by Marc Spitz
“There were just a lot of bizarre drinking antics going on in that house,” Jeff Ott recalls. “Fishing for people off the roof with fishing poles, and literally we’d put a wallet at the end of the line.”
When Rob Cavallo pulled up to Ashby Street in the summer of 1993, he was just a few more failed projects away from taking that bait. “I was failing—I got my job in 1987, I signed Green Day in 1993,” Cavallo says today. “I hadn’t done anything of great merit in six years, except for maybe helping Black Sabbath on a song in Wayne’s World. But you know what was great about Warner Brothers at that time and still is today? They really allow you the chance—they saw something in me that I didn’t even know was there.
“If you ever see the ’Longview’ video, that little room, except for the fact that they painted the walls blue and red, was pretty much exactly what I saw as an A-and-R guy. I sat on a bucket looking up at Mike and Billie, who were in the exact same positions as in the video. There was no monkey. I saw them play for about forty minutes from my seat on the bucket, from that upward camera angle. And I thought, oh my god, I love these guys. I remember they heard that I could play all those Beatles songs and they said, ’OK, let’s jam,’ or something. They got me stoned, and I started playing guitar and we jammed. We had a good time. There was an immediate chemistry.”
Armstrong was a fan of Cavallo’s work on The Muffs record and was impressed that he did this at a major label. The fact that Cavallo, unlike most A-and-R executives, could actually play, surely helped his pitch as well.
“I think I might have been the first person he told that they got signed up as Green Day with the first major label,” says Tre Cool’s old school friend Zann Cannon Goff. “I used to work at Whole Foods Market. And I was cashier. Tre would come in regularly because he was living near there. So he comes in one day buying a bunch of cookies and chips and stuff and looking all glassy eyed, and he’s like, ’You’ll never guess what just happened.’ And I’m like, ’What?’ He’s like, ’This guy from Reprise records just came over and he got us stoned and signed a record deal with us. We’re gonna be really big.’ And in the back of my mind I’m like, ’Yeah right, whatever.’ Who the heck out of Willits is gonna be on MTV? Yeah right. Then it was three months later and there he is on MTV. That day was the last time I saw him. I was pretty damn shocked. Definitely jealous. Since there was someone younger, bigger, and richer, and more famous than I am. And that’s always a bummer.”
“Things got a little more complicated once we became successful,” Armstrong told me in 2005, during our Spin sit-down. He was recalling with some understatement those first few months when word started to get around that the band were leaving Lookout. It was one thing to go to the pizza place and be recognized by a total stranger. It was another matter entirely when those total strangers called you some very unkind names.
“Punk rock is elitist,” Fat Mike of NOFX explains, “and people in punk rock feel like ’this is our scene; we don’t want other people liking this kind of music.’ When I was a kid and X signed to a major [Slash/Warner Brothers], I was pissed too. We felt privileged and lucky to see X at the Whiskey or Green Day at Gilman Street. And when they go to a major, you’re never fucking seeing them at Gilman Street again. You’re going to go see them in Oakland Coliseum. And I’ve seen Green Day at Oakland Coliseum, and it’s no fucking fun.”
“It was a huge backlash,” Appelgren remembers. “It was huge around here at least. There were Mohawk kids out there protesting in front of their shows out in Petaluma.”
It was unspoken but abided that Green Day were no longer welcome within Gilman (whose pre-entry list of rules read and still reads: “We do not support racism, homophobia, or major label bands”) to perform or even to watch their friends perform.
“Lookout couldn’t get them into the Fillmore in San Francisco. They didn’t have that torque. Green Day needed a bigger label, bigger management, bigger distribution,” says Arica Paleno. “They almost had no choice [but to leave.] It was supply and demand. And I remember them saying, ’Well, everyone is going to hate us. They’re going to shun us. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ And it was really bad. Gilman had that no-rock-stars policy. And Green Day wasn’t allowed around anymore. They went from everybody’s darlings to everybody’s joke. ’They sold out. They’re totally against what we represent as punks.’ Whatever. Fucking bullshit.”
“Billie Joe told me he felt the backlash bad enough that if he went to Gilman he disguised himself with a beard,” Jello Biafra says. “To me I thought that was very, very sad and not a good statement on how the punk underground devours itself. These guys are human beings. When somebody becomes well-known, other people sometimes reduce them to this subhuman thing. You know, they’re not a friend anymore; they’re an ’it.’ ” MRR ran anti–Green Day letters and snarky comments they’d received from readers apparently with glee. (When contacted for this book, the person at the other end of the line almost reflexively snarled, “Not interested,” before hanging up abruptly.)
“Can you imagine what it feels like to pick up that magazine [MRR], something you totally respect, and read all these fucking opinions about you?” Armstrong asked Spin in 1994. “That’s what the Gilman Street scene is,” Brett Gurewitz says. “Its very identity is tied up in being other than the mainstream. It can’t embrace them anymore. Or it isn’t anything.”
Much of the loudest protest was headed up by an extremely irate punk named Brian Zero. Banners and petitions designed to officially excommunicate the band were circulated, but many were so over the top they were easy to dismiss. The editorials in MRR and general day-to-day trash-talking was a bit more down to earth and, therefore, much more hurtful.
“It was mostly just a lot of talk and snarky comments in fanzines,” Livermore says, downplaying it somewhat today. “But the band may have taken it a lot more seriously and personally because they were young and that whole Gilman scene meant so much to them.” Livermore was one of Green Day’s loyalists, defending them in his own MRR column by casting the blame not on Green Day directly, but on those moved to bileful indignance by their actions.
Never ones to take a blow without delivering one, the scrappy punks fired back at MRR in one of their first national cover stories. Speaking with Spin in 1994, Armstrong snarls, “Tim Yohannan can go and suck his own dick for all I care. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I’ve never waved a punk-rock flag in my life.”
But it was clear that the barbs had left wounds. Feelings were hurt at a time that should have been completely celebratory.
“There were a lot of Northern California punk rockers, and probably from some other places too, who weren’t happy,” Rob Cavallo acknowledges. “I remember there was a banner that was made that said ’Fuck Green Day’ or ’Green Day go home’ or whatever. It was definitely a big deal for Green Day to take that step because there were many, many fans and friends of theirs who thought they were selling out. But I also know that the majority of those fans, when they heard Dookie (later on) realized, wow, they didn’t sell out. They just made a really good record, you know?”
“What I warn bands about to this day is that the trouble with major labels is that when you sign on the dotted line, you cease to become an artist and from that point onward you are their employee,” Biafra says. “You are employed to generate pop culture for them to make money off of, and hey, they might even pay you. And in the meantime you get to be a star. Once you figure out there’s all kinds of sacrifices in high-visibility stardom and pressure on your ass, and that maybe you don’t like it anymore, it’s too late. You’re on the treadmill, and they want more product and want to exploit you any way they can.”
Still, he dismisses those who put the fatwa on Green Day with equal disdain. “The entire underground scene was livid at Green Day, and deep down their crime was being successful. And my attitude was look, OK, in my case I didn’t want to go this route, that’s fine, but we all knew from the get-go th
at some day the public was going to discover and embrace this music. It was too good not to have reached mass success eventually. It was an inevitability. And I tell people to this day, look, the reason Green Day and Rancid and Offspring and Bad Religion and NOFX and the others got where they are is because like it or not, they’re good at what they do.”
This topic enrages Courtney Love for personal reasons. Her late husband, Kurt Cobain, had massive ambitions but also an odd guilt about selling out or violating the unspoken but brutally enforced punk fundamentalist dogma.
“Fuck the nineties for that shit,” she fumes today. “Fuck the nineties for that shit ’cause lookit now! I remember getting a Lexus for 60K and getting eggs thrown at it! We couldn’t even have a motherfucking Lexus when we had 10 million in the bank? I hate my generation for that. Rules? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rules schmules. Fuck that. I mean fuck it. And now the whole context of celebrity has changed and we get no credit, those of us who semi-abided by those rules or were forced to abide by those rules. God, I don’t want to sound bitter. I don’t really care anymore but having to live through the nineties and live through those crass rules . . . anti-successful, anti-brand, anti-consumer, there’s no level of credit. Your credibility should come from your lifestyle, your wholesomeness, your values, from how you conduct yourself, your level of decorum, all of which Billie Joe has abided by very well. His level of decorum has always been really good. Polite to his elders. Polite to his peers. Tim Yohannan never accepted me either.”
Yohannan, it should probably be pointed out again (in the band’s defense), was from a middle-class background. Historically, it’s been much easier for people with a certain degree of privilege to carry on in a dogmatic fashion. Armstrong, Cool, and especially Dirnt knew what it was like to eat macaroni and cheese for dinner every night and sometimes not have money for gas. To refuse a major label deal on principle is easy if you’ve never seen your parents working in restaurants. “I did not realize until I talked to the Green Day guys at length that they came from far less advantaged backgrounds than most of the people in the punk underground and most of the more-radical-than-thou,” Biafra says. “When I talked to Mike Dirnt about it, he finally kind of snapped at me a little bit and said, ’Look I’ve got money, and I bought my mom a house so she doesn’t have to live in a trailer anymore.’ I’ve also noticed this from the beginning in hip-hop culture versus punk culture: Even among the more political rappers, they’re more accepting of money and fancier cars and showing off a little wealth and whatnot. And granted that turns my stomach, but it’s also a reflection of people who grow up not having a damn thing, and entertainment culture dictating down to them, just like Motown did before, that it’s much better to dream of being super filthy rich than to systematically, brick by brick, get yourself out of poverty.”
“It’s so white to worry about things like that,” Armstrong said in 2005. He had more than a decade to reflect on it and was then liberated from Green Day’s paralyzing dual personality syndrome. He ultimately decided that success, even in the values-driven world of punk rock, was really nothing to be ashamed of. Earning it didn’t mean you were superficial or treasonous. “Hip-hop guys are so much more dangerous and so much more willing to take risks in music in a lot of ways because they’re not afraid to be successful. It’s embraced. That’s what you’re supposed to be. You’re supposed to be a superstar. In rock ’n’ roll, and especially alternative rock music, it’s sort of looked at as if you’re not supposed to be up there. It’s taboo. And it ends up making for conservative music because all of a sudden you feel like you have to have all these rules and are not really a rock star.”
“It all depends on what you call punk,” Brett Gurewitz said, after I posed the “Cred” question to him. “Let’s take the word punk out of and call it hip. Take an artist who’s this obscure, unknown artist and he’s just very hip. Say a graphic artist like Jean-Michel Basquiat. And then he explodes and then he dies. Now everyone knows him. Is he still hip? I wouldn’t say so. He’s collectible. To me the thing about Green Day is they just write really great songs. And they just keep doing that. I think they’re just a great rock band. Do I think they’re punk? Yeah, I mean I do. But I guess the question nowadays is what does it mean to be punk? For me it’s kind of like asking me if I’m Jewish. Like, I hate Judaism, I hate the Old Testament, and I don’t believe any of that. But I’m still Jewish. Punk is almost like an ethnicity, you know what I mean?”
“Tim Yohannan sort of spun a spider web for himself and then tightened it further and further with each passing year,” Jello Biafra laments. “He admitted to me at one point when MRR was all hard-core all the time in terms of what they were the champions of. He told me, ’You know, sometimes I get kinda tired of what we’re playing on the show and when I’m home I just want to listen to Billy Childish.’ Even till the very end you could flip through the MRR record collection and find a Slim Harpo album or something in there that Tim never felt he could get rid of. I think he kind of confused it a bit in the end.”
Even as they trashed Green Day, everyone, punks and non-punks included, waited to see what the band would come up with given this opportunity. Before most of the world even knew Green Day’s name, in certain circles, their third album was already wildly anticipated and the band, not yet old enough to drink legally, was feeling the pressure.
Green Day behaved characteristically, doing what they always did when things around them became painful. They closed ranks together and focused on new songs. They had reason to be excited by the material that they were coming up with for the controversial, major label debut. “They all really focused,” David Katznelson remembers. “I think they had something to prove.”
“We kind of evolved,” Armstrong said in 2005. “I loved Kerplunk!, but I think at the same time we didn’t have time to think it out or define who we were with it. There was something that happened to us when we signed to a major label [Reprise]. I became really focused on the songwriting. I really want to make something that defines who we are and that has a statement behind it, even if its like an anti-statement. All the major label bands that came from punk rock had sort of failed on major labels, so it became a real gamble.”
“My mantra as a producer at that time was, I want you to sound like the best version of yourselves. I think Dookie is a really good snapshot of what Green Day sounded like at that time. And that’s why I think it works: because it’s honest. That’s not only why it works, but also why we didn’t get killed. I didn’t turn out to be the evil record producer who sold out Green Day’s sound.”
You can tell, literally, from the very first noise that you hear—a sharp Tre Cool drum beat preceding the opening track, “Burnout”—that the Green Day/Cavallo partnership would take them very, very far. Listen to Kerplunk!, then cue up Dookie, and the difference in production is remarkable, like an old Triumph bike that’s had its engine cleaned.
Its title may be self-deprecatingly scatological but the music is nothing if not confident, almost struttingly so. The first verse, if you read into it at all, can only seem ironic now: “I declare, I don’t care no more . . .”
Dookie, conversely, marks the emergence of a band who are finally committed and positioned to destroy all comers. It gets even better quickly.
Track two, “Having a Blast,” is all about an explosive-strapped suicide bomber’s giddy nihilism (in the early nineties this kind of thing could still seem darkly funny). “Chump” is another piece of effortless snotty speed-pop. On any of the earlier albums, it may have been a centerpiece. A single. Not here.
As it fades out, the walking bass line to “Longview” rolls in. It’s lounge jazz–derived, but you can also tell that it too is wired to detonate. The drums roll easily and Billie Joe’s adenoidal tone thickens and slows down a bit towards a conversational tone. “The lyrical content of it was supposed to be almost like a Pink Floyd moment,” Cavallo remembers. “Where you have a guy wondering how fucked up he really is. There w
as a version of it where we put this doctor speaking in the background. He’s talking about all these various sexual dysfunctional diseases related to impotence and things. That’s something that is brilliant and is on tape somewhere but didn’t make it to the record.”
“There’s this lyric that goes ’Call me pathetic, call me what you will,” Patrick Hynes recalls. “When they’d play the song at their shows, before Dookie came out, their friend Eggplant from the audience would shout, ’What you will!’” And so when they recorded it, if you listen really carefully you can hear him shouting it. They brought him into the studio just to do that. If you listen on headphones, you can hear it.”
“It’s one of those songs where you can really feel the scene,” Cavallo observed. “You can just know what Billie’s talking about. ’I’ve lost my motivation. Where is my motivation?’ You know, ’I’m smoking my inspiration.’ When it all fades down at the end, sort of like as he describes after you’ve masturbated or whatever, you’re kind of relaxed and then that soft guitar riff comes. It just sort of fades away.”
It’s perfectly realized punk rock. Alienated but longing to be understood. Adolescent but weary. “Longview” is Green Day’s first immortal single, as potent to teenage ears today as it was a decade ago and as it will be a decade from now. And it’s not even the best song on the record. “Welcome to Paradise” sounds crisper and even more furious than it did on Kerplunk!, now that the scary crash pad in West Oakland is even further behind him.
The girl in “Pulling Teeth,” a love gone wrong lament, is Dirnt’s girlfriend Anastacia. Dirnt, ever accident prone, cracked his elbows after a pillow fight with her. “I was running and turned around and hit a beam,” he recalled at the time. “It was lucky though; I happened to be ducking down. If I hadn’t I would have crushed my face.” The basic metaphorical equation of actual pain of a nearly crushed face with heartache works better than it should.
