by Marc Spitz
The Nimrod promotional tour pushed off in the fall of 1997, and the band wasted no time proving that they had not gone soft. An in-store signing at Tower Records on Lower Broadway in Manhattan was scheduled around a Conan O’Brien appearance and a sold-out concert at the Roseland Ballroom. Stung by some reviews that suggested they’d gone a bit soft, Green Day woke up their dormant punk brat schtick once more. The trio turned an eight-song set into yet another riot, albeit a small one, contained behind storefront glass like a school science exhibit on punk attitude. While four hundred fans gathered inside and one thousand more lined the streets, shivering in the unseasonable chill, Billie Joe upended CD racks and tagged “Fuck” and “Nimrod” on the storefront windows in black spray paint. He mooned the people who were outside. When it was over, Cool tossed his bass drum into the throng.
No charges were filed and nobody was hurt, but Tower staff had to close the store down to repair the damages and clean up. When they opened in the morning, “Fuck” and “Nimrod” remained exposed until the windows could be replaced.
The incident brought them another blip of national attention, but this go-around something about it sparked of contrivance: the kind of “Give the people what we think they want” punk mentality that prevented acts like the Ramones, brilliant as they were, from altering their assault strategies over the years. Green Day had taken one remarkable step forward with “Good Riddance,” and here they were backsliding in New York City. “If you look at their career,” suggests Baltudis, who scrambled to rush-issue a post-riot press release that evening, “it does go in waves. There are waves of them recognizing certain [public] perceptions and waves of them [defying them]. I think the band felt pressure to live up to expectations that day. They were in the media capital of the world. We had press at the event. And so they made a statement. But the difference between Tower and Woodstock was that Tower appeared to be more calculated. And I think they did take a measurable amount of flack for it [from the media]. Like ’Oh, how obvious! Destroy fixtures in a record store. It’s punk rock. Kinda.’ ”
That June, while playing K-ROQ’s sixth annual “Weenie Roast” festival at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater, Dirnt was injured onstage again after an altercation with fellow Bay Area hit makers Third Eye Blind. Third Eye bassist Arion Salazar, ostensibly drunk, rushed the stage during Green Day’s set and bear-hugged his fellow bass-man. Dirnt shook him off and security manhandled Salazar into the wings. This irked a Third Eye Blind fan, who threw a bottle at Dirnt’s head; he suffered a fractured skull and cuts.
“I am sorry that my attempt at doing something I thought would be funny escalated into Mike getting hurt. That was never my intention. I simply had too much to drink and made a very bad decision. If I had been in Mike’s place, I’m sure I would have acted similarly. My heart goes out to him, and I hope he recovers quickly. We have many friends in common, and I just hope that they can accept my sincerest apology. I am sorry, Mike.”
“On the advice of their attorneys, Green Day are unable to comment at this time,” the band shrugged in an official response. “Stay tuned.”
Happily, the Nimrod tour is most notable for the debut of a ritual that exists to this day at every Green Day tour stop: turning over their instruments to random members of the audience and standing back as fans take over the stage. “I saw them play in a show in London and then in Paris,” says rock photographer Bob Gruen, who was out shooting the band as they toured Europe with openers D Generation. “And that’s when they were first exchanging a guitar player, you know, getting somebody to come up out of the audience. It really just involves the whole audience so much. The fact that they pass some kid up. I saw them one time where they had the kid literally jump out of the balcony and get caught by the crowd and passed up through the audience toward the stage.”
The nightly ritual usually begins about three quarters of the way into the set, with Armstrong asking who can play the drums (prompting the kids in the pit to swear that they can keep a minimal four on the floor beat). “Do you swear?” he pushes. A natural showman, Armstrong knows that the momentum can be killed at any moment if the bit (and the beat) falls flat. “Do you fucking swear? All right, get up here.”
“The crowd surfed me up to the security guard, waiting at the end of the ramp,” says twenty-two-year-old New Jersey fan Sarah Elizabeth Royal, who played guitar during the September 2005 Giants Stadium show. “Everyone around me is screaming. I’m all psyched up and the security guard tells me to relax. So I say ’OK’ and cool down. He sits me up on the end of the stage, now I’m facing the kids in the front row. I pull myself up onstage, jog up the ramp, and see Billie Joe waiting there for me. He was holding his hands out as if to hug me. I gave him a hug. As soon as I let go, he grabbed my face on either side and pulled me toward him and planted a big kiss right on my lips. Then he kind of laughed, and I held my hands up in triumph.”
The ad hoc band of fans always play “Knowledge” by Operation Ivy because it’s a perfect nod to Green Day’s populist roots and because it’s really hard to screw up. Anticipating the stage nerves they’ve long since mastered, the first thing the band does is try to focus their new charges. “’This is going to be real simple; you’ll be OK. Three chords, OK?’” Royal continues: “Billie was definitely warm and wanted to make sure I was comfortable and wouldn’t freak out. I knew the song by heart. I’d practiced it at home. But for half a second I freaked out in my mind because I thought he was playing something different. I ended up regaining my senses and nodded that I understood. He put the guitar on me and I hastily reached out for him to hand me a pick. I fretted. My hands were shaking terribly.”
When the song is over and the nerves turn to pure adrenaline, the guitarist usually gets to keep the guitar he or she has played (the bassist and drummer are out of luck). One of the fans is encouraged to dive into the crowd (complete with drum roll and sometimes a mock cry of “Get the fuck off my stage!”). Maybe the fans will go on to form their own bands—that’s the implicit gesture anyway, a passing of the torch, just as Operation Ivy passed it to Green Day in 1989.
“They play ’Knowledge’ at almost every show for years and years all over the world so that’s been really helpful to us and a nice thing,” Jesse Michaels says today. “A big compliment and I appreciate it.” At a time when their fortunes were dicey (the Nimrod tour played largely to 1,500- to 3,000-capacity venues), the instrument-exchange part of the set formed a solid and deathless bond between artist and fan, one that would help them survive the next four years.
Chapter Nine
UNCLE BILLIE
By the end of the decade, Green Day found themselves in an odd sort of limbo commercially. Their Gilman-era fans had turned thirty. Many of them had settled down. The club even lifted its ban on Green Day members, by booking Dirnt’s side project The Frustrators for a gig. “For me, it was a wonderful piece of closure,” Dirnt said in Guitar World’s September 2000 issue. “I didn’t get one iota of shit from anyone there. ’Cause people know where we’re coming from and that we’re not full of shit.”
The complete Green Day lineup would perform a stealth show for about a hundred truly shocked fans (almost none of them irate) in 2003. They took the stage unannounced before a set by Jason White’s band the Influents, blew the door out, and then left: a nice bit of guerilla closure, nearly a decade after first being banned. Closure was a big deal at the end of the millennium. Unfortunately, this meant that a noticeable measure of the band’s fan base was putting the cap on their own decade of adolescent angst.
The Dookie-era teenage fans were heading off to college and listening to indie rock or classic jazz (or whatever else impressed the opposite sex on campus). And the new generation of kids seemed, for the time being anyway, way too intoxicated by the one-click variety of file sharing, which had become (in its pre-iTunes/Napster period) an unsettling force that threatened to destabilize any and all lasting, loyal fan bases and make relics out of album buyers. Punk had ceded to ska,
which flickered a bit, then quickly ceded to rap-metal. Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock were the new modern rock superstars and radio formats changed accordingly. Three-chord pop-punk with no DJ to scratch on the explosive chorus seemed played out. Green Day could only sit and observe, somewhat bemusedly, maybe a little worried as the baseball cap alarmingly replaced the Mohawk.
Billie, Mike, and Tre had been together a decade now as Green Day. They had toured and recorded almost constantly in that time, and certainly earned a break. They all had other interests. Their children were walking and talking now. They were nearing thirty themselves. It was time to reconsider things. The millennium was ending and so, it seemed, was the manic phase of Green Day’s career.
“They were definitely at a very big crossroads,” recalls John Lucasey, a former Hollywood stuntman in big budget actioners like The Rock, turned owner of Oakland’s Studio 880 (where Green Day’s new album would be recorded).
The most symbolic indicator that this would be Green Day’s new direction was the fact that they initially opted to work with a different producer. Rob Cavallo would take a back seat to sought-after modern rock helmer Scott Litt (whose credits included Nirvana and R.E.M.).
There was tension in the studio, however, as Green Day and Litt labored to come up with something that would signal the next phase of the band’s career.
“It just didn’t work out,” Armstrong explained to the Alternative Press. “He was really cool, but for that particular project, it just wasn’t the right chemistry.”
In February it was announced that Litt was out and Cavallo was back in, although in a limited capacity, as “executive producer.” Green Day would otherwise handle it all on their own.
One album that hinted at the kind of statement the band was going for was Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. The 1964 release was half free-form electric blues, half acoustic folk rambles and protests. Armstrong listened to it over and over again during the writing and early recording sessions for what would become Green Day’s sixth album, Warning.
“Billie mentioned in passing, ’I’ve been listening to a lot of old Bob Dylan lately, especially that album where he first used a band,’ ” Larry Livermore wrote in the Reprise bio that was sent out with the record. “I know the album. It is called Bringing It All Back Home, and I suddenly realized that this was what the new Green Day record was all about.”
The year 2000, like 1964, was an election year. Bill Clinton was a lame duck and as his vice president, Al Gore campaigned against George W. Bush, the son of forty-first president George H. W. Bush.
“I don’t know that he was thinking as politically as he would,” Cavallo says, “but he was thinking more socially. It could have been a little bit of foreshadowing of things to come.”
“I want to be the minority,” Armstrong sang on the chorus of what would be the new record’s standout track, “Minority.”
“I don’t need your authority. Down with the moral majority . . .” As if a nod to Dylan, the song was propelled by a folky harmonica line.
It was Green Day’s most overt political statement to date, something that may not have made the late Tim Yohannan reconsider his dismissal, but it was certainly not another “pot song” or a “girl song” or a “shit song.”
“We’ve always tried to keep our ear to the ground and keep our eyes open to what’s going on,” Armstrong said in 2005. “We were starting to think about how there was going to be a changing of the guard from Clinton to somebody else. It didn’t look good for Al Gore. It was just sort of a feeling that I knew there was going to be someone really conservative who was going to come into office. And after he was elected, we watched the culture sort of sway. And that’s one reason why I was really taking my time writing songs to really [make an impact]. Instead of just writing an overly knee jerk reaction.”
Once the record was near completion, the band announced to the surprise of many that they would join that summer’s sixth annual Warped Tour. Warped had started as a small package tour for up-and-coming punk bands and extreme sports stars but had quickly evolved into one of the season’s biggest live draws. Green Day were the obvious headliners, although Warped, much like Gilman, made a policy of not identifying any one artist as such. Although hardly a staunch boot camp for cred-Nazis, Warped was no easy gig either. Eminem had debuted there the previous year and was roundly booed. To play convincingly, Green Day had to reconnect with some measure of rawness that they’d left behind.
Warped was no haven for nu metal acts either. It was strictly guitars and three-chord, pogo-friendly punk rock, so synergizing was a keen career move, when to some, it may have looked like a downgrade.
“We’d been asked to play it before,” Dirnt said. “But we never had the time. They’ve done a really good thing with that tour. It was just a good time for us to [finally] play it.”
Their old friend Jason White, of Pinhead Gunpowder, was hired as a second guitarist to give their songs a bit more power for the festival circuit, but even he shared the sentiment that maybe Green Day were a bit beyond it all. “Even I was like ’Why are Green Day on the Warped tour,’ ” he laughs.
The explanation may be as simple as this: They were bored. More than what it might do for their careers, spending the summer out on the road with three or four dozen smaller bands was something to do. Armstrong, Dirnt, and Cool can be restless types, and too much down time is often a dangerous thing. The record was done but not out yet. Rather than waiting for a fall release (and making your friends and family nuts as you stress out over how this next change in direction would be received), why not play some parking lots and fields?
“They were the biggest band on that tour but it wasn’t by far,” Fat Mike of NOFX says. “Green Day weren’t super popular at that time. I think they did the Warped tour because they wanted to get popular again. There’s very few bands that can have a long career at such a high level. And Warning is probably their worse album, I think. It’s what happens, the ups and downs.”
When Warning was released in the fall of 2000, critics tended to agree with Fat Mike’s assessment. Like all their records, it debuted high (Number 4) but fell out of the Top 20 almost immediately.
Even worse, the band were slapped with a plagiarism claim by unknown UK act The Other Garden, who alleged that the album’s title track appropriated their 1997 recording “Never Got the Chance.” Green Day denied the accusation and promised to defend themselves “vigorously,” but the whole thing felt like insult to injury. (The suit was later dropped.)
K-ROQ played “Minority” as well as the album’s title track and the gorgeous retro-pop lament “Waiting,” but it seemed out of respect rather than genuine fervor. The station had largely switched over to a harder, rap-metal format.
“During that period, that was like late nineties, early 2000, they were kind of seen as elder statesmen,” Kevin Weatherly says. “You had the whole rock-rap thing. And there was a period of time where we had a tough time getting that whole sound—it has nothing to do with Green Day—that sound we had a difficult time getting to work for us.”
When Armstrong would spy any backward baseball hats in the crowd at the promotional shows he’d play in support of the record, he’d shout: “Well, it’s all about the dookie,” mocking the title of Limp Bizkit’s rap metal hit “Nookie.” “We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve had our ups and downs,” Tre Cool observed philosophically. “If people want to buy our albums, that’s great but [record sales] is not the kind of thing you worry about. Bands that do that tend to become jerks.”
“It was kind of a strange time,” says Jason White, who continued to play with them live through 2001. “I think more for the band than for music in general. It was the new millennium and everybody was kind of like wanting to forget about the nineties and wanting to embrace something new. By the end of the Warning tour, we were playing festivals in Europe and that was sort of when the Strokes were breaking really big. They were the new thing. And
we were sort of still doing the Green Day thing, you know?”
It’s one thing to be phased out by metal mooks or New York City hipsters, but to be upstaged by acolytes can be especially unnerving. In the space between Nimrod and Warning, Blink-182, a scatological pop-punk trio out of Southern California, hit the Top 10 with their blatant Green Day homage Enema of the State. Boasting formulaic hits (adenoidal verse, minimally pulsing bass, explosive three-chord guitar riffs tempered by sweet harmony on the chorus) like “All the Small Things” and “What’s My Age Again,” they quickly found favor with the new crop of teenage boys and girls (mostly girls) who now saw Green Day as a nineties thing.
“I don’t mind Blink-182,” Armstrong said diplomatically in 2000. “It’s gonna be tough for them. They’re gonna be judged by a couple of songs for a while. It just depends on what they come up with next. You can’t judge a band by one record.”
“Is this your older brother’s pop punk band?” Spin asked in its review of Warning. “Have Blink-182 rendered them obsolete?” The magazine gave it a lukewarm 6 out of a possible 10.
Ironically, most of these younger bands, like Good Charlotte, whose 2001 release Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous also outsold Warning, hero-worshipped Green Day. These were the kids who purchased Dookie in junior high.
“They’re probably my favorite band of all time,” says Good Charlotte cofounder Joel Madden. “They opened me up to punk rock. We got into the Bay Area stuff like Rancid through them. Anything they said they liked in their interviews, we got into. We discovered the Clash through Green Day! I was definitely aware that our record at the time sold more maybe than their record but I think we idolized them so much that it didn’t matter. We thought Warning was one of their best records.” While the amount of respect paid by these bands was considerable, the mass audiences proved to be fickle.
