by Marc Spitz
“Basket Case” is the album’s high point and probably its most enduring track. Like “Longview,” it’s a worrying bit of teenaged self-inventory; a plea for help with a little bit of pride that our narrator, paranoid, stoned, or both, is not like anybody else. Structurally, it’s simple three-chord pop punk, but there’s an authority to how it’s played that seems less fully formed on previous exercises. Green Day’s segue from influenced to influence really begins here.
“She” is another Beatlesque pop song that has as little to do with MRR-approved punk as possible. Its lyrics are gentle and poetic. A portrait of a disenfranchised punk girl: a recurring theme in Armstrong’s lyrics that extends all the way up to “She’s a Rebel” and “Extraordinary Girl” on American Idiot. “Are you locked up in a world that’s been planned out for you?” he asks his screaming (albeit “in silence”) subject. Green Day’s female audience exists largely because of songs like this.
“Sassafras Roots” is a throwback to Kerplunk!’s Gilman-approved stylings. The harmonies on the “wasting your time” refrain aside, it is the record’s only real regression, especially when sequenced into “When I Come Around,” destined to be Dookie’s third (and biggest) single. Even less typical, “When I Come Around” is a near-ballad with a slow, boozy groove. “No time to search the world around, cause you know where I’ll be found . . .”
When people accuse Armstrong of being a wannabe pop idol, they usually wave their fingers in this direction. Like most of Dookie’s tracks, this could have been a hit for anyone. It’s yet another piece of classic songwriting, but there’s something inescapably juvenile about it. The kind of lyrics that seem written to be scrawled in homeroom notebooks. This, of course, is still all wonderful. “Coming Clean” picks up the tempo but doesn’t allow us to graduate.
“Seventeen and strung out on confusion . . .” Armstrong sings in his best Paul Westerberg-esque tone. It’s the band’s most overt homage to the Replacements.
“Emenius Sleepus” hints at the distance the band have put behind them, touring, signing with a major label, becoming ever more famous. Like “Longview,” it’s an exploration of alienation but this time from someone who has a way out of the bedroom. It’s a nice bookend. A different kind of tension.
“In the End” has a country-punk shuffle to it, hinting at Armstrong’s upbringing in Rodeo. “F.O.D.” (“Fuck Off and Die”) closes the record with a snort, a kiss off, until Cool emerges, after a two-minute pause with a lisping bit of psycho-stalker novelty, called “All by Myself,” another Tre song. “He has many of them,” Cavallo says. “Enough to make a comedy album? Definitely.”
The levity was not something the new partners reached with ease. “There was some angst in the studio,” Cavallo recalls. “They had never been produced before. The longest they had ever spent in a studio was three days in a row to make Kerplunk!” (Green Day, it should be noted, receive coproducer credit with Cavallo on Dookie as well as the subsequent albums on which they’ve collaborated). To reduce the tension, they’d hit the bar at the Mexican eaterie down the road from the studio. “Tre wasn’t old enough to drink, but they would serve him.”
The mixing of Dookie was completed in late 1993 in Los Angeles. Armstrong, Dirnt, and Cool returned to the Ashby House to rehearse for an upcoming tour with Los Angeles punk heroes Bad Religion and to spend some catch-up time with their girlfriends both home and elsewhere. Armstrong spent many of his free hours on the telephone with Adrienne Nesser. Although they weren’t yet a couple, Armstrong filled much of these conversations encouraging her to come to California to visit him, temporarily, at first, then perhaps permanently. Nesser was still in school and couldn’t get away easily. He already had commitments on the road. They agreed that she would visit immediately after the tour and just before the record’s release. Neither of them could have possibly guessed what was about to happen next.
“When I turned in the record, the people at the company immediately said, ’Oh, we’ve got something here guys,’ ” Cavallo remembers.
The band returned to Los Angeles a few weeks later to discuss various marketing details with then Warner Brothers Reecords marketing director Geoffrey Weiss. Weiss had heard and loved the new music but was expecting a trio of sneering, Johnny Rotten–worshippers. He encountered three extremely young and semi-overwhelmed individuals. “It was slightly intimidating to be in the Warner Brothers building for anybody,” Weiss says, “because it was this giant construction full of all these gold records and all these legends of the music business. Anybody who comes from a punk rock background was looking at us saying, ’Jesus Christ, look at all this money, look at all this corporate rock culture.’ Onstage, Billie Joe just had this sort of ’look at me’ quality to him that was so unlike what he exuded in person, where he was almost modest.”
With the songs completed, it came time for Warner Brothers and the band to decide just how to sell this clearly strong product to the world. Warner Brothers, seizing on the trio’s cute appeal, obviously wanted a band shot for the cover. Green Day had other ideas.
“We had a great art department. We had every great photographer, every great illustrator, we had books for everybody,” Weiss says. “But that wasn’t the point. The point was that this band came from a very specific culture and we had to honor that.”
The cover of Dookie is probably the goofiest cover ever to grace a ten-million seller. Fanzine artist and local musician Richie Bucher’s apocalyptic rendering of a fecal bomb exploding over the Bay Area features everything from Patti Smiths’s hair armpit from the Easter album sleeve, to a shoutout to Black Panther Huey P. Newton and Black Sabbath (quoting from the song of the same name) to dogs and monkeys throwing their own poop.
“I think that they saw a fanzine cover for Eggplant’s ’zine Absolute Zippo and they liked it,” Bucher says today. “Billie Joe just told me that it was gonna be called Dookie so I had that to work with, the whole shit theme. That was all I really needed. I had just had this little germ of an idea, and I did a drawing—you know, with the plane coming down and swooping over and dropping shit. Then I saw characters around and just drew them in. The dogs were like something I associated with shit, being a kid, when there was dog shit all around and you throw it at one another and stuff. And monkeys at the zoo, you know, it’s just all stuff I remember from being a kid. Shit-oriented stuff.”
Once pre-release detailing had begun, Green Day went back to the Bookmobile to head with Bad Religion. “I remember hopping on the Bookmobile and hanging out with them each night after the shows,” Gurewitz says, “Jerry Finn was remixing the Dookie record and mailing them CDs. This was the days before broadband at Starbucks. And we’d sit in the Bookmobile and listen to the mixes, and the guys were really into Jerry’s mixes. I remember when all of that was going down. I remember thinking the songs were huge hits when they were playing them every night live before I’d even heard them mixed.”
Bad Religion have a hugely loyal fan base, especially in California. Green Day had been filling small clubs on their most recent outings, but there were two- and three-thousand-seat venues filled with hard-core punks. Supporting Bad Religion could be a challenge to a lesser band, but Green Day were on fire, every night. One by one, they converted the suspicious, ripping through one soon-to-be-released Dookie raver after another.
“The show at the Warfield was where Green Day finally delineated themselves for me,” agrees Gina Arnold. “Before that, they were merely part of that Gilman amalgam.” “We went out to the Hollywood Palladium and saw them open for Bad Relgion,” Jesse Malin (then of New York punks D Generation and now a solo artist) says, “and suddenly the place just erupts, and they’re putting on such an amazing show. I was really super-impressed. I didn’t even stay for Bad Religion. I would later talk to Billie and he’d say, ’Yeah, it was our first really big gig,’ but you couldn’t tell. It’s a big, tough, spread-out room to play, especially opening for Bad Religion, an L.A. band.”
“L.A. is a
city that Bad Religion kind of owns,” Weiss says. “For a band that didn’t have a high profile, at least as far as I knew, it was shocking how well they went over. The audience went bananas for them. [After seeing this] my goal was to have a successful record, which to me meant that if we sold a couple hundred thousand records, it would be fantastic. I remember when Rob was making the record, I asked Tre what his goal was. And he said, ’Oh, I just want to sell half a million copies,’ which I thought at the time was a ridiculously ambitious thing to say.”
The band shot the video for the “Longview” single in their basement apartment on Ashby Street. Video director Mark Kohr was a young prot訩 of filmmaker Tim Burton (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands) and hired for the shoot. “I think the reason why they called me is because I lived up there and I did a whole bunch of videos for Primus, which they had liked,” Kohr says. “So I think that Green Day said, ’Well, get the Primus guy.’”
Kohr was familiar with the Ashby house, as it was on his way to his chiropractor’s office. During the first meeting with the band and their management, Kohr sat quietly and listened as the band brainstormed. “We’ll just do what we do in the apartment. Watch TV. Rehearse.” Budgetary constraints necessitated a performance video, but Kohr encouraged the band to get creative with their suggestions.
“[After that] Billie would say stuff like, ’Hey, you know, I was wondering if you could get a monkey to be sitting with me on the sofa,’ ” Kohr says. “And I said, ’Sure.’ And then there was stuff like, ’Mark, I was wondering if we could shoot like a guy, this friend of ours, as if he were masturbating.’ And I said, ’Sure.’ ” Kohr added mirrors to the walls and painted them bright blue and red. Designed to introduce Billie Joe, Mike, and Tre to the world, the video wisely relies on close-ups and emotions reflected in the song. “I listened to the lyrics and broke it down as I wrote scenarios,” Kohr says.
The band’s clothes are their own, but Kohr did insist on a hair and makeup person. “I, of course, wanted them to look as real as possible,” he says, “but a big white pimple? I don’t know. Sometimes stuff like that needs to be dealt with, so it’s always good to have someone there.” A stunt couch was also necessary for the climax, in which Billie Joe leaps up and begins stabbing through the cushions. “They didn’t want to stab their own couch,” Kohr laughs.
The shoot lasted only two days, but by the end of it, the young director had perfectly captured the band as appealingly approachable—cute but intense young punk personalities. The day after the shoot, events beyond any director’s control or vision transpired that would, albeit indirectly, thrust Green Day even closer to modern rock’s center stage.
On the day that Billie Joe, Mike, Tre, and their pet monkey were romping for the cameras on Ashby Street, Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain was dead on the floor of his Seattle home. “We all went home and the first thing that was out on the news the next morning was that Kurt Cobain had killed himself,” Kohr remembers. “I went into the living room where we shot, and Billie said, ’Oh my god, did you hear that Kurt Cobain killed himself?’ and I said, ’I know, it’s wild.’ And he said, ’Such a bummer.’ He was really affected by it.”
Although both bands toured their respective indie releases across the United States around the same time, Cobain and Armstrong never met. Cobain knew of Green Day only vaguely. He caught an early ’90s Pinhead Gunpowder show in Seattle. Although an avid, indie punk singles collector, he was most likely distracted by that pesky voice of a generation thing, when Green Day were touring Kerplunk! His widow, Courtney Love, insists that Kurt would have been impressed, however. “The title is about poo poo,” Love says. “It’s toys for boys. I’m sure Kurt would have dug it.”
Armstrong, for one, was a big Nirvana fan. Like Cobain, he came from a little and often-maligned town, far from a major city but close enough to long for it—Cobain was raised in Aberdeen, a logging town outside of Seattle. Armstrong’s family life was once blissful, then, suddenly, destroyed by a parent’s death—Cobain’s destroyed by divorce. As a songwriter, Armstrong related well to Cobain’s secret love of power pop, and he knew what it was like to be vilified for it once it started getting too much attention. “I remember standing right next to him at a Nirvana concert about two years ago,” Armstrong told Entertainment Weekly in December 1994, just seven months after Cobain’s body was found. “I really admired him. I just sort of sat next to him and looked at him, and I was like, ’Oh fuck it.’ I just walked away. I’m sure he had people hounding him all the time so I chose not to do it.”
Interestingly, Armstrong had been taken to the Nirvana concert in 1993 by an A-and-R representative eager to sign Green Day to Cobain’s label (the major DGC).
“To some extent, he’s like Jesus to me,” Dirnt told Spin that same year. “He died for my sins, so I could sign to a major label.” As it happened when Operation Ivy disbanded five years earlier, a void was left in the culture (this time, worldwide, as opposed to just regional) for someone to fill. Green Day were again ready to step in. “All of a sudden there was no one there,” Armstrong says in our 2005 Spin interview. “It was like there was no leader anymore.”
When Dookie was released on February 1, 1994, the initial shipping sold out, unexpectedly pushing the release right to the top of the Billboard heat-seeking chart. Warner Brothers had severely underestimated the demand for the new record, and the rush to ship more created the kind of waitlist buzz that still can’t really be planned.
Although it overperformed out of the gate, Dookie took some time to become a phenomenon. The album’s X-factor, the thing that separates platinum-selling hits from diamond (10 million copies) shifting cultural touchstones, could be its odd kid appeal. (Ironically, the image of an Ernie doll, held up by a fan on the album’s back jacket live shot, had to be air-brushed out of reprinted copies of the record because it risked infringing on the equally beloved Sesame Street character’s copyright).
“Rock ’n’ roll had been hijacked by this sort of critical, college and upward mindset and Green Day spoke to nine-year-olds,” Weiss says. “Probably because the videos were so colorful. I think ’Longview’ just had a beat that really made sense to little kids. They’ll kill me for saying this, but the same way as the Spice Girls did. Or if you were nine in 1964, the Beatles were on TV, and they were in your face and they had that youthful exuberance. Green Day had that. Nirvana didn’t. Nirvana was angsty. If you were nine, that angst did not make any sense. On the Dookie tour it seemed like there were lots and lots of nine-year-olds in the audience.”
“I think X-factor is always the same, which is people,” then Reprise label president Howie Klein says. “Those songs on that album are undeniable. What people tend to not understand is that Billie Joe Armstrong is one of the great songwriters of our time. I believe that in the future he will be looked at as a really important songwriter the same way Joni Mitchell is and the way Bob Dylan is . . . and Neil Young is.”
There’s a reality and a conviction to Armstrong’s vocal delivery that immediately resonates as honest, and it seems that no matter where they grow up, at a certain point in their lives, this is what pre-teens and teenagers are craving from their increasingly confusing world. “It goes back to his upbringing,” Klein says. “Billie is real. Everything about him is real. Which, of course, permeates the music and permeates his persona and his public everything. He experiences it in his life and that informs his music. To me he’s like a modern-day Woody Guthrie. That’s how I’ve always seen Billie Joe Armstrong. And I’ve never told him that ’cause I thought he would just think I’m out of my mind.”
Early modern rock radio support didn’t hurt things, as far as bringing on those who’d already been through puberty. Los Angeles–based station K-ROQ, to this day the alpha dog of the entire country as far as taste-making and hit-picking goes, played the hell out of Dookie. The rest of the nation followed. “I remember first hearing ’Longview’ on K-ROQ. I was driving down Topanga Canyon Boulevard, ten thirty at
night, and I heard the song and I had to pull over,” Cavallo says. “I thought to myself, ’Holy shit. This really could be a hit.’ It was one of the first times it was played. Of course, I was calling the radio station [requesting it]. I called about ten times, ’Hey, this is Steve from Canoga Park . . .’”
The Offspring are a band from Southern California and don’t really sound anything like Green Day. As with Nirvana and Pearl Jam a few years earlier, one group is a fluke but two groups with massive hit singles in the same time period, from the same (gigantic) state, and with origins in classic punk constitutes a movement. While the Offspring played Gilman in their pre-fame years, the two bands, it’s been widely reported, are not fans of each other (the Offspring politely declined to be interviewed for this book). It may be personal. It may just be social chemistry. But at least some of their perceived animosity must have to do with being bound together and chucked into the zeitgeist as “the platinum punks.” Smash, the Offspring’s breakthrough (ironically on cred-to-spare indie Epitaph) sold a nearly identical amount of copies as Dookie (although in recent years their cultural importance and commercial stock has fallen noticeably).
“With grunge,” K-ROQ program director Kevin Weatherly notes, “there already started to be at that time like the fourth, fifth, sixth generation of grunge. So Green Day came along, and it was this like really fresh, authentic, you know, punk sound but big hooks. It was young but it was real. It felt that what Nirvana was to grunge, Green Day was to the new punk movement. Obviously, there were some punk bands in the eighties but they never really broke out of that. Being kind of defined as just a punk band. These were punk bands that really wrote big, fat hit songs.”
“Dookie was one of those records where we had to refrain from putting five songs on the radio,” K-ROQ’s music director Lisa Worden adds. “When we got the album it was like, ’Oh my God! Oh my God!’ K-ROQ’s famous for putting on too many things and the label freaks and it just pulls us back. But we did put ’Basket Case’ on right away too.”
