by Marc Spitz
As “Basket Case” made a steady crossover from modern rock to pop radio, the band headed back to Europe, this time as headliners. “They couldn’t believe what was happening,” says Bryan Jones of the band Horace Pinker, a frequent tour opener during the Dookie promotional push. “It was surreal but they were just trying to have a good time, just trying to ride the wave and make the most out of it. It was weird because there were still some places where Dookie hadn’t hit. Like Belgium. Nobody knew who they were in Belgium. There were maybe two hundred people there. I remember after the show, we were sitting there watching them play and we’re just like, ’Wow, this is the last time we will ever see them in front of, you know, two hundred people.’ After the show, I saw Billie out on the sidewalk, smoking, and nobody was bothering him. I was thinking you know, ’This is probably the last time this guy can sit here on the sidewalk and just hang out and nobody will fuck with him.’”
“What happens to a band that gets that popular,” David Katznelson wonders. “I think Green Day handled it pretty well. I can tell you what happens to the label. The label is back in a place where they need to be, where they have a number one band. There’s nothing like breaking a number one band. You can bring back bands, and have bands maintain themselves, but you have a band that no one’s ever heard about coming out of nowhere that looks sexier than you could ever look. And the label loved it. And Rob was the golden boy.”
“It was in the spring of 1994,” Cavallo says, “and they’d just been back from touring in Europe. I picked them up at the airport, and I got them all in a rental car and said to them, ’Guys, I gotta tell you something, you know, all the indicators point to the fact that you’re gonna sell a couple a million records even though we’ve only sold a couple hundred thousand or two hundred and fifty thousand. Just the trajectory of the single, all the research a record company can do is telling us that it’s gonna be pretty fucking huge.’ And Tre, who I love, says to me, ’Well of course it is, Rob. What did you expect?’ And I said, ’Yeah, but I think it’s bigger than you even think. And it’s bigger than we ever thought.’ There was silence for the first five or ten seconds. They were letting it sink in. And then we just started hopping and hollering and having a great time. But it’s always an adjustment. There’s always a ’Holy shit, what did we do this time?’ Every time you take another step in your career, especially if you’re stepping into the limelight to be famous and to do something, it changes—if you’re smart, you realize what’s happening is it’s actually changing you and it’s changing what you mean to your fans and it’s changing what you mean to yourself and it changes what you mean creatively. And I think they were always really smart and aware of that and they realized what it does is it sets up a new challenge. And I think that was a good signpost that our conversation was met with sort of pensive bravado.”
“Everything after [Dookie’s release] was completely unpredictable,” Armstrong told me in 2005. “I remember everything being scary. It was a really sensitive period for us. We were affected by the fame . . . kind of in a negative way. We should have just looked at our record and said, ’We made a great record. And we know that, and we don’t have to justify anything. Stick to the music.’ But we were all twenty-one, twenty-two years old. We just started trying to get into the bar scene. All of a sudden, you walk in and you’re this famous band. You’re in this shithole bar, and you’re like, ’Wait a minute I just want to have some drinks.’ And so-and-so is trying to talk to me and so-and-so wants to pick a fight with me.”
The band had one another through it all and would filter out any weird energy as they did in the past: by employing an insular sense of humor, tended to during countless nights alone in a van in the middle of nowhere.
924 Gilman Street and the ethics they took with them even after they were banned had always made Green Day feel somewhat invulnerable to schmoozers and celebrity-hungry hangers on. But now they felt completely outnumbered. There was no real protection from these people once they crossed over into super-fame.
It was around this time that Armstrong realized that he wanted to be with Adrienne Nesser for good. Perhaps this new and relentless exposure to suck-ups and industry jivers had a positive effect in that it refined the twenty-two-year-old’s sense of what was really real and what was fleeting. After four years of unconsummated courtship, Armstrong finally succeeded in pairing up with his teeange crush.
“I still had my set of friends,” he says. “I loved them. I loved Adrienne. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me in the whole world and that was all I needed.”
“I think Billie was honestly head over heels for her. It was almost like they were stepping up [with everything else], so I think growing up a bit with regard to relationships was a part of it,” David Armstrong says. “Everything was happening at once. Traveling, and then a brand-new wife that was pregnant.” Armstrong’s sister has a similar theory. “I think he felt untethered,” Anna says. “And Adrienne was somebody he could put in his pocket in a lot of ways. He could carry his family or someone close to him with him at all times. He loved her and he knew that she loved him. I think when he was feeling alone she made him feel that he wasn’t.”
The band were booked all through the summer, with promotional appearances set up at every major city stop. When Armstrong proposed to Nesser in June, he knew he didn’t have a lot of time for wedding planning or a honeymoon. The couple married in a small (and by all accounts, extremely short) ceremony at the Claremont Hotel, Berkeley’s poshest, just a few days later, on the second of July, 1994. The bride’s and groom’s families and the members of Green Day and their girlfriends made up the wedding party. The following day, Nesser found out she was pregnant. The day after that, Green Day joined the fourth annual Lollapalooza tour. “They just sort of signed up for everything all at once, you know,” recalls Jason White. “Billie got married within maybe a few months, I don’t know, after the record came out. And then, you know, right after he got married they find out she was pregnant. Same thing happened to Tre with his first wife, Lisa. And Mike got married to his girlfriend Anastacia right after that as well. Maybe they needed to feel grounded because they didn’t know what the hell was happening to them.”
“I remember at one point after we’d had giant hits with ’Longview,’ ’Basket Case,’ and ’When I Come Around,’ the company really wanted to come with ’Welcome to Paradise’ as the fourth single. And it was getting tons of airplay,” Geoffrey Weiss recalls. “But the band wouldn’t let us put out a single of it, and they wouldn’t let us work it and they wouldn’t let us make a video. And we kept trying, and Billie Joe’s whole rationale—I kept saying, look, we can sell more records. He didn’t care. To him the song was about a period of his life—I think he was ambivalent about rerecording it. I just kept saying, ’Look, people wanna play this song, people wanna hear this song, we’ll sell more records.’ And he was like, ’It’s a lie. I can’t do it.’ So, I never really saw him as being unambitious; I just saw him as being like, ’I do this for a very particular reason, and I’m not gonna change my thinking about it no matter what.’ ” “Welcome to Paradise” became the radio smash that never made it to retail, further proof that even the band could do nothing to slow down their success in 1994.
Ironically, for all the rancor it inspired, Dookie’s impact on the world had a positive effect on the Gilman Street scene as well. True to form, Green Day opted to tour the United States with gay punk rockers and Lookout signees Pansy Division instead of a fellow Warner Brothers act who might have benefitted from their support. As the venue sizes increased, so did the jock to punk fan ratio, and the band seemed to delight in making them sit through numbers like “James Bondage” and “Denny (Naked).” “There was this club,” remembers Pansy Division’s John Ginoli. “It was a bowling alley, held six hundred people, and it was way sold out. There was somebody in line who was wearing a belt that said ’White Power’ and they were like, ’Oh, no.’ Just the kind of people they
do not want at their show. So they got some security people, the whole band went out there with their security, everybody’s in line, they confront this guy, and say, ’We don’t like your belt.’ And the guy’s like, ’Well it doesn’t mean anything.’ And they’re like, ’Well, it better not. We’re watching you.’ And they had the security guys there looking up the guy. So I thought that was nice to try to defuse the situation in advance. And to have the message be out there that [racism or sexism] was something they wouldn’t tolerate.”
Lookout Records’ fortunes soared thanks to increased sales of the EPs and the first two full-lengths, as well as a general interest in Bay Area punk rock. “Our sales went from several hundred thousand dollars a year to several million almost overnight,” Livermore says. “It was a bit of a shock, but I think that’s one area where being older was helpful: Because I’d been around a while, the large amounts of money coming in didn’t seem quite so big a deal as it might have been if I were still in my twenties. That being said, I found myself dealing with enormous pressure to spend more of that money on marketing and promotion from bands who thought that was all that stood between them and being the next Green Day.”
“Green Day and the Offspring have both had long careers,” Fat Mike says today. “But there’s fifty other punk bands that totally blew it: Jawbreaker or Jawbox, punk bands that signed to a major in 1995 and disappeared because their regular fan base disowned them, and they never got popular.”
Soon, Green Day were selling out arenas all over the United States, but they applied some of their Gilman-nurtured punk humanism to this surprise superstardom, accomplishing what fellow early nineties superstars Pearl Jam could not do (with much less fanfare too): offering their young fans cheap concert tickets. The math was pretty simple. By starting with a low ticket price (thanks to low overhead) they were able to allow an agent to tack on a fee and still keep tickets in the fifteen- to twenty-dollar range.
The band applied an equal measure of fiscal responsibility to their new fortunes as well. For much of 1994 and ’95, they were simply too busy to slow down and spend their new wealth unwisely. They also carried around a measure of Gilman-guilt, which would, for a few years anyway, prevent them from fully indulging in the rock-star privileges and toys now available to them. Indulgences, however, were very few. They wore the same clothes. Drank the same beer. None of the members of Green Day came from money, and financial security for themselves and their families (old and new) was a primary concern.
While it was somewhat easy to keep their business sound and practical (having come from essentially nothing), controlling the spin was much more difficult. As Dookie sold and sold the attention thrown on the band would only get more intrusive and weird.
Green Day played The Late Show with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and MTV, increasing their profile and teen friendly lovable Marx Brothers of punk identity. Once mainstream print media, sensing a trend “punk redux,” came around, and a thousand “Young, Loud, and Snotty” or “It’s Not Easy Being Green Day” headlines were born. The days when they were only being bashed in ’zines seemed swell by comparison.
Dookie was too big to be just a great record. It was now both critically adored and insta-contextualized. Like Nevermind, it was read into as a generational statement. “This is music for people with raging hormones and short attention spans,” Time magazine wrote in June 1994, “for the sort of kid who, as his burrito rotates in the microwave, impatiently frets, ’three minutes is an eternity.’” “Beavis and Butt-Head have started a band and it’s called Green Day,” crowed Rolling Stone in their “Hot Issue” of that year (Green Day being named Hot Band). Entertainment Weekly would later note (in December of that year) the phenomenon of the trout dances writ extremely large. “Call it Anarchy 90210. The punk rock of yore may have been the property of gloomy subterraneans, Orange County surfers, and jackbooted British thugs, but these days the Clearasil club is learning to mosh.”
Dookie-mania brought equal measures of absurdity and mayhem to the band as they criss-crossed the United States in the summer of 1994. Lollapalooza was dizzying if only because they were slotted into an opening slot in the harsh daylight. At the previous Lollapaloozas this main stage slot was usually occupied by a band just grateful to perform for a few hundred kids, and get their merch booth out on the lawn. Green Day, who agreed to the spot before Dookie exploded (they replaced Japanese noisecore heroes The Boredoms, who played the first leg), were now the biggest draw on a bill headlined by Beastie Boys and Smashing Pumpkins (and once earmarked for Nirvana). Thousands of kids clogged the venue at 1 p.m., and immediately made a break for the toilets and concession stands following Green Day’s all-too-short set.
“Once again, the organizers of this whacky affair decided to put the cart out before the horse,” the Music Connection observed at the time, “and scheduled Green Day, the hottest act on the roster, to open the event.”
A Kohr-directed video for “Basket Case” (shot in a still functional lunatic asylum) found even more favor at MTV than “Longview.” Still, by the time they left the stage for what is, to date, still their defining performance, they would be the most popular rock group in the world. Green Day were huge, and not just in Petaluma.
The Woodstock 2004 Arts and Music Festival was designed to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original, legendary gathering of hippies and freaks in Upstate New York in the summer of 1969. Billed as “three more days of peace, love, and music,” the event had the air of a marketing ploy, but the bookings, a combination of classic rock godheads such as Dylan; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Peter Gabriel; and Santana, with modern rock and metal favorites like Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—with a good measure of crunchy, jam-friendly beardos, old and new, from Blind Melon and Blues Traveler to Country Joe McDonald—were smart and the 300,000 fans who traveled to Saugerties, New York, in early August were eager to drop $130-plus on some more history . . . and a tie-dyed T-shirt or leather cuff.
Sheer audience demand was the only thing that made Green Day a likely addition to an otherwise punk-free bill. “I went there with really low expectations and came out overwhelmed,” Armstrong told the Los Angeles Times. “It was the closest thing to chaos, and complete anarchy, that I have ever seen in my whole life.”
The event that helped turn Green Day into a household name almost didn’t happen. “There were people who wanted them to do it and people who didn’t want them to do it,” Geoffrey Weiss says. “I think I fell into the camp of people who didn’t want them to do it because I thought that Woodstock was something from a long time ago; it was for hippies, it was part of a previous culture’s iconography. Why on earth would this band that stood for this important musical subculture finally breaking through want to rely on the imagery of another time when they were so clearly of this time.”
As they did twenty-five years previous, the skies over Upstate New York opened on Day Three and each tribe—hippie, Goth, punk, hip-hop head—was drenched with rain. By the time Green Day hit the stage at about three in the afternoon, the 830 or so acres of farmland became a mudfield, and the audience was completely covered. “Welcome to Paradise” was the set opener. As he sang, some mud and spew-covered souls found this ironic choice a bit offensive and began chucking the sod at the band.
“Come on you assholes, throw some more,” Armstrong egged. He grabbed a piece of mud and stuck it in his mouth as he sang. The crowd lost it at that point and the gunk-fire tripled, then quadrupled, turning the expanse between the giant stage and the dank pit brown. This was Green Day’s biggest show yet. With the pay-per-view audience, they’d be playing to millions. Their families and friends were watching at home in the East Bay. Their peers were watching from backstage, and here they were . . . covered in dookie.
As they did whenever life tried to shit on them, they turned it into a triumph. “It worked out well because of the mud fight, and it got incredible internationa
l coverage,” Weiss continues. In the middle of it all, Mike Dirnt was beaten senseless by a panicking and overzealous security guard who, what with the sky being brown and solid, mistook him for a stage-rushing fan. It was hailed as a refreshing bit of anarchy in an otherwise calculated bit of mall-ified counter-culture; proof that Green Day and their fans really were interchangeable. “Who gives a shit about that,” Dirnt said at the time. “The fact of the matter is that it was a great show. That was an unfortunate incident.” Besides, Dirnt had done far worse to himself in the past. By the time the headliners, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, took the stage that night nobody was talking about the headliners, the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“Woodstock was nuts,” says Anna Armstrong, who’d been, along with the rest of Billie Joe’s family, more or less agape all year over Green Day’s ascent. It began with the shock and thrill of hearing “Longview” on local modern-rock station Live 105. “We’d sit around listening or calling in. That was huge. But with Woodstock, we were thinking, ’Look at this crowd. And look at Billie, how he’s able to interact with them and control them like that.’ I always knew Billie was a showman, and I knew [watching him] that he wasn’t afraid to be up there.”
Woodstock’s impact on the band’s fortune’s were seismic. In one perfect synthesis of planned stagecraft and a few priceless accidents, Green Day broke out of the modern-rock box, just as they had broken out of the indie punk box the previous year. They were now pop stars, household names. “I always call it pre- and post-Woodstock,” says the band’s former publicist Jim Baltudis. “Literally the following Monday the phone never stopped ringing. It was just a complete one-eighty from a publicity standpoint. We had eight lines, with the blinking buttons all blinking at the same time. We’d come back from lunch and there’d be fifteen new messages about people wanting to talk to the band. It was such a turning point. The sod throwing and Mike’s tooth getting knocked out just created a huge buzz that was organic and huge at the same time. I remember watching the performance and thinking, ’Oh my God. This changes everything.’ Press [for Dookie] started out as a well-crafted plan with the best intentions. Then it became crisis management. We just went from crisis to crisis.”
