by Marc Spitz
“Everything we did, if we did something smart, made them sell more records,” Weiss says. “If we did something dumb, it made them sell more records. It sort of seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut. If you put them in front of the cameras or in front of the culture in that year, everything worked.”
“I decided I couldn’t handle Green Day as big as they were, so I left the country,” Arica Paleno says. “I went to Europe, but there were huge posters of them everywhere. They were on the sides of double-decker buses! I said, ’My God, I wanna escape this band.’ So I go to Central America and I’m in Nicaragua on a mountain and I hear a guy on the local radio station saying ’Verde Dia! Verde Dia!’ and then something from Dookie comes on. I was thinking ’Goddammit. It’s three a.m. I’m on a mountain. There aren’t even mirrors here. I have to look in silverware to put on lipstick. And here’s Green Day on the fucking radio. I went all over the world trying to bail on this band, because it was too emotional.”
Dookie surged up the Billboard charts post-Woodstock, eventually peaking at Number 2. When the tour hit Boston, just three weeks later, for a free September 9 radio promotional concert at the Hatch Shell of the Boston Opera House, Green Day notched up their second riot inside of a month.
“I was never worried about the amount of people,” says Kurt St. Thomas, then program director for WFNS, the local rock station that organized the event. “But after seeing Woodstock [on television] I said ’OK, kids are gonna mosh and they’re gonna get really rowdy.’ And we had done shows on the Hatch Shell before but never with a band like Green Day. It would always be like a reggae band or something like really mellow.”
When more than 100,000 impatient punks began crowding the Hatch Shell area and began chanting “Green Day” while opening act The Meices played, local authorities started to panic. This wasn’t exactly Altamont East but there was a nervous-making tension already in the air, an hour before headliners Green Day were set to perform. “So now they’re like, ’We’re gonna fucking pull the plug,’” St. Thomas remembers. “That’s it. I just remember it kept getting more and more intense.” The crowd responded to these threats with chants of “Pigs suck! Pigs suck!” and “Hell no, we won’t go!”
After several announcements to calm the crowd (a few made by Armstrong himself) Green Day began their set but it soon became clear that the situation was beyond containment. By the seventh song in the set, which was “Longview,” Armstrong himself was caught up in the energy of the moment. “Billie Joe jumps off of the stage, [goes] down into the flower bed and starts pulling flowers out of the bed, and basically that’s when all hell just erupted. And that was it. They just shut the power down. Green Day ran off the stage down into the bottom of the Hatch Shell, and then bottles just started flying.”
The Dookie North American tour finally wound down in New York City, shortly before Christmas. When 1994 began, Kurt Cobain was alive and Green Day were a club act with a hot buzz on them. The band members were all single and living off their tour money and indie royalties. By December, they were a Grammy-nominated, arena-rocking trio of young millionaires with wives and fianc褳. The press considered them spokespeople for the Beavis and Butt-Head generation. In March of 1995 Billie Joe and Adrienne welcomed their first child, Joseph Marciano Armstrong, into this new world. The couple would have a second son, Jakob (middle name “Danger”) in September of 1998. Tre Cool had married his girlfriend Lisa Lyon and in January he too became a father, of little Ramona. They were twenty-two years old, but much of the rest of their lives seemed already set for them.
“I’m just exhausted,” Armstrong told Entertainment Weekly that December. “Totally. We’ve outdone ourselves in a serious way. I have insomnia problems anyway, so it’s hard for me to sleep. That’s the main thing I’m looking forward to. I’ll probably sleep for the rest of the year.”
Whether or not he knew the rest of the year was only two weeks long at the time is questionable. It had been a truly dizzying run.
Chapter Seven
INSOMNIACS
Insomniac, the follow-up to Dookie, was one of the most anticipated rock releases of 1995 (it vied for that status with the Smashing Pumpkins’ double disc Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness). As Green Day convened to begin recording their new material, once again with Rob Cavallo, they were still shell-shocked by the events of the previous year and struggling with questions of identity and purpose. In the past, life was only about making music and staving off boredom. There was more to it now: family, money, image, pressure.
Armstrong, Dirnt, and Cool all purchased houses in suburban Oakland. They could have lived anywhere in the world, but the Bay Area provided them with a sorely required feeling of solidity and familiarity. “I’m sure one day I will leave,” Armstrong reasoned. “But I’ve been an East Bay kid my whole life.”
“Billie wasn’t sure how to enjoy his success, or if he even should. ’Should I enjoy this or should I be miserable,’ ” his sister Anna remembers. “And yeah, they really did close ranks. I think that’s one of the reasons why they stayed up in Oakland instead of moving to L.A. It was a really traumatic time. It even changed his relationship with us. You’d be excited about your brother’s success and want to talk about it, but he wouldn’t want to talk about it. It’d be taboo. Like there was something wrong with selling ten million records.”
Sean Hughes simply remembers them disappearing. “They never flaunted their status,” he explains. “They were just around [Rodeo] a lot less.”
Attempts to live the normal lives they’d never really known were made but even in the suburbs, people knew of Green Day. Grocery shopping was difficult if there were any teenagers around. During the day, when they were all in school, Armstrong, a walker, would travel to the store to get the newspaper and a cup of coffee in the early afternoon, and find himself grilled by the middle-aged proprietor. “When is the new record coming out?” “I don’t know. Probably this fall. Thanks for the coffee,” he’d reply, before beating it. The world, only a year ago, seemed wide open as they moved through it like an army. Now, it was shrinking. Billie Joe wrote some of his new material while staying up all night with his young son. These sleepless nights inspired the album’s title.
As usual, only Green Day could relate to what they were going through. The band, now a mini-corporation, put several of their friends like Bill Schneider on the payroll as techs or assistants; but even their closest friends had a hard time providing any empathy over the fact that they were now husbands and fathers, much less international rock superstars.
Family and rock, or rather family vs. rock, was the make-up of their daily lives. A new song was due, but the refrigerator was broken and “Didn’t it need to be fixed? Can we get someone to do that? Am I supposed to do that? How do you fix a refrigerator? How do you write a hit when you’re trying to write a hit? And fix the fridge?”
Paranoid notions swirled around Billie Joe’s, Mike’s, and Tre’s heads as they tried to focus on one thing at a time. The group were always business minded out of necessity. John Kiffmeyer had taught them that. Now Green Day were a business.
“One question we get asked a lot now,” Mike Dirnt complained in a 1995 Spin interview, “is ’How much money do you make?’ When I was younger, I actually asked that question to my mom’s friend. My mom took me and slapped me in the face and said, ’Do not ask that question. It’s none of your business.’ Sure we make money. We make plenty of money. And it’s peace of mind for me to know that I’ve bought my mom a house and that my little sisters don’t have to live in a trailer anymore.”
“I have a vague recollection of intentionally trying not to talk about money with them,” Jeff Ott says. “At some point after Dookie, they said, ’Who should we give money to? The accountants say we have to give away money for taxes.’ And I kind of remember feeling like, ’Oh, that’s why I avoided all that just to keep that stuff clear.’ So I don’t know how they dealt with it, but I didn’t really wanna deal with people about m
oney at any point in my life. Really, I still don’t.”
“They certainly made a lot of money and they certainly were able to buy houses and cars and things. Although that really wasn’t where their mindset was necessarily at,” Cavallo says of the post-Dookie period. “They actually were saying to themselves, ’We’ve made it now. What are we gonna do?’ And their main response to that was to prove to everybody that they still rocked.”
Their fourth full-length and second Warner/Reprise effort, Insomniac, recorded over the summer and released on October 10, 1995, is commonly referred to as Green Day’s “reactionary record.” Galled that they’d been tagged as teenybopper punks after cross-country van tours and an indie career that lasted nearly twice as long as Operation Ivy’s, the band indeed felt that they had to prove themselves “still punk.”
Whenever possible, they opted for the raw and the in-your-face over the tweenie-friendly. The cover, a collage commissioned from Winston Smith, for example, was entitled “God Told Me to Skin You Alive.”
“I got a call one day and it was Tre and he asked, ’Hey, we were wondering if you still might be interested in doing a record cover for us,’” Smith recalls. “And, I said, ’Oh, sure, come on over. You can look at some of the pictures I got.’ And he and Bill and Rob Cavallo, who was their producer, really nice guy himself, came over and hung out for a couple hours and went through big piles of stuff. We went out for a pizza and looked at different stuff and at one point I asked, ’So how’s it going? You guys got a day job or did you sell any records for your last record?’ You know, ’cause I had never seen their names all the time in MRR; all I could see was other bands in the Bay Area playing here and there. And he says very calmly, ’Well, you know, our last record sold about nine million copies.’ I nearly fell down. I thought they had printed them up and were peddling them out of the back of the VW microbus.”
The video for the first single, “Geek Stink Breath,” was a perfect piece of career-suicidal behavior. With bloody dental surgery footage, straight out of a punk rock Marathon Man, and the band appearing only on static-marred television screens, it was hardly the makings of a blockbuster.
“It’s open to interpretations from all sides,” director Kevin Kerslake says of the off-putting image, and whether or not the metaphor of career-ing as pulling teeth applies directly or implicitly. Still, with its “. . . and I’m picking scabs off my face” chorus, it’s clear the band knew this wasn’t one for the nine-year-olds to sing in the bath.
“It was a harder record, Insomniac,” says Brent Burghoff, who engineered it. “A darker, harder record. And I think that was maybe the answer to some of the massive success and whatever comes along with it. [As they recorded] I saw a lot of release going on, so to speak.”
“Consciously or unconsciously, the band probably didn’t want to be the hit-making machine,” Weiss says. “That was my perception of why they would choose a song like ’Geek Stink Breath’ to come back with [after Dookie]. I actually thought it was a mistake.”
“Geek Stink Breath” is actually a great single. It’s a chugging, mean-spirited rocker about the ravages (dental and otherwise) of crystal meth abuse. The drug was, at the time, the Bay Area’s signature illegal narcotic, brewed in bathtubs by bikers and tweakers and prized for its cheap and intense high. Speed is great if you’re a trucker or studying for the SATs. Exalting it is not so good if you’re the punk pinup from the cover of Tiger Beat. Armstrong knew this well too.
“They chose it, I think, to take some of the heat off them,” Weiss says. “My perception was that the band had been a little bit freaked out by how big they got and they wanted to reassert how punk rock they were and that’s why they made that record.”
“OK, here’s a band that is coming off an album that sold probably [nine] million records; I mean it was insane,” says K-ROQ’s Kevin Weatherly. “And so there were huge expectations when that album came out. And ’Geek Stink’ was the first track and a lot of times the first track coming off of a hugely successful record gets the benefit of the doubt. And the momentum of just the benefit of that doubt can drive it up the charts. You know, that song, for us, was a good solid track, not a huge slam dunk.”
Shortly before the record’s release, the band cut ties with management and lawyer, Jeff Saltzman and Elliot Cahn, and decided to boil down their retinue even further. They were one of the biggest bands in the world, with a world tour on the way, when they decided to take on the task of self-managing their careers. Saltzman and Cahn may have been distracted by the formation of their own label, 510 Records. With Green Day already more than established, they focused most of their attentions on younger bands like the ska act Dancehall Crashers. This didn’t aid in closing a rift between Green Day and their representation that had been growing for some time.
“I think the problem with Jeff was that he didn’t listen to them,” says Mark Kohr. “510 is the area code of Oakland, or Berkeley, and at the time it just felt kind of tacky. At that time the band were concerned that they would lose their cred. So there was friction. They were stressed out.”
“I think their mechanism was to shut off from the world for a while,” says Jim Baltudis. “Every other phone call didn’t have to be from Elliot or Jeff about some issue that maybe, perhaps they weren’t at the stage of maturity to deal with. A lot of responsibility came with that new success. I’ve seen it happen with artists like Prince. You know, Prince doesn’t want to deal with the issues that he has at Warner Brothers, so he changes his name to an unpronounceable symbol. This is what happens when you’re surrounded by a bunch of yes-men. Attorneys or whatever. The mentality level shifts. I think it was probably really scary for those guys, and they managed it the best way they could. They eliminated certain things that they thought were responsible for it all.”
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1995, Armstrong is asked whether it’s still difficult to write about being defiant and disaffected given his level of success. “I’m not exactly defiant, but there’s still things that anger me,” he replied, citing racism, and police brutality.
Armstrong knew, however, that unlike before, his gripes were guaranteed an audience. Any score he wished to settle, he could drag out now before literal millions. And so we get Insomniac’s most talked about (and least played) track, “86.” Armstrong smartly inhabits the mind of one of his own Gilman Street critics as he fires back at the punk fundamentalists who’ve banned him for life.
What brings you around?
Did you lose something the last time you were here?
You’ll never find it now
It’s buried deep with your identity
So stand aside and let the next one pass
Don’t let the door kick you in the butt
There’s no return from 86
—lyrics reprinted by permission
The focused wit ranks it high on the list of great “fuck you to the old scene” songs (Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” still resting at the top of that one).
In an article that heralded the release of the Insomniac album while at the same time questioning Green Day’s edginess now that they were big money-makers, The New York Times observed that the world “was their mosh pit.” It wouldn’t be for long.
Although the Dancehall Crashers never really capitalized on it, ska had replaced pop-punk (mach 1) as the new old genre. Although Insomniac debuted at number 2 (a ranking it took Dookie months to reach) and would be certified platinum by January, it was, like Nirvana’s In Utero, almost willing itself out of the charts. Warner Brothers were expecting huge returns. Although burned by the lukewarm public reaction to the new record, they threw their support behind the band for better or worse.
Remember, there were always two sides to Green Day, and one of them—the ambitious inner rock star—was certainly shaken that they’d succeeded so effortlessly at . . . well, failing. It’s easy, especially when the world is watching, to say, “Oh, I don’t care about
show business.” The fact that they all had families to support, bills and taxes to pay, and the expectations of their fans and record label to meet wasn’t nearly as important as the fact that, at least in part, they secretly did care. They simply wanted to control how small they got. Or how big. And the part of Green Day that wanted, or needed, to be big was secretly stung by Insomniac’s commercial performance.
“You know, when it came out and didn’t sell as much as Dookie, I think it spun their heads around, like all of a sudden they’re failures,” Anna Armstrong Humann says. “[After that] Billie’d be hateful towards other bands. He’d be real negative. I don’t know if it was ego or insecurity.” The Smashing Pumpkins (who met both commercial and critical expectations with their Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness record) were a frequent target of Billie Joe’s snide, private put-downs. Green Day’s inner punk could dismiss the Pumpkins as glorified arena rockers, full of pomp but hollow inside. Green Day’s latent Queen fan could only burn with jealousy. It’d be another full decade before the trio would “out” the latter side of themselves.
“We didn’t just sign them because they had a couple of cute tunes,” Howie Klein says today when asked about the label’s loyalty. “They weren’t Hanson. We were going after artists who we believed in, who have a vision that we can buy into and who we can help. Coming off this gigantic record Dookie, would we have liked to sell more records? Sure. But their work was not suffering. They were still doing really good work so who cares? Not for one second did I lose a nano-millimeters’ worth of faith in Green Day.”
