to new places,” Appelgren continues. “It was not going to be just be a symbolic fuck you to the rest of the world and like, ’We’re gonna stay in our small little clubhouse.’ They were really going to take the spirit of the underdog and the misfit to a larger level in their own way. I think that to me is tremendous and something to be proud of and maybe John didn’t have the vision to do that.”
With Tre Cool in, Green Day also gained a sort of universal teen appeal that they lacked with Kiffmeyer. Cool, like Armstrong and Dirnt, was a teenager. The subsequent live dates brought an element to Gilman that hadn’t really been seen there before: teenage girls. Punk rockers, with very few exceptions (such as Billy Idol and basically . . . Billy Idol), had not been crush worthy. Green Day embodied that “so homely they’re adorable” appeal that has created unlikely heartthrobs from Frank Sinatra to Ringo Starr to Joey Ramone. They were aggressive, but not threatening; cute, but not conventionally handsome; sexy, but in a shy and goofy way; tortured, but too amused to brood for too long. Drunk? Yes. High? Yes. But they never were the types who steal your TV set to sell it for another fix. “They brought a group of kids—mostly girls—from their suburban towns; girls from Hercules would come to the show,” Appelgren recalls. Distribution for 39/Smooth had been adequate. Occasionally, there’d be people in the audience in the South or Midwest who’d know the band’s songs well. But in Northern California, every kid seemed to own a copy.
