by Marc Spitz
“Sort of normal, non-punk high school girls started showing up,” observed Lookout employee Patrick Hynes. “Billie Joe was like their neighborhood idol. They were ridiculed in the scene. There was this thing called the Trout Dance where a girl would stand with her arms crossed, bend her knees, and shake her head so the ponytail would shake [so she’d resemble a trout wriggling on the end of a hook].”
Sean Hughes recalls how the Trout Dancers soon became something of a liability. “They’d fold their arms and shake their heads. I think some people might have been jealous that they were getting attention paid to them by girls.”
“People would kind of tease [Green Day] about it,” Hynes adds, “but I don’t think anybody really believed that they weren’t really punk. If there were people like that, they were in the minority.”
“It was like a mini Beatlemania,” Arica Paleno recalls. “The love songs Billie wrote had a big part to do with it. A lot of punk bands didn’t have that same nature, and I think the girls started to pick up on that. They started to see a little Paul McCartney thing going on. They would show up and dance. It was groupie-dom, but it was cute. It was sweet. And one thing about Billie, he was never into groupies. To his benefit.” Armstrong preferred the long-distance companionship of Nesser, whom he was still telephoning on a regular basis. On one hand it allowed him to focus on the band, pouring all the energy he might have expended on a girlfriend directly into Green Day. On the other hand it was difficult to take any of the Trout Dancers too seriously. Outside of Petaluma, anyway. “They were huge in Petaluma,” Sean Hughes says with a laugh. “And there were all these hot chicks that were into them over there.”
In spring of 1991, while Green Day was recording their first album with Tre Cool on drums, something unusual was brewing several hundred miles north in Seattle, Washington. By the time Kerplunk! hit stores in January 1992, Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind—their first for major label DGC/Geffen—overtook the pop charts and seemed to make the melodic Beatles-conscious punk rock that Green Day had been defiantly pursuing for years extremely marketable. Suddenly, the commercial prospects for a young, loud, and snotty trio from the ’burbs of a major U.S. metropolis seemed limitless, whereas before, it was foolish to dream of selling 10,000 vinyl copies and touring in a bus rather than a van.
If Green Day had made a lackluster second record, they would have still stood a chance of getting further than they ever had before, on zeitgeist fumes alone. But Kerplunk! was yet another leap forward. The record’s title may sound as if it’s an homage to the Hasbro game of skill, but more than likely it refers to the sound effects resulting when you do number two from a great height. As on 39/Smooth, the line between the scatological and the dreamy is exceedingly thin but with Kerplunk! it starts to feel like an actual sensibility as opposed to a symptom of arrested adolescence. Mock country corn such as Tre Cool’s “Dominated Love Slave” happily coexists with genuinely romantic pop like “2,000 Light Years Away,” and neither feels forced. Green Day take their “shit” as seriously as they do matters of the young heart.
Most important, the band was still enforcing good quality control. “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?” and Armstrong’s song for Paleno, “Christie Road,” are both pop gems. “The twelve chunks of fun on Kerplunk! favor melody over speed metal aggression and lyrics of love and confusion over explosive revolutionary tracks,” College Music Journal (CMJ) wrote in their January 31, 1992 issue. “The hooks in these songs are as easy to find as a broken string must be at a Green Day show. Keenly underscored by gleeful, chiming vocals and hurdle-jumping basslines, Green Day’s tunes stick in your head like cat hair.”
“Unlike some people, I consider Nirvana and that whole Seattle scene to be at most tangentially related to punk rock,” Livermore says. “They certainly had little or nothing to do with punk as we were practicing and experiencing it in the Bay Area. Still, when Kerplunk! came out in January 1992, it sold ten thousand copies the first day, which was phenomenal at that time. The Operation Ivy LP, which was our perennial best-seller, had taken a whole year to sell its first two thousand.” By the end of the year, Kerplunk! sold another twenty thousand and pumped up the sales of 39/Smooth. College radio play added to the boost in the Green Day phenomenon.
Steve Masters, the former music director for San Francisco station KITS Live 105, recalls, “I used to do a show called the ’Local Modern Rock Block’ on Thursdays, and I’d play a lot of demos and local acts’ indie releases. Green Day’s record really stood out [among the local bands]. And I was kinda picky.”
Matt Pinfield, a college radio DJ at Rutgers in New Jersey at the time, agrees: “People just grabbed a hold of them. Eighteen- through twenty-one-year-old kids who were sneaking into bars were into Green Day. They knew Kerplunk! They knew 39/Smooth. And they were spreading the word among their friends. I would run into a 7-Eleven in Jersey and someone would recognize me and go, ’Ah, hey Matt Pinfield. I’m going to see Green Day!’ I think the thing that made people grab hold of it was that it had such a pop element to it. They represented a complete turn in punk from the hard-core to the pop-informed.”
By the next wave of U.S. tour dates, Green Day were filling prestigious venues like the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles and Slim’s in San Francisco. A feeling of excitement, some kind of organic buzz seemed to trail them wherever they went. After three years of struggle and lean times in crash pads, Green Day was starting to see some serious results. “They’d be playing Sluggo’s in Arkansas, and it would be full of people,” remembers Bill Schneider. “They’d fill it just through word of mouth.”
With the royalties they were making, Armstrong and Dirnt purchased new equipment and a new touring vehicle—a converted Bookmobile. Basically, it was a van with a huge cab for storage and sleeping. They’d ripped out the shelves and tossed whatever volumes remained. The band would soon load up the battered cab and embark on another cross-country tour. This time, however, the buzz would precede them and the shows would be full. Tre’s father was the sometime navigator of the Bookmobile, but most days, there was little adult supervision.
“They were like little monsters let loose on the road,” Appelgren says, recalling tour life without Kiffmeyer to keep them in line. Danger seemed to find them at every stop. “I got slipped some acid from a hippie when I was in South Dakota,” Armstrong said in 1992. “We were staying at this hippie people house and this guy comes up and he goes, ’Here,’ and he put these two stupid little pills in my hand. I go ’What’s this?’ And he goes ’Two will do ya,’ and he walked away. We crushed ’em up on the porch, and everyone in the van was waiting for our trip to come.”
The psychedelic trip never came (perhaps it was a placebo). The Kerplunk! tour did take them to Europe for the first time, however. As they moved from country to country, Green Day saw the world like most of their friends and family members never did. It was exciting, but at the end of the night, the band felt increasingly alone and overwhelmed. They bonded, as they would when things were overwhelming, and by the tour’s end, all three seemed irrevocably possessed. “It was the best thing we ever did for ourselves,” Dirnt said. “We were there three months, playing on borrowed equipment every night. We played in squats. I don’t think we were a tight band before we were there, but all of a sudden something clicked.”
“We all saw the same new things and had the same new experiences,” Cool agreed. “We shared stuff together. It was a ground-shattering, life-changing tour. Every single experience was something completely new that none of us could imagine.”
It was evident to all who encountered them that Green Day was on a course for something huge. A kind of self-made cultural ripple is like blood in the water to the majors. The unprecedented press and radio play made it easy for people to catch wind of Green Day, monitor Kerplunk!’s sales, and place the trio at the top of their “next Nirvana” lists.
“When they came back from tour, everybody at the label was pretty much flabbergasted,” Patrick Hynes s
ays. “The roadies would say, ’It’s fucking crazy. The last time we played in this town there was like fifty people and now there’s three hundred.’”
“They came back home, and the world had changed,” Bill Schneider says, “and they didn’t really feel like they had changed at all—and they really hadn’t as people or musicians—they’d always wanted to grow and go to the next level.” “It was a gradual build,” Appelgren says. “And we [at the label], with each milestone we achieved, thought: ’Well, gee, we can thumb our nose at the rest of the world for being such idiots before.’”
“It was only in 1993 that I started getting serious rumblings about them possibly jumping to a major,” Livermore continues. “I heard rumors sometime in the early spring of 1993 and cornered Tre about it. He said they were ’talking’ to a management company about the possibility of signing to a major label, and I got the whole band together and asked them what was going on. They told me they’d pretty much already decided to go for it, and not too much later, they got a deal.”
Green Day had pretty much managed itself back in the Kiffmeyer days and beyond. Now they were represented by the management/legal team of Elliott Cahn and Jeff Saltzman, a Los Angeles–based firm that had been signing up modern rock acts in the wake of Nevermind’s success. “We all made jokes about [the band signing with a major label],” Appelgren says. ” ’Well if we sign, here’s how we’ll scam ’em.’ Then it became a reality. The band said that they had authorized their team to see what kind of deal might be possible for them. I was very critical of this decision. I had this conversation with Billie Joe about how I really was concerned that if they didn’t succeed, and at the time there was nothing to really make us believe that they would, that they wouldn’t be able to come home again. Billie didn’t finish high school. If they didn’t pull this off, then that’s gonna be it and they’re gonna be done. I felt they would be much better served continuing to do things on their own terms and build up success and snub our collective noses at the establishment. I expressed that to Billie. He was eventually gracious, but I think he was annoyed at first. He was defensive. The way it was construed was that I had a problem with what they were doing. But Billie said, ’We feel like this is our opportunity. It’s what we’ve been working toward. We believe in ourselves, and we’re gonna do this.’ I had to agree with that. I believed in them too, but I just didn’t know that the world could get it.”
Green Day performed their last ever show as an independent punk rock band at 924 Gilman on September 24, 1993. The show was recorded for posterity and remains a much-circulated bootleg to this day. At the time, however, the band had no idea it would be such a historical document and that they would never be formally invited back.
Chapter Six
ANARCHY 90210
In the August 24, 1993, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the announcement of a minor acquisition was made. “Warner Brothers Records won the hard-fought multi-label battle to sign Green Day, a trio of Berkeley-based twenty-year-olds that have sold an impressive 30,000 copies of each of its two albums for East Bay independent Lookout Records. The buzz on the band is that Green Day, a not so oblique reference to pot smoking, is a grassroots phenomenon poised to break big with the release of a major-label debut early next year.”
At the time, Warner Brothers was widely known as an artist-friendly label, with a roster of integrity acts. Reprise, the label subsidiary for which Green Day would record, was the label founded by Frank Sinatra and was the home of Jimi Hendrix during his short recording career and of the Kinks and Neil Young during their prime. The Replacements had released four albums on Sire Records, another WB subsidiary. Sire’s roster of British and American punk, post-punk, and New Wave acts—from the Ramones to Talking Heads to Echo and the Bunnymen—was legendary. R.E.M. had transitioned from cult indie IRS records to Warner Brothers three years before and were now vying with U2 for the title of biggest rock act in the world. Jane’s Addiction had graduated from L.A. underground parties to arenas. The Flaming Lips had just signed and would record their breakthrough Transmissions from the Satellite Heart shortly thereafter. In the age of mega-selling alternative rock, Warner Brothers seemed to be the place to be. But all was not ideal inside the label’s offices. Body Count, rapper Ice T’s hard-rock collective, brought on serious bad publicity with their song “Cop Killer.” And for every R.E.M., there were dozens of failures. Worse, the label had recently extended a multimillion-dollar vanity label enterprise with its perennially hottest act, Madonna, who was in a little slump. Everything Madonna touched was not turning into an across-the-board smash hit lately. It would be nearly two years before Maverick Records would fill up the WB coffers with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. In the meantime, the label needed a boost to keep its stockholders from sweating.
In 1993, however, nobody inside the Warner offices needed a hit more than rookie A-and-R man Rob Cavallo. Cavallo came from a music business family. His father, Bob Cavallo, was Prince’s manager during his Purple Rain–era superstardom. Like Armstrong, Cavallo grew up in a house filled with music.
“I heard the Beatles very early on, when I was two,” he remembers. “By the time I was eleven or twelve, I just had to know how they made those sounds. I was just wonderstruck. I began to figure out how they played all those songs on guitar, bass, drums, piano. I had this quest to figure out how they did all that. And so I became a moderately proficient player in a number of different disciplines. Then I would try to figure out how a bunch of other bands played their songs, bands like the Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Earth, Wind, and Fire riffs.”
Cavallo moved from his native Washington, DC, to Los Angeles when he was ten. He graduated from USC with an English degree. After he graduated, with the Clinton-era economic boom still a ways away, there were few good jobs available, even for someone with connections. Cavallo, with his stocky frame and glasses, decided he stood a better chance getting somewhere as a producer than a performer.
“I was forced with the prospect of making money,” he says, “but I also played—I was in bands. But I knew I didn’t really want to be a performer. I was in bands all through my teens. I was just having fun. I never actually took any of the music stuff seriously. To me it was always a hobby. It was fun to go on stage and be that kid who could play. By the time it became something that was serious—when you’re twenty and you’re not really faking it; you’re not just a kid anymore.”
“He always wanted to be a producer,” says David Katznelson, his former producing partner. “When he was young, if he was given any presents or any kind of money from his father he would go right to the Guitar Center and buy equipment. I mean, granted he didn’t come from a life of misery. You know, he wasn’t poor, but he didn’t just rely on the fact that his father was Prince’s manager. He went out there, and he taught himself how to produce, and he experimented and all that kind of thing—and he read every book on it. He was a psycho student about this stuff. He geeked out.”
“I ended up producing a demo for a band called Rhythm Core,” Cavallo says. “Warner Brothers heard it and said, ’We don’t really want to sign this, but we think this demo is good enough to get them a deal elsewhere.’ And I said, ’Well, I’ll just keep trying to make one that’s good enough for you guys to sign.’ And then they said, ’OK, you’re on the staff. We’ll give you five hundred bucks a week.’ I said, ’I’ll take it.’ “
Cavallo would discover, sign, and produce bands for Warner. One of his first was also one of the best: an L.A. pop-punk act known as The Muffs. Lead by a charismatic screamer with bangs named Kim Shattuck, The Muffs (who still tour and record) are the great lost pop punk act. Their self-titled major label debut was a cult hit and very much a prototype for the platinum-selling bands that would follow nearly a decade later. At the time, however, it was another in a series of Cavallo-affiliated flops (among them an act named Sister Whiskey, whose WB debut was idiotically entitled Liquor Poker).
> Green Day’s demo came to Katznelson first, but he was unimpressed. Today, he remains at peace with his status as the man who declined to sign Green Day. “I liked Green Day, but I didn’t love them. I didn’t feel passionate about them, so I pretty much gave the tape to Rob,” he recalls. “To be frank, I wasn’t a huge fan of Billie Joe’s voice.”
“It was during the mixing sessions for that record that the attorney of The Muffs, who comes from Berkeley where Green Day was working, said, ’Rob, you should listen to this,’ ” Cavallo remembers. “I took the cassette and listened to it in my car on my way home that night—’Basket Case’ was on it. ’Longview.’ I loved it. Loved it right away, and I just said, ’Oh my god, you gotta let me see these guys!’”
While their manager and lawyer were fielding offers, the band was back off the road, living and rehearsing in a basement apartment in a turn-of-the-century Victorian house on Ashby Street in Oakland. From the outside, the place looked elegant. Inside, it was another squat.
“I never personally witnessed any of the A-and-R guys giving their pitches there,” Livermore said. “Though I did hear stories about limos pulling up in front of it.”
The ceilings in the Ashby house were so low that people who were more than six feet tall could seriously hurt themselves if they weren’t careful. “It was a classic kind of guys’ place,” recalls video director Mark Kohr (who would later shoot the band’s “Longview” video in the living room). “Mattresses on the floor, milk crates, plywood furniture, and a tiny practice room with corkboard soundproofing.”
