by Marc Spitz
When interviewed at the venue, drummer The Snoo (who is not Tre Cool) would only say, “Sometimes, after band practice, the ringing in my ears tells me jokes. Fink is always complaining about Van Gough’s mass cabbage consumption. He orders fifty-pound vats of sauerkraut flown in fresh from Bavaria every week.”
According to Roecker (who “manages” the band), their Church of Lushology is like Scientology where they try to get celebs to join.
“The Church of Lushology. It’s Billie and my Church against Scientology. They’re saying that we’re in a toxic world. But our philosophy is that we should embrace that and put the toxins in our bodies so that we will be stronger. You know what I mean, so that we’ll be able to survive. We’re becoming one with the toxins. We’re not being hypocritical about it. There’s no dead alien souls. Just like, a lot of litter, maybe.”
The Network (who opened a pair of club shows at the tail end of the American Idiot tour) are so enigmatic that there was a persistent Internet rumor (denied by the band sources) that the missing Cigarettes and Valentines was actually Money Money 20/20. It’s seriously implausible that Green Day would follow a folk-punk release like Warning with tracks like “Joe Robot,” but in a way, the Network and the errant Cigarettes and Valentines project are intertwined. Cavallo makes the correlation between something as ridiculous as Money Money 20/20 begetting something as sublime as American Idiot.
“The Network was about finding a way into discovering who they were gonna be and what they were gonna do on American Idiot,” he reasons. “There was a lot of artistic experimentation going on in the studio. And just the idea of like, ’Hey, we’re gonna be somebody else. We’re gonna press out and we’re gonna do this opera and we’re gonna be different,’ was a freeing experience to them. And allowing themselves that freedom led them to sort of rediscover who they were and what they wanted to do, you know what I mean? It makes things a lot easier.”
“Looking at it from the outside,” Bill Schneider says, “they remembered how much fun what they do is. And it really just energized them. At that point for a band that hasn’t had a record out in three years, they’d been in the studio for six months and now they had to start over and follow up a record like Warning that was not a great hit. Most people in that situation would be fucking scared shitless—their management would be quitting and their label would be wondering if it was all worth it—you look back and it all could have gone so wrong and they were so energized by it. But in the back of Billie’s head, I’m sure he was scared to death.”
Schneider adds, “Green Day are not the Network.”
Chapter Eleven
AMERICAN IDIOT
As early as November of 1997, Green Day floated the idea of experimenting with a rock opera. A Nimrod-promoting profile in CMJ, seven years before the release of American Idiot, notes, “They began practicing in the same rehearsal space they’ve occupied for years, a garage rented from a more than understanding schoolteacher—and according to Armstrong, toyed with ’all kinds of wild ideas.’ Maybe a punk rock opera. Possibly a two-CD concept album.”
The back-burnered notion might never have come to the fore had it not been for a good-natured songwriting challenge instigated by Armstrong during one typically long and convoluted day in the studio during the trial new sessions. It wasn’t designed to provide focus, it was simply a way to give Dirnt something to do while he was alone in the studio. On the day the “Homecoming” suite was written and the gateway to punk’s first opera opened, Armstrong was set to register for his community service: the penalty for his DUI conviction. Cool, who was in the process of divorcing his second wife, Claudia (the mother of his second child, Frankito), had meetings with lawyers. Dirnt, who was always the first in the studio, the one who, in keeping with his upbringing, treated being a rock star most like a career, complained that he’d have to be there alone all day.
“Well why don’t you write a song?” It was an acknowledged fact among the members that Armstrong wrote the bulk of the band’s material. Dirnt was a songwriter but most Green Day songs began with Armstrong; so when he suggested it, Dirnt saw it as a challenge rather than something he might laugh off. “I decided to write this thirty-second vaudeville song,” Dirnt says today, “and make it as grandiose as I could. Everyone came back to the studio later that day. Billie heard what I wrote and was like ’Oh, OK. This sounds great; I wanna do one.’ So then he put one onto it, or connected his song to it, and he threw the ball to Tre, Tre connected one. And through the course of like a week, it ended up being like this ten-and-a-half-minute thing. And it kind of ended up getting this serious arc to it. It had all the energy and creativity and inspiration that something like either Dookie or Nimrod had for us. And so it was kind of obvious that this was something that we needed to be doing.”
Dirnt’s song is literally about being alone in the studio waiting for everyone to return. “I fell asleep while watching Spike TV . . .” it opens, quite inauspiciously. Armstrong’s, similarly, concerns his own activity that day: registering for community service; Cool’s concerns, in part, his divorce.
“I got a rock ’n’ roll band, I’ve got a rock ’n’ roll life. I got a rock ’n’ roll girlfriend. And another ex-wife,” he sings. It was absurd, sure, but for the first time in years, the band were amusing and inspiring one another. And the work, as basic as it was, was unimpeachably honest. More important, it felt physically good to write, to play, to sing this kind of stuff. After a decade as a mega-famous band, they’d relocated the freedom to screw around and have fun. “It’s almost like what it was like to be alone in my room when I was rocking out in front of a mirror when I was younger,” Armstrong said at the time. “I had a sense of freedom and abandon to take the record wherever it wanted to go. None of this was written from a perspective of like ’I gotta write smart music.’ I look at all of our records as always having some sort of a progression, even until Warning. And [American Idiot] doesn’t really match the progression of Green Day, really. It’s got the energy of our early stuff, the dynamics and the way Tre plays. He’s just a really reckless, insane drummer. And it’s got all the power and the pushing hard, but it’s definitely got something else. We’ve somehow broken the mold.”
The band continued to build the suite over the course of the next week but still weren’t sure of what they had. They were also working on songs like “Gimme Novocaine” and other less ornate bits that would make (or not make) the new album. They sent a tape of these down to Los Angeles for Cavallo to listen to. “Homecoming” was thrown on just to see what their longtime producer would think. Maybe he had a thirty-second song of his own to add.
“Cavallo called and he’s losing his mind. He’s like ’Dude I’m playing that thing over and over again in my office as loud as my stereo will go, and everyone in the fucking building is at my door going what the hell is that? That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard,’ ” Bill Schneider remembers. “And Billie and Mike were like ’Really? You like that?’ “
“I was in L.A. and they sent that song down to me and they didn’t really know what they had,” Cavallo says. “They were like, ’What do you think of this?’ You know, they were really curious. Is this great? What is this? And I played it and I called them up and I was freaking out. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. I thought it was amazing. I loved it. The ’Homecoming’ opera, that was a tipping point really. It was a song that broke the boundaries for punk rock.”
“It unfolded after that,” Armstrong says today. “We started talking about doing a rock opera. All we knew was that we wanted to tie it into the political atmosphere of what was going on. We had the song ’American Idiot’ and it was better than all our other songs, which was great and frustrating at the same time.”
“When Billie wrote ’American Idiot’ it was like, ’Wow, this far supersedes everything that we’ve been doing; this is the level we should be writing toward,’” Dirnt agrees. Armstrong was out blowing off some steam one afternoon, ra
cing around the lot on a scooter that Go-ped had sent over for the band to toy around with when he had the idea for what would become the album’s title track. He came back to the studio and began strumming out the riff and the one verse that had appeared in his head like a banner, waving:
Don’t wanna be an American idiot . . .
The theme was not unlike that of “Minority,” but it had a bit more conviction, a bit more urgency. It was a call and response. Like a gospel track or a hopping punk rock “oi” number. Something anyone could sing. “I Fought the Law.” The “Limbo Rock.” Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O.” The Violent Femmes’ “American Music.” The Mc5’s “American Ruse.” All were super-catchy touchstones. Any message couched in this bit of melody had to be righteous because it was the kind of delivery system that doesn’t come around often. Armstrong thought of Bush, campaigning on a war ticket across the country. He thought of the man’s message, which he considered to be a lie. The raising of the terror alert every time the administration was scrutinized. The using of the media to play him and his family and friends like puppets. The numbing effect of reality television and color-coded terror alert fear, which, he felt, turned us all into ostriches. And he spit . . .
“Welcome to a new kind of tension/All across the alien nation where everything isn’t meant to be okay . . .”
“Minority” was a Clinton-era song. “American Idiot” was pure Bush 2.
He thought of the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage . . .
Well maybe I’m the faggot America . . .
He thought of Pat Robertson praying for a Supreme Court judge who would repeal Roe v. Wade and institute intelligent design in schools . . .
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda . . .
Then he played the track for the band. “He got together with Mike and Tre and said, ’You know dudes we got to talk about something,’” Cavallo says. ” ’I’m kind of going out there with these lyrics,’ and he played them the song once he’d done the vocals and they were like ’Yeah, fuck yeah.’”
“I think that since George Bush was elected, that we have led a path of destruction and mayhem and problems that are gonna stay with us and be with us for the next hundred years if we even go about changing them at all,” Tre Cool says, adding with typical self-deprecating humor, “We’re from Berkeley so we have to be political.” When Cavallo heard it, the producer was floored once again.
“It sounded like the title track,” Cavallo remembers. “Like a big important way to start a record. It kind of encompasses the meaning of the whole thing.”
“I think that politically we didn’t really have an agenda,” Dirnt says. “The song just says that among all the different medias and in today’s society right now with reality TV and all the media being swayed one direction or another and all the information being thrown at you and then throw this war on top of it, we’ve had enough and we’re ready to say ’I feel confused and disenfranchised.’ As individuals we feel like we’re losing our individuality.”
Still, in an age when anything vaguely suggesting a lack of patriotism had been enough to get an artist black-listed, throwing a spot on this common emotion, as sharp as it was, risked being wildly misconstrued. “This was a time in history when they were booing Bruce Springsteen for speaking out against the president,” Jesse Malin says. “In New Jersey.”
“When they told me they were gonna call the record American Idiot, I was the one who was saying, ’Oh no, you can’t.’ ” John Roecker laughs, “I was the one who was worried about it. Because when you think about, we know the song now, but then it was a really fucking bold thing to do. So many people got destroyed, like Sean Penn or Johnny Depp for saying one bad thing about it.”
“We discussed the Dixie Chicks factor because it was reality,” says Brian Bumbery, the band’s new publicist at Warner Brothers. “I wasn’t too concerned about it. I felt like a lot had changed in America even since then and that people were ready to hear artists take a personal stand through their music again.” With the military casualties mounting even after President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and addressed the troops under a tragically premature “Mission Accomplished” banner, Bumbery and those at the label correctly assumed the new material would now be something of a national catharsis rather than a source of knee-jerk outrage. Perhaps the Dixie Chicks did suffer so the likes of Green Day wouldn’t have to. But there was still no guarantee. The Dixie Chicks were pilloried for commenting from a concert stage. “American Idiot” was loud, angry music. If it hit, it could have a genuine impact on the political climate. If it missed, there’d surely be more shrapnel.
Bolstered by his band’s reaction to the song and Cavallo’s enthusiasm over “Homecoming,” Armstrong completed the second of the two pieces that make up the album’s “rock opera.” Armstrong had a rudimentary version of “Jesus of Suburbia” kicking around for a while.
“There’s this Jesus of Suburbia character and he’s pretty disenfranchised,” Armstrong says, explaining the story line today. “He hates his town. Hates his family. Hates his friends. He needs to get out so he leaves and goes into the city. He starts dealing with what true rebellion means. Rebellion could be disguised as self-destruction. You get involved with drugs or self-mutilation. Or it could mean you end up following your own beliefs or ethics. He’s sort of torn.”
Saint Jimmy is “a charismatic scumbag,” as described by Dirnt. “You know, girls want him, guys want to be him, sort of thing. Then there’s Whatshername. She appears in the song ’She’s a Rebel’ and she’s kind of this kindred spirit to Jesus of Suburbia. ’American Idiot’ is the song that sets the political climate that our main characters live in. If it’s kind of dark, it’s just a direct reflection of the story being written in modern times.”
“Jesus is the king of his local 7-Eleven,” Armstrong elaborates. “And he’s the guy who ends up leaving town. He’s the guy who—he’s trying to find out something more of life and he’s trying to figure out what the truth is in life. And then there’s the Saint Jimmy character, who’s sort of the seductive, smart Darby Crash type of human being. He’s the instigator. And then there’s Whatshername, the person who the Jesus character ends up falling for. And sort of has—she’s challenging, challenges his beliefs and his ethics so that’s sort of where he’s caught between two different worlds of Saint Jimmy or Whatshername.”
As torn as Jesus of Suburbia is, our narrators were never more focused. Although they clearly had an affection for St. Jimmy, this was a process of intense creativity, not destruction. As they invented these characters, they were reinventing themselves as a new group, unencumbered by the past, but rather, able to use it again to write powerfully. Armstrong felt like Jesus of Suburbia. The punks he met in San Francisco as a teenager, surely there were many St. Jimmys among them. And Whatshername symbolized the nurturing female influence that was vital to his creativity from his mother to Maria Fiatarone to Adrienne. “I think I’m sort of digging up a lot of stuff in my psyche, like the whole ’Jesus of Suburbia thing,’ which isn’t necessarily about me, but I feel like I had to go through a similar experience to be able to write from that standpoint.”
Nobody expected a band like Green Day to confront Bush and his cronies. They were arrested adolescents and had been for years. It was how we knew them. And in 2004, there was no reason to expect that anything would make them change. They did it so well. They were great knuckleheads.
“It’s hard to go into new places just because you’re so familiar with what you know,” Armstrong says. “When you get into what you don’t know, that’s when things get scary . . . and exciting at the same time.”
Imagine hearing the explanation of what the new record was about before hearing the music and you’ll sympathize with the band’s fans, both past and present, who read the Web-circulated rumors about Green Day’s new direction in the summer of 2004.
“Green Day were done dude,” says MTV’s Gideon Yago. “I remem
ber when people were saying, ’Yeah, Green Day’s done this rock opera and it’s anti-war.’ I just kept wondering if they were serious. I was off the Green Day train, you know? I was a little suspicious.”
“I saw Mike one night and he said, ’Hey Jess, we’ve got it. It’s our best record yet,’” remembers Jesse Malin. “And god bless everybody, everybody usually says that. You know, Gene Simmons has been saying it for years: ’It’s our best record since Destroyer.’ Or Aerosmith . . . it’s always that thing. And Mike said, it’s an opera. And I said to myself, ’I don’t know.’ “
“Maybe people just didn’t know they are smarter than they looked,” says Chris Lord-Alge, who mixed the record. “When I first heard it I thought ’This is gonna fuck ’em good. This is gonna fix some wagons.’ “
Fueled by how clearly he’d articulated his outrage (and how satisfying it was) Armstrong decided to juice up another song he was working on with some anti-Bush invective. “Holiday” had been a struggle. With a jumping bassline borrowed from Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” the track had gone through several permutations before the band nailed it.
“I remember we went for sushi or something, we came back and then all of a sudden Billie was there playing it and man there it was, it was great,” Cavallo says. “There’d been this big hole in the middle, during the breakdown and Billie said ’I’ve got this insane idea for the middle of the song, and it’s freaking me out. I’m going to do something,’ and he told everybody to leave the studio. And then literally, ten minutes later he called us back in and there was the ’Sieg Heil to the president gas man. Bombs away is the punishment . . .’ He almost couldn’t believe he was saying something so direct. He was not scared as much as he was thinking ’Can I get away with that?’ “
