Radio has rarely been without a Green Day hit since the mid-'90s, and if you want to
know more about the band's story - from their punk origins to their tragic losses - then
check out this look into the life and times of Green Day.
Green Day has had the same three members since 1991, a remarkably long run in the fickle
world of rock 'n' roll.
Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt have been around since the band's inception in 1986,
with Tré Cool signing on five years later, providing the final piece of the musical puzzle.
In the mid-'80s, when Armstrong and Dirnt were teenagers, they teamed up with a couple
of friends to form their first band.
Initially, they were a metal band called Condom, then they changed their name to Desecrated
Youth when the group started playing more straight-ahead rock.
By 1986, the band started to develop the Green Day sound that everyone knows and loves, but
they started out going by the name of Sweet Children.
The band's original drummer was long gone, and when Sweet Children played its first show
in 1988, it was with John Kiffmeyer behind the drum kit.
After he decided to attend college full time in 1990, the band, now called Green Day, had
to find a new drummer - and they found a pretty Cool one.
Since the very beginning, part of punk rock's unrelenting ethic to rebel against anything
conventional has been for the musicians to adopt stage names - the funnier, brattier,
and more threatening, the better.
There are plenty of examples: take '70s punk band Germs, home to musicians Darby Crash
and Pat Smear.
And, of course, there's the Sex Pistols, with their infamous frontman Johnny Rotten and
Sid Vicious on bass.
Green Day followed suit with this tradition - for the most part.
The band's bassist was born with the name Michael Pritchard, but he plays under the
moniker Mike Dirnt.
When he was in elementary school, the future musician liked to play "air bass," and while
doing so, he would imitate the sound of the instrument by making a "dirnt" sound with
his mouth.
Thus, he became Mike Dirnt.
As for drummer Tre Cool, in the mid-1980s, at the age of 12, he joined Larry Livermore's
band the Lookouts.
At the time, he was just a kid named Frank Edwin Wright III.
Half the age of his bandmates, Wright struggled to fit in and Livermore gave him the iconic
name Tré Cool.
Only frontman Billie Joe Armstrong decided to stick with the name his parents gave him.
And Billie Joe is definitely not short for a more regal moniker.
"My mom listened to a lot of country music, you know, she comes from Oklahoma, thus the
name 'Billie Joe.'"
On February 9, 2011, seemingly out of the blue, Billie Joe Armstrong revealed on Twitter
the inspiration for three of the band's best-known songs.
According to his tweet, "She," "Sassafras Roots," and "Whatsername" are all about a
girl named Amanda.
According to Alan di Perna's Green Day: The Ultimate Unauthorized History, she's also
the subject of "She's a Rebel" and the devastating breakup song "Good Riddance (Time of Your
Life)."
So who exactly is this Amanda person?
Well, in 1991, after returning home from a club tour, Armstrong broke up with his girlfriend
and met up with a woman named Amanda, a punk rock feminist he knew from the Berkley scene.
The relationship didn't last long, and according to Marc Spitz's Nobody Likes You: Inside the
Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day, Amanda dumped Armstrong right around
the time the group's debut album turned him into an international superstar in 1994.
Armstrong was devastated by the breakup, and he came up with "Good Riddance" in response.
He wound up holding on to it for almost four years, eventually including it on the 1997
album Nimrod.
While Armstrong ultimately married and has a family with someone else, he couldn't quite
move on from Amanda.
She not only influenced the song "Whatsername" but also the character of the same name in
the band's concept album American Idiot.
The frightening events of Woodstock '99 - primarily a destructive and fiery riot prompted by price-gouging
water vendors and an inciting Limp Bizkit performance - have left the events of Woodstock
'94 almost completely forgotten.
The three-day festival held in upstate New York was originally meant to pay homage to
the 1969 Woodstock concert on its 25th anniversary.
However, times had definitely changed and the original festival's vibes of peace and
love didn't quite mesh with the lineup of contemporary artists featured at Woodstock
'94, which included headbangers Metallica, Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails, and relative
newcomers Green Day.
The punk trio, one of the most popular emerging acts of the year, took the stage on day three.
By that time, audience members were anxious, exhausted, and tired of getting rained on.
And Green Day didn't really help matters with their stage banter.
They jokingly referred to the audience as "Funny little people" and "rich motherfu--ers."
Then in the middle of the show, bassist Mike Dirnt literally asked for trouble - and mud.
"Yeah, we suggest that you throw mud.
That's fun."
The band was soon eating its words when the crowd started throwing chunks of mud at the
stage.
About two-thirds of the way through their 35-minute slot, the set had descended into
a thick, two-way mud fight between Billie Joe Armstrong and the crowd.
Dirnt added even more fuel to the fire with another round of tongue-in-cheek comments
to the audience...
"You're just mad because you're in the rain.
Well, f--- you.
I hope it rains so much you all get stuck."
However, instant karma hit Dirnt hard.
After the set, when he tried to run across the stage, the mud-covered bassist was tackled
by a security guard, knocking out part of his tooth.
In 2000, Green Day released its album Warning with the title track as the second single.
Not as breakneck and punk-ish as its earlier work, "Warning" was a bouncy song built around
a circular riff.
Perhaps music buyers found the single so irresistible because it sounded pleasantly familiar.
As pointed out by Pop Matters and other outlets, "Warning" sounds a whole lot like the song
"Picture Book" by the Kinks.
The tune was a standout track from the influential British group's album The Kinks Are the Village
Green Preservation Society.
Ray Davies, the band's frontman and writer of "Picture Book" likely would've had a strong
case if he'd pursued a copyright infringement lawsuit, but he didn't.
Oddly, Green Day got hit with a lawsuit over "Warning" by a little-known band from England
called Other Garden.
It was reported that the band's leader, Colin Merry, wrote a song called "Never Got the
Chance" in 1992.
Citing a keen similarity between that song and "Warning," Merry alleged that Green Day
ripped him off and asked their publisher Warner Chappell to freeze royalties generated by
"Warning."
While Merry acknowledged a similarity between The Kinks' song "Picture Book" and "Warning,"
he thought the Green Day tune sounded far more like his.
Perhaps not wanting to get the attention of The Kinks and put an infringement target on
his own back, Merry later dropped the suit.
In 2003, Green Day was nearly finished with recording what was to be its seventh studio
album, Cigarettes and Valentines.
But even hardcore Green Day completists haven't heard the entirety of the record.
That's because while the band was working on it and nearing its completion, the master
tapes were stolen.
The idea of re-doing all that work was just too much to bear and not that attractive of
an idea.
So, Green Day cancelled the album entirely in favor of working on a brand new record,
which turned out to be the mega-hit American Idiot.
Eventually, the master tapes were recovered, but Green Day has yet to release those recordings
in their original forms.
Billie Joe Armstrong told NME that they still have the tapes in the band's vault but those
tracks might never see the light of day.
Bassist Mike Dirnt elaborated...
"There's always a lot in the vaults, but we tend to look forward rather than, you know,
reaching back."
However, a few of those lost songs were eventually released for public consumption.
For example, a live version of the title track appears on Green Day's live album Awesome
as F---.
Another tune that escaped the vault is "Youngblood."
Armstrong said that the song got a facelift and new lyrics before it was included on the
band's 2016 LP Revolution Radio.
Around the time that Green Day abandoned the album Cigarettes and Valentines and then made
American Idiot, the trio took a serious left turn and formed a New Wave side band called
The Network.
Green Day and associates performed in masks and adopted stage names like Fink, Van Gough,
The Snoo, and Z.
They even released an album called Money Money 2020.
According to NME, there was speculation that the record was actually Cigarettes and Valentines
renamed, a charge Armstrong denied.
Green Day also cheekily denied being The Network at all, at least at first, but nobody involved
with the project held the secret that closely.
The Network's vocals and instrumentation sounded a lot like Green Day's, and the songs' registered
writers were Armstrong and company.
It was all in good fun, especially when the Network released footage of a press conference
in which the band members went crazy when the words "Green Day" were uttered aloud.
As part of the made-up, just-for-fun lore, The Network hated Green Day and considered
the band its sworn enemy.
Nevertheless, the two not-at-all separate parties patched things up enough for the Network
to open for Green Day at a Las Vegas show in 2005.
It wasn't until a decade later, in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2013, that somebody
fessed up.
Mike Dirnt made a casual reference to the band's busy early 2000s, which included "the
Network record."
At the time that it was released, "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was an outlier several
times over.
It's a tender, emotionally wrenching ballad performed by Green Day, a band generally known
for speeding through pop punk tunes.
While it appears on the group's 2004 thematic song cycle American Idiot, it has nothing
to do with the plot or characters found elsewhere on the album.
It's also the Green Day song closest to singer and songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong's heart.
At a taping of VH1 Storytellers in 2005, Armstrong said…
"It's a personal thing.
I've never tackled an issue about that - about singing about my father...It's hard to sing
but definitely therapeutic, because it deals with the passing of someone that you love."
Armstrong's dad, a jazz drummer who helped him get into music, died in 1982 when the
Green Day frontman was only ten years old.
Many years after the song was written, it's still a tough one for Armstrong to get through,
and as such, Green Day doesn't play it live all that often.
The band did, however, perform it on a 2019 visit to the Howard Stern Show.
Armstrong even talked a bit more about the song and his father.
"Do you still actively think about your father when you sing this?"
"Um, yeah, I mean, I think about him every day, really."
"Really?"
It may seem incongruous that somebody would take American Idiot, an album by a famous
rock band, and adapt it into a big Broadway musical full of singing and dancing.
But it's actually not all that weird.
In 2010, American Idiot - the musical - debuted at the St. James Theater on the Great White
Way.
Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told the New York Times that theatrical forms were in his
mind when the band crafted American Idiot in the early 2000s.
He went on to say…
"Storytelling has always been at the heart of much of my music...We talked about doing
a mini-opera, and each of us wrote 30-second songs about exactly where we were in our lives
and we started seeing this arc of a story that we felt we wanted to tell."
Those songs developed into a concept album that told the story of Jesus of Suburbia and
St. Jimmy, among other characters.
But playwright and theatrical director Michael Mayer - who won a Tony for helming the rock
musical Spring Awakening in 2007 - thought American Idiot told a bigger story about youth
alienated by leaders and the media.
He already had a rough outline of a show, with new characters and a clear storyline,
put together before he even approached Armstrong.
Together, they wrote the script for the show, and Armstrong occasionally acted in the Broadway
production, playing the character St. Jimmy.
In recent years, there's even been talk of a film version of American Idiot.
With so much success over the past three decades, Green Day must have friends in pretty high
places.
"God's favorite band, Green Day!"
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