by Marc Spitz
Crucially, American Idiot is not pure anti-Bush rhetoric or bombastic rock opera. The album’s humanistic core is key to selling both those elements. Two songs on American Idiot, both of which would become huge crossover hits, complete the emotional cycle Armstrong began with the songs “I Was There” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” Both “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” have become part of universal pop culture now. They mean different things to different people. But for Armstrong, they can only recall Rodeo. Growing up, getting out, and looking back.
With the demos for American Idiot completed, the band headed down-state to Ocean Way studios in Los Angeles to record them. They all knew they had the best work of their careers.
“We showed up in L.A. and when they were recording it at the time, dude, I felt like I worked for the biggest band in the world,” Bill Schneider says. “Nobody else knew it yet.”
Slowly it was confirmed by the professional session musicians who came in to add their parts to what would be the band’s most ornate production yet: a veritable opera with hammer bells, piano, horns, and tape loops. Multi-instrumentalist Jason Freese, who plays saxophone on the “Homecoming” suite (and toured with the American Idiot band) had heard the rumors that the band were creating a punk opera. He had no idea what to expect when he drove to meet the band and hear the tapes. Would they be pretentious? Overly intense? He knew it was Green Day, but an “opera”? Freese braced himself.
“I showed up to Capitol Records [in Hollywood],” says Freese. “I walked in the room and I was really nervous. Tre comes down, there’s this spiral staircase in the mixing room over there, he comes down, he runs up to me, and he goes, ’hey!’ he goes, ’If you and I were camping and you woke up with my dick in your ass, would you tell anybody?’ And I said, ’Uh, no.’ And he goes, ’You wanna go camping?’ Those were the first words out of his mouth to me.”
With the tension broken, Freese, one of the first civilians outside of the band’s inner circle, was played “Jesus of Suburbia” in its entirety. “It wasn’t even mixed yet. And I just remember sitting there and just going, ’Jesus Christ!’ I’d never heard anything like that in my life. I remember the first thing hitting my head was, ’This is either gonna be the biggest thing ever or it’s gonna go over everybody’s head.’ You know what I mean? It was like, there was no middle ground. It wasn’t like, this is just another pop song that’s gonna go to radio. It was so unbelievable and moving and huge.”
“I remember the first time I heard the demos,” Jason White recalls. “I thought ’OK, this is insane. It’s all over the place. There’s nine-minute songs that are all these sort of little vignettes. It’s kind of like ’A Quick One (While He’s Away)’ by The Who.”
The title track to The Who’s 1967 release predates their most famous rock opera, Tommy, by two years. The band’s performance of the suites the following year during a guest appearance at the Rolling Stones’ multi-act concert Rock ’N’ Roll Circus was so incendiary, it allegedly scared the headliners into scrapping the project for three decades.
“Pete Townshend’s definitely been inspiring for me,” Armstrong says. “I’ve always been drawn to The Who and some of my first things I ever listened to was British Invasion kind of music. And I love his audacity, to take rock into that medium and still have that energy. That’s where I want to go. I didn’t want to get into writing overtures and undertures but there’s definitely a couple of nods to Pete Townshend, for sure.” Saint Jimmy is likely a nominal reference to Jimmy the Mod, from The Who’s Quadrophenia.
Down in L.A., the band felt completely empowered. They’d indulge every creative notion that came across their discussion table. Longtime fans of her previous band Bikini Kill and her current, more danceable project, Le Tigre, the notion was floated that Kathleen Hanna should be invited to sing the album’s recurring melodic section. The “Nobody likes you, everyone left you, they’re all out without you, having fun . . .” line. A call was placed. “I was having dinner with my boyfriend and some of their people,” Hanna says. “But it wasn’t anybody who had any real connection to Green Day except my boyfriend, Adam, because he’s in the Beastie Boys and he knows them. Somebody was talking about them recording a new album, and I said, ’I wanna be on their record.’ I said something like that, this was like a month before. And then I got the call like a month later and I was asking him, ’Did you do something?’ I was really pissed. I asked ’Did you call somebody?’ And he said, ’No.’ I asked Billie Joe and he said, ’No, we just were really big Bikini Kill fans and big Le Tigre fans and needed a girl to sing this part.’ But isn’t that weird? It was like I wished for it and it happened.”
Hanna’s vocal part was recorded in a New York studio then e-mailed to the band.
“Billie Joe was in the headset and he just gave me total direction. Like, no, do it more like this and it was kind of like trying to sing like a female Billie Joe.”
Once the music was finished, everyone agreed that it called for something different as far as packaging. Not just the album art, but an entire visual concept as well for the band members. Their live backdrop, their merchandise, everything should reflect the message: kind of like a political campaign. If Bush can do it, Green Day would as well. “We wanted to be firing on all cylinders,” Armstrong says. “Everything from the aesthetic to the music to the look. Just everything.”
“We were thinking of the concept for the designs [in the studio],” Roecker says. “We’d go to Wacko and the Soap Plant [galleries on Melrose Avenue] and look at these artists, and these like Chinese Communist photos.” Artist Chris Bilheimer, who designed the Nimrod album and International Superhits! covers, was contacted in an effort to come up with a visual direction that would be at once uniform and powerful. Listening to the material on his computer, he seized on a line from the new track “She’s a Rebel.”
And she’s holding on my heart like a hand grenade . . .
Inspired by graphic artist Saul Bass’s poster for the Frank Sinatra–starring junkie film The Man with the Golden Arm, Bilheimer concocted an upstretched arm, clutching a bloodred, heart-shaped grenade. The logo that would follow them around the world, wave over every stage, and peer out from each CD sleeve jewel box was born.
“Red is the most overused color in graphic design. You know, Coca-Cola, Target, it’s everywhere,” Bilheimer says, “partially because it’s one of the strongest and most eye-catching colors that’s not horribly offensive like bright orange. It’s so immediate. I’m sure there’s psychological theories of it being the same color of blood and therefore has the power of life and death. And I’m sure there’s psychological studies about it. And as a designer I always feel it’s kind of a cop-out, and so I never used it before. But there was no way you couldn’t use it on this cover.”
Green Day, for all the teenybopper appeal of the Dookie era, had never been exactly sexy, and certainly, in their early thirties, the man-child crusty punk look they pretty much invented was no longer appropriate. The American Idiot campaign behooved something a bit more sophisticated. If George Bush was going to campaign in a suit, so were Green Day. Theirs would be black. Christian Dior, designed by rock fashion visionary Hedi Slimane.
“They were going to step it up,” says Jason Freese. “They said, ’We’re not gonna wear Hurley shirts onstage anymore. We’re gonna wear suits. We’re gonna wear nice suits too. We don’t want to look like we’re eighteen. We don’t wanna look like every other punk band out there.’ “
“Look at those early photos of Billie and his hair. He never touched his hair.” Jim Baltudis marvels, “It wasn’t a concern. None of this concerned anybody before. It was all about Billie’s blue guitar and a little red tie. That’s all they gave a shit about.”
To fit into their suits (and the mold for what an older, wiser, classical rock ’n’ roll star should be), the band went on a collective diet, ordering Zone box lunch delivery to the studio and their hotel rooms at th
e Chateau Marmont. “We were too cool for food,” Tre Cool laughs.
By the time they met acclaimed director Samuel Bayer (who most famously helped with the iconic video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991) to discuss the clip for the album’s first single and title track, they all had lean jawlines, which brought to mind hunger and feral focus. They looked like fighters. They didn’t want to appear too elder statesman–like, however. They still needed flamboyance. Rock stars are not like anyone else, after all, so they began wearing thick black eyeliner.
“Billie Joe really does wear more eyeliner than most drag queens now,” New York City–based glam rocker and band friend DJ Miss Guys observes. “But they all had the face for it and could pull it off. I think it’s great when somebody in the mainstream is doing something that’s not just like everybody else. And punk boys look great with eyeliner and nail polish on.”
They played the full record for Bayer during a pow wow in the Marmont. “I was absolutely blown away,” he says today. “They played me ’Jesus of Suburbia,’ ’Holiday,’ ’Boulevard of Broken Dreams,’ and ’American Idiot.’ Blown away. I thought, this is gonna be either the biggest thing that ever hit rock ’n’ roll in the last number of years or people are gonna look at this record as a brilliant failure.”
The band explained the album’s story line as well as their political vision to Bayer and he saw, as one of the first people outside their circle, that they were all dead serious in their conviction.
“I understood very clearly from the band that, ’We want people to hear us and see us differently than they’ve seen us before.’ You know, ’They’re gonna hear a record that sounds different than anything else we’ve ever done.’ I think my attitude was ’Fine, now let’s make videos that don’t look like anything else you’ve ever done. Let’s make sure they’re not just goofy and funny and silly. Cinematically, they’ve got a look, a style, and a feeling that’s really provocative and really interesting and a departure.’ I mean that’s the key word here: Let’s do something that’s a departure for you guys.”
“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t skeptics,” says Bumbery, who flew to New York City with five finished songs to play for the editors of various music magazines, as well as for tastemakers at MTV and radio. “But the music spoke volumes.” Bumbery wisely included Green Day’s online and print fanzine editors. “My goal was to take them immediately to the fan base they had amassed through their long and storied career and grow from there. I knew that word of mouth would quickly spread about how great the record was.”
“American Idiot” hit pop culture like a lobbed, properly shaped grenade, muscling into playlists on pop, rock, and modern rock radio. Even if it had been an instrumental, it would have been huge, the riff was so instant. Many people hummed it without even listening to the lyrics. Bayer’s video, featuring an upside down green and white flag, and the band in top shape, new look in full fly, laid immediate waste to every pop punk pretender going. It was like Warning never happened; it was almost as if Dookie hadn’t either. That’s how new this “nineties band” seemed.
Inevitably, the words “fuck,” “redneck,” and “faggot” (the latter being the song’s boldest moment, perhaps, and certainly a show of solidarity with the Bay Area’s gay community as much as a direct attack on the queer-bashing moral majority) were censored from mainstream radio. Still the fire in Armstrong’s vocals alone made it clear that a powerful protest song, the likes of which pop culture hadn’t heard since the heyday of Dylan and Lennon, had arrived.
“I wasn’t surprised that they were gonna censor part of it,” Armstrong says. “What was surprising to me was how some places were censoring the word ’redneck.’ I thought that was kind of cool actually. Oh there was one radio station that won’t play the song, and when asked why they won’t play the song and they said because we have a ’redneck agenda.’ “
Democratic presidential candidate senator John Kerry had, in most people’s eyes, defeated President Bush in the debates, but in the weeks leading up to the election, he was once again trailing in the polls. Although Kerry’s campaign songs skewed older, it was clear that “American Idiot,” a genuine, bona fide, old school protest song, was a gift. Surely it was easier to embrace than rapper/producer P. Diddy’s cryptic and vaguely threatening Vote or Die campaign. Had Kerry gotten on board a bit earlier, with “American Idiot” pumping at each campaign stop, who knows how many more eighteen-year-olds may have made the polls?
“We sat down and he insisted to me: ’I listen to rap music,’ ” remembers Gideon Yago of MTV. “It’s important to listen to popular music and popular musicians because they tell you a little bit about what’s going on in America.’ And, after that he said, ’I think some of them might even make very good candidates. You know, they’ve got the charisma . . .’ Which I thought was astute. And then I said, ’Well can you give me an example? Who are we talking about here?’ And the best he could come up with was Carole fuckin’ King. I like handed him the fuckin’ ball.”
“You have to draw a distinction between the left as a whole and the Kerry campaign,” says Aubin Paul of Punknews.org. “The Left could and did embrace the band, and the song, but the Kerry campaign seemed almost embarrassed by the youth of their supporters. Howard Dean rallied the youth while Kerry took it for granted and condescended to us.”
Kerry and Green Day did finally cross paths when both were booked on The Late Show with David Letterman on September 22, 2004. Green Day had an album just in stores and had good reason to be there promoting it. John Kerry seemed to see an opportunity for some last bit of synergy.
“The Democratic party was so chicken shit with that election and the last two elections that they were afraid of really aligning themselves,” Bill Schneider says. “And I’m sure that Letterman was a last-ditch effort. Kerry was not the guest. And all of a sudden all the other guests canceled and it’s just ’Tonight John Kerry and Green Day.’ ” A source at the show, who preferred to speak off the record, counters: “We’d been trying to get Senator Kerry on the show for a while and there was finally some time in his schedule. We absolutely did not rearrange anything or cancel any other guests.”
Kerry’s backstage at Letterman photo op, much like Eminem’s much-vaunted protest single “Mosh,” released later in the fall, was too little too late to genuinely rally any voters. In the minutes leading up to the show taping, the band walked onstage and posed with Kerry as both their contingents watched with a measure of pride, but an equal measure of bewilderment.
“Kerry said ’I can’t wait to hear that anti-Bush song,’ ” Jason White says. “I don’t think he had heard it before himself. He was obviously pretty busy.” The next day American Idiot would hit stores. The following week it would debut at Number 1 on the Billboard 200, a first for Green Day. One month after that Bush would win a second term in a mandate.
“We did our job. The youth vote percentage-wise was up more than any other vote,” Fat Mike says. “But so was the homophobic Christian vote. They all came out too.”
Defeat only seemed to rile the band even more as Green Day began their American Idiot tour in the spring of 2005, playing large theaters. “We didn’t even know we were going to sell out theaters [when the tour was booked],” Jason Freese says. “A year later, we’re selling out stadiums.” On each tour stop, Armstrong’s center-stage position would take on the role of pulpit. He’d demand the lights out for “Holiday’s” “seig heil” section. He’d twist up his features like Bush and inform the crowd:
“My name is asshole!”
“My name is George W. Bush”
“This next song is a big fuck you to George W. Bush.”
He’d introduce songs with instructions such as, “I want you to scream this next one so loud that every redneck in America hears you!”
The tour seemed, by its midpoint, to be a full-on anti-campaign, a youth rally designed to both entertain and enrage. “I think Bush’s win definitely fuel
ed everybody’s spark,” says White. “It was really disappointing. There’s that glimmer of hope. I think everybody was sort of prepared to be disappointed but it was disappointing anyway. We sort of hit the ground running after that. This wasn’t Toby Keith.”
The band weren’t campaigning for the Democrats so much as they were traveling America, while reinforcing American ideals and liberties, which seemed to many to be compromised with each new Bush pen-stroke.
“We didn’t have an agenda,” Mike Dirnt says today. “It’s not a personal agenda anyway, it’s more like ’I wanna think for myself.’ That’s all we’re saying. [The record] is about raising a discussion . . . with really good rock ’n’ roll.”
True enough, Armstrong signed off most of the American Idiot sets by reminding his audience that they have the power to elect their own leaders.
“There’s not one interview that you can find that really apologizes for anything that he says,” John Roecker says. “Anything. You know, he just says the most insane things. He’ll call me up, he goes, ’You have no idea what I just said.’ I go, ’Oh my god, I cannot believe you just said that.’ And I think people are really happy; it’s refreshing because at least someone can be honest about it.”
“If it was a concert in a red state,” Schneider says, “Billie turned it on.”
The American Idiot tour wasn’t about amplified agit-prop, however. It was about bringing these new songs to the world. The band took care to play the new material faithfully to the note. “We rehearsed for three months before we even attempted to play it live,” Jason White says. “It’s almost like playing a Ramones set. No breaks. It’s like shifting gears five times and playing five different punk rock songs,” Mike Dirnt adds, referencing the seamless delivery of “Homecoming” and “Jesus of Suburbia’s” various suites.
