by Marc Spitz
Happily, Canadian former child star Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill album was about to become the next Warner-affiliated ten-plus million-selling modern-rock phenomenon. If this took any heat off of Green Day remains unknown. Radio play for the album’s second single, “Brain Stew,” enabled Green Day to move another million units in early 1996. This probably calmed some suits.
Recorded live and sequenced (also live) into the two-minute thrash-fest “Jaded,” its melody appeared while Armstrong was humming to Joseph late one sleepless night. “We put ’Brain Stew’ on and you know,” Weatherly says, “it took a minute, but then it ended up probably being one of the biggest Green Day songs for K-ROQ that they’ve ever done.”
Song by song, Insomniac is pretty thrilling. It’s easily worthy of Dookie, with pummeling punk tracks like “Tightwad Hill” and “Walking Contradiction” ranking with some of the best songs they’ve come up with to date.
Green Day launched a world tour in support of the release early in 1996. The shows were booked into sports arenas, but the spark didn’t seem to ignite this time around. Perhaps it was too soon after the extensive Dookie tour. Although always ambitious, Green Day still didn’t seem 100 percent comfortable with their size and popularity. It would be something that would take them another decade to finally come to terms with. “We were becoming the things we hated,” Armstrong said. “Playing those big arenas. It was beginning to not be fun anymore.”
As they had done before, Green Day took care to keep ticket prices low and many of the shows were sellouts. However, several cities saw the band’s drawing power thin out a little. The sellout shows were fine, but the smaller attended concerts seemed to be filled with fair-weather fans.
“When kids used to come to our shows, they used to come like a community, to hang out and be part of a punk atmosphere,” Armstrong complained to BAM that year. “Now it’s more like ’Alright, motherfucker . . . entertain my fucking ass right now.’”
Perhaps even more difficult than the ennui and the decreasing box office was the pain of leaving their wives and young children behind. For three young men with varying degrees of unstable childhoods, this must have been especially unsettling.
“Billie used to make these speeches on stage about how much he missed his son. Nobody could understand what he was saying,” Dr. Frank Portman says (His band The Mr. T Experience provided support on this tour). “The whole thing of touring at that time, anywhere, but particularly in Europe, was finding a phone that worked; it was the most difficult thing. I remember a couple of nights in the middle of nowhere in Germany or wherever, and Bill, Tre, and I trying to find a phone so we could call our wives at home.”
“I’d still rather be the station wagon kind of parent,” Armstrong says today. “You know, like going to Wally World. I just wanted to be a normal dad.”
This was not an easy feat, despite the fame and ability to absorb the long-distance bills. The European leg of the Insomniac tour, in late 1996, was canceled before its completion, and without much ceremony. The band, claiming exhaustion (surely mental as much as physical at this point) flew home to be with their families and tried one more time to balance family life with their careers.
Chapter Eight
“SHIT HAPPENS”
Another year passed quickly and by 1997, the members of Green Day were well into a long period of actually enjoying their hard-won luxury. It was impossible, however, to credibly supply another barrage of ferocious punk rock from the suburbs. The new album needed to somehow reflect their current state, although if it did so honestly, what would people think?
“Having a son has changed my ideas about life,” Armstrong said at the time. “I am a father and I am a husband and I have this relationship but at the same time I want to be like an arrogant rock ’n’ roll star. The two roles definitely clash.”
For the third time, Rob Cavallo was brought in to sort through the three dozen new songs Armstrong and the band had finished since the aborted European tour. Despite Insomniac’s relatively disappointing performance, a new producer was never considered for what would be their next Warner Brothers release, Nimrod.
“Well Rob had been with those guys since the beginning so he’s like their mentor,” says Chris Lord-Alge, the acclaimed studio veteran (who would later come in to mix both Nimrod and American Idiot). “He’s the George Martin of Green Day. He keeps those guys on the leash.”
“They’ve always asked me to do it,” Cavallo shrugs. “I think they’re the kind of guys who are very loyal, and I think they’re very good guys. I think that they look at things like—it is definitely hard to get into their circle. But if you do get in, you’re in.”
There was one caveat, which the band and Cavallo did discuss at length. Nimrod had to be different. Essentially, Green Day, who could write stellar three-chord/two and a half minute punk rock while on the bog, were becoming bored with being Green Day. Although 39/Smooth and Kerplunk! had both been certified gold by 1997, most of their fans had no idea just how long they’d been making records.
“[Nimrod] is the record I’ve wanted to make since the band started,” Armstrong said at the time. “I was always wondering when I was going to get to make my ’London Calling,’ and I decided the time was now.” Whether or not it achieves “London Calling” status (it doesn’t), Nimrod, with its horns, strings, and sheer size (it’s nearly twice as long as Dookie) is surely not fenced in by provincial punk rock constraints. Nimrod, if nothing else, stands as a genuine transitional record, a gateway to astonishing things down the road, and in many ways a farewell to the youth that had marked them as a band so deeply from Sweet Children onward.
The new songs took four full months just to record (unspeakable in genuine punk-dom), and after a point, the process drove the band—holed up in the city’s Conway Studios and sleeping inside the Sunset Marquis (a notorious rock-star playground in West Hollywood)—to drink and worse. As sessions stretched from noon to two in the morning every day, the spirited foosball tournaments around the studio’s table were hardly enough to calm the demons. “One night one of us was walking down the halls knocking on people’s doors while naked,” Dirnt said. “Another one of us tried to pick a fight with someone from another band,” Armstrong remembered. “Let’s just say someone from an Australian band who’s not very famous anymore.” (Pretty sure it wasn’t Men at Work.)
Tre Cool chucked his hotel room television set out the window and cackled as it shattered on the pavement below. “There was a lot of glass,” Armstrong observed. “You have to live that arrogant lifestyle every now and again.”
Cool was even briefly linked to actress and serial rock-boy poacher Winona Ryder, perhaps the strongest evidence of Green Day’s submission to the rock life.
Unfortunately, the band’s inner punk (whose turn it was to take the back seat this time around) was not there to keep a lid on the cliché overload, and soon the dookie began flying.
Although the band officially deny this, it was strongly rumored that on Oscar Night 1997, while acclaimed French actress Juliette Binoche was onstage collecting a Best Supporting Actress award for her extremely earnest work in the highbrow war drama The English Patient, as she thanked the Academy, she had no clue that Mike Dirnt’s buttocks were extended, baboon-style, over her balcony—she had the misfortune of having been given the room below a very restless bass player. Dirnt’s turd plunked onto Binoche’s terrace and waited for her to return home. “She was so pissed she tried to get us thrown out of the hotel,” Dirnt said. “As they say, ’Shit happens.’ “
Fortunately, for all involved, the band were no longer managing themselves under such conditions. Pat Magnarella was hired to manage them, with Cavallo’s father, Bob, overseeing the affairs in an unofficial capacity. Magnarella was, at the time, also managing Weezer and the Goo Goo Dolls. “It was just too much to deal with,” Armstrong said at the time. “I wanna write songs. We didn’t go around and whore ourselves to any other management. [Magnarella an
d Cavallo] were conveniently there. We happened to luck out. There was no contract signed. It was pretty much a handshake and a nod and we had a manager. Pat’s the main guy, and Bob is sort of like the management guru.”
“If we were Muppets,” Dirnt clarified, “they would both be Jim Henson.”
All eighteen songs that made the final sequence of Nimrod are good (Green Day have never released anything truly rank), but only a few seemed worth the effort and expense. “King for a Day,” a cheeky, Pete Townshend–esqe lyric about cross-dressing enlivened by ska horns and a bass line cribbed from Otis Day and the Knights’ version of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout!” (the band acknowledged this during their American Idiot tour, often segueing into the fraternity row classic). With third-wave ska act No Doubt now trumping them as the biggest modern rock band going, the track seems a wicked wink in that direction, as if to say, “We can do this too. It’s not hard.” “Hitchin’ a Ride” opens with Middle Eastern strings courtesy of Petra Haden (then of That Dog) and proceeds to brutally (and hilariously) recount the on-again, off-again wagon jumping that the band themselves were dealing with as they veered from fatherhood to rocker-hood and back. “Nice Guys Finish Last” could be a throwback to Dookie. It’s a neat melody, with a spirited bass line by Dirnt. “Take Back” is one minute and nine seconds of hard-core jollies. “Platypus (I Hate You),” actually a rather dark song, may just have the best rock title ever (Thank heaven for parentheses).
Nimrod’s rightful centerpiece is “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” an unexpected piece of mature reflection that would return the band to the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles. With a tentative false start and a strummed, campfire riff, it’s not a power ballad . . . just a ballad. Like McCartney’s “Yesterday,” although credited to the group it’s basically an Armstrong solo performance, vocals, acoustic guitar, and the strings Cavallo added. Wimpy by hard-core standards, sure. But it is also a crucial middle finger to convention, something fresh and risky and honest, something crucially by Nimrod’s standards punk rock. “Good Riddance” has its roots in the Gilman days. Armstrong began it shortly after getting dumped by Amanda. He wasn’t confident enough at the time, however, to insist that Green Day record or perform it. He’d shelve it for three years and leave it unrecorded for nearly seven. “Supposedly Billie had brought an early version of it into the studio when they were recording their first album and John had told them ’No,’ ” Chris Appelgren says. Kiffmeyer, using the old MRR criteria, ruled the song out as not punk enough.
“A song like that is so vulnerable, and in a way, that’s sort of what punk is,” Armstrong counters, astutely today. “Instead of throwing your insecurities into a closet somewhere and keeping your guard up all the time, it’s like celebrating it.”
“Yes, it is actually a song that was finished during the writing sessions for Dookie, and we didn’t put it on Dookie because it didn’t fit,” Cavallo says, confirming its vintage. “And we said, ’Well this doesn’t really fit. We think it’s a great song, but it doesn’t really fit the album.’ It took quite a while actually to figure out how to arrange that song and structure it. I played around with it for a couple of months before we went in the studio because I was like, ’Oh my god, I know this song’s a hit, but we just have to figure out how to do it. How do we do this song?’ And when it came time for Nimrod, Billie said, ’I think this song will finally fit.’ Then I thought to myself, ’You know, the one thing that the song really needs is strings.’ When I brought the idea to them, they said, ’Strings? Are you sure?’ and I said, ’I think so. I think it’s what the song really wants.’ They said, ’Well, OK, we’ll fuckin’ try it then.’ They were definitely open to it, but it was a risk.”
Cavallo told the band to go play some foosball while he recorded the string section, and they happily obliged. “I don’t know if they were uncomfortable or they were nervous, but they weren’t in the room when the strings were recorded.”
Ironically, the stylistic leap of faith was one of the easiest tracks to record and mix, thanks to its bare bones arrangement. “It took almost no time to get the strings done. We probably did it in like fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe a half an hour at the most. And I knew we had done the right thing. I knew it was a hit the second I heard it; I knew it was a hit. And I was so excited, but I was all casual and I walked outside to the other building where they were playing foosball. The window was open and I looked in and said, ’Hey guys, you just cut a number one single.’ And they said, ’What?!’ And I said, ’I’m telling you, this thing is fucking awesome. You’re not gonna believe it.’ I was really excited, so they listened to it and said, ’Oh my god, it’s amazing.’ They just thought it was amazing.”
“Everyone knew it was a good song and knew that it was departure and knew it was nice to have on the record,” Lord-Alge recalls. “But at the time they weren’t thinking it would be [a hit]. You know, a punk band that does rock stuff isn’t going to say, ’Well here’s the big single for us, and it’s a mellow song.’ They’re hoping that ’Hitching a Ride’ or ’Nice Guys Finish Last’ were the ones that were gonna make a difference.”
“Hitchin’ a Ride,” a great track with a thumping bass line and an infectious “One, two, one, two, three, four,” bridge, was indeed the first single off Nimrod and quickly became a radio hit, but nothing that would crossover or sustain the album on the charts (it would debut at Number 10). “Time of Your Life,” despite the band’s jitters, was selected as the second single.
“I was scared for that song to come out,” Armstrong said in our interview for Spin in 2005, “and I was really excited at the same time. I thought it was a powerful song and it made me cry and all that, but there was just that fear of it coming out, and I never had that feeling of being afraid. But because it was such a vulnerable song, to put that song out and it was like which way will it end up going? It was really exciting and it kind of sparked more in us as songwriters to expand on that.”
The song’s presence and sheer reach across the culture seemed gigantic; from sporting events like Michael Jordan’s final game with the Chicago Bulls to television dramas and comedies, it seemed to hit whatever note was necessary: wistful nostalgia, pathos. It was an all-purpose soundtrack to life’s varied bitter sweetness. “We saw it take on a life of its own,” Cavallo says. “We knew they were playing it at everybody’s high school prom and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, we were very aware of it and we thought it was awesome. I actually think that adding the strings was key because it was sort of an early indication that you’re not just gonna get one brand of punk rock music from Green Day; you’re gonna get a lot of different kinds of music and it can all be great. And it can be something as heavy as ’Brain Stew’ or something as fitted for pop radio and emotional as ’Time of Your Life.’ “
“I was at a dentist’s office,” San Francisco disc jockey Steve Masters recalls, “and they were playing K-OIT, like the easy music station and that song came on. I go, ’My god, Green Day is on the K-OIT easy listening station. What is the world coming to?’ They would hate to know that. I bet you they would hate that this program director, after Elton John’s ’Candle in the Wind,’ puts on Green Day. Oh my god.”
Although Nimrod was hardly easy listening soft rock, reviews for the album (discounting acclaim for the single) were mixed—in the rock press at least. Green Day still seemed to be a band that was finding itself outside its punk rock identity. If Insomniac communicated “We still rock,” then Nimrod seemed to convey: “But we can do more than just rock, you know. We are creatively ambitious.”
“Anyone who ever griped that Green Day weren’t really punk will find confirmation here,” read a December 1997 Spin article. “At heart, Nimrod is a poker-faced rendition of what every band before them has done in this situation—genre hopping, ’testing their boundaries’ in the studio, strings, horns, the works.”
Still, the single kept Green Day from falling far off the grid, and pleasantly surprised tho
se who were in the process of writing them off as scatological, arrested teens. “Can this really be the same band that helped reignite the punk scene several years ago?” Billboard mused in its November 29, 1997 edition.
Although “Time of Your Life” was featured in an episode of ER (nurse Gloria Reuben sings a soulful rendition of it at the funeral of a twelve-year-old boy) and the aforementioned Jordan retirement, the song is inextricably linked with the May 1998 series finale of Seinfeld. Played over a two-part package of clips from the groundbreaking sitcom’s nine seasons, the track perfectly sets a reflective tone without the usually attendant sap.
“It has a nice ironic, yet elegiac, edge,” People’s associate bureau chief and television critic Cynthia Wang notes, “which fits the producers’ intention of a nonsentimental yet sentimental ending. It’s not a far stretch to see how the punkish, outsider edge of Green Day matches a sitcom that was also unconventional in structure and topic. After all, Green Day covered masturbation in ’Longview’ and Seinfeld did it in ’The Contest.’ “
“I’m not really much of a TV watcher,” Tre Cool shrugged at the time. Like The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” it’s ironically a dark and embittered song that’s been widely misconstrued as a sincere piece of well-wishing: a love song. “If I’m going to write something poppy,” Armstrong said of the song’s complex nature, “it’s got to mean something to me. If musically it’s super catchy and almost sweet-sounding, then I’ve got to make it mean something.”
“It’s really about a girlfriend [Amanda] who he broke up with,” Cavallo theorizes. “It’s one of those classic stories where the song sounds like he’s saying, ’I hope you had the time of your life and that you had this thing.’ But really, it’s not necessarily coming from a nice point of view. He’s saying good-bye and good luck and good riddance.”
