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=> On the road with Green Day, the nation's most passionate punk-rock

On the road with Green Day, the nation's most passionate punk-rock
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It's the second-to-last night of Green Day's U.S. tour behind the album American Idiot, and they're playing a packed concert at the Gaylord Entertainment Center in Nashville. If you can call it a concert. In reality, it's pure Brechtian political theater -- mixed with a punk-rock-fueled anti-government rally. Singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong -- a tiny dynamo clad in black, eyes rimmed with kohl -- plays the role of a strutting Great Dictator who, between songs, marches around the stage with his guitar at shoulder arms and introduces himself to the crowd as "George W. Bush -- but my friends call me asshole!" Massive concussive explosions (rigged by the band's pyrotechnics team) periodically shake the house and unnervingly call to mind the attacks in New York, Madrid, London and Iraq. Four songs into the show, the houselights go out and the arena is plunged into blackness. Armstrong, lit by a satanic red spotlight, pans a hand-held searchlight over the crowd and recites, in menacing tones, the Pledge of Allegiance, while bassist Mike Dirnt pumps out a paranoia-inducing bass line and drummer Tre Cool taps his snare rim like a bomb ticking down to detonation. They explode into "Holiday" -- an incendiary anti-government song in the tradition of Dylan's "Masters of War." And when, near the end of the show, they play the plaintive ballad "Wake Me Up When September Ends," a curtain of sparks pours from pyro devices above the stage, a beautiful and elegiac sight. Armstrong tilts his head up and watches as the fire rains down onto what Green Day have convinced you is a country, and world, in serious trouble. But before they leave the stage, Armstrong roars over the crowd: "They don't have the power! You're the fuckin' leaders! We elect these people into office! Don't let them dictate your life or tell you what to do!" For a moment, he sounds like a presidential candidate.
That's no accident. With the release of American Idiot in September 2004, six weeks before the presidential election, Green Day served notice that they had left behind their identity as the goof-punk California trio who first went to Number One in '94 with a song, "Longview," about spacing out in front of the TV and choking the chicken. American Idiot was huge in ambition and scope, and sounded like a direct call to arms to oust the country's most powerful idiot from the Oval Office. Though the album didn't quite succeed at that, it has gone on to sell 10 million copies around the world, and earned Green Day a Grammy and a sweep of the MTV Video Music Awards. Called the world's first punk-rock opera, American Idiot is something more: It is a fearless and politically astute rock album, a richly melodic song suite that gives voice to the disenfranchised suburban underclass of Americans who feel wholly unrepresented by the current leadership of oilmen and Ivy Leaguers, and who are too smart to accept the "reality" presented by news media who sell the government's line of fear and warmongering -- "a nation under the new mania," as Armstrong snarls on the ferocious title track.

The transfiguration of Green Day from punk-pop jesters into outspoken political agitators was mystifying -- except to those who knew anything about the band members' respective childhoods, and their early forging as a band in the cauldron of the gritty Berkeley, California, punk-rock scene, a back story that, in retrospect, makes the emergence of American Idiot, and its attendant rebel-rousing riot of a stage show, seem all but inevitable.

Born thirty-three years ago in Oakland, California, Billie Joe Armstrong was raised in the blue-collar San Francisco suburb of Rodeo. The youngest of six children of a truck-driver dad and waitress mom, he was a prodigiously gifted singer. At age five, on the urging of a music teacher, he cut a single, "Look for Love," on a tiny local label and went on to play gigs with his part-time drummer dad, Andy. It was a happy childhood, until, when Billie Joe was ten years old, his dad died of cancer. His mother was left to raise Billie Joe and his five siblings on her salary waiting tables at a twenty-four-hour restaurant called Rod's Hickory Pit. "She worked a lot of graveyard shifts," he says. "My brothers and sisters were put in a position where they had to grow up really fast and become parents to me." Then his mom married a man that Billie Joe and his siblings loathed. He retreated into music, and by the time he entered Carquinez Middle School in the fall of 1982, at age eleven, he thought about little else than mastering the guitar. One day, he fell into conversation with another eighth-grader, a skinny blond kid and fellow music fanatic, Michael Ryan Pritchard -- better known today as Mike Dirnt. "The first conversation we ever had was about music and songwriting," says Dirnt. "Right there in the lunchroom."

Dirnt describes himself as someone who has always felt like he's on the "outside looking in." Born in 1972 to a heroin-addict teenage mother, he was given up for adoption at six weeks old. His adoptive parents divorced when he was seven, and he wound up with his mother, a Native American, who had to work three jobs to support the family. "We just never saw her," Dirnt says. "She had to work all the time." Like Armstrong, he took refuge in music, playing guitar in his room. After the friends linked up at Carquinez, they set up a rehearsal space in the Armstrongs' living room and bashed through Van Halen and Motley Crue covers. When Dirnt's mother went broke, lost their home and moved from the area, Dirnt moved into the Armstrong family's garage.

"Your politics, when you're a kid, are just basically whatever your parents are bitching about around the house," says Dirnt. "I remember when I was a little kid hoping that Jimmy Carter would win. I don't know why the fuck I was hoping that. I didn't know him from anything."

But when they were fifteen years old, Armstrong and Dirnt first ventured to the punk-rock all-ages club 924 Gilman Street Project, and everything changed. Located beside a canning shop in the gritty warehouse district of Berkeley, 924 Gilman was a graffiti-etched nonprofit drop-in center for legions of tattooed and mohawked punkers who ran the place on a volunteer, co-op basis. Gilman was where Armstrong and Dirnt first fell in love with punk music, and it's where they cut their political teeth.

"We were all pretty much in the same ballpark when it came to politics," says Jesse Townley, a longtime volunteer at the Gilman who has known the members of Green Day since the late 1980s. President Ronald Reagan was in his second term, and he was a target for the rage of American punkers everywhere, especially those in California, who had already suffered eight years under his governorship of the state. "It wasn't just Reagan," Townley points out. "It was an examination of the corruption of the politics of the United States, late-twentieth-century style: the quest for the almighty dollar, and the quest for conformity. You can hear that in all kinds of bands from that time and that scene."

Armstrong and Dirnt became regulars at the Gilman and soaked up the ideologies of the myriad punk subsets who hung there. "There was an aggro faction," says Dirnt, "a goofy faction -- everything from bands like Gwar to people that were literally like Weird Al with an acoustic guitar and a fried-chicken bucket on their head." "There was the straight-edge scene of kids who hewed to a hardcore anarchist line," says Armstrong, "then there was that Germs side of it too, just total nihilism. There was the really educated people, as well as leftover burned-out hippies. And lots of local punk-rock kids. We sort of represented the teenage runaway faction." He laughs.

It was impossible to hang at the Gilman and not become politicized. "It was everything from the bands we were listening to," says Dirnt, "to fanzines, to just sitting around in coffee shops or behind buildings drinking beer and talking about things with friends who had political leanings." One day someone gave Dirnt a cassette of a band called Crimpshrine, who had a song titled "Free Will." "It had the lyrics 'Question everything,' and I thought that was really great," he says. "Don't accept things without thinking about it." Armstrong recalls a band called Sewer Trout who had a song called "Wally and Beaver Go to Nicaragua" -- a tune about the lead characters in the TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver debating the Reagan administration's war in Central America. "That summed up a lot of what Gilman Street was all about," Armstrong says.

Apart from their political awakening, something else happened at the Gilman that would have an incalculable effect on their future. They met a fellow teenager, and Gilman regular, who already bore the stage name Tre Cool. Of the three members of Green Day, Tre (invariably referred to as the band's "comic relief" for his twisted sense of humor) grew up furthest from the mainstream of American society. Born Frank Edwin Wright III in 1972, he is the son of a Vietnam-vet father who, after the war, retreated with his family to a remote mountaintop home near the tiny town of Laytonville, three and a half hours north of San Francisco. The house, which the family built, had no electricity, TV or plumbing. Tre was eleven when he was recruited to play in a band led by a punk-rock-loving mountain neighbor who taught him to drum to his self-penned song "Fuck Religion."

Tre wound up in the Gilman scene after dropping out of high school. He, too, eagerly imbibed the punk politics of Gilman Street. "It was the way people were political at Gilman," says Tre, "which is something that we walked away with. Be very bold with your statements. Like, a band flier with a simple cut-and-paste that an eighth-grader would do but with Ronald Reagan's head cut out, and put in a tank and having him mowing down Gandhi's followers. Shit like that."

By 1990, Armstrong, Dirnt and Tre had coalesced into Green Day (named in honor of a daylong weed binge) and were one of the biggest draws at the Gilman, pulling in crowds of fans for their punky three-chord rave-ups about life as latchkey teenage potheads. The band released Kerplunk on the tiny indie label Lookout! Records in 1992, and a bidding war broke out among the majors. Green Day signed to Reprise, and in February 1994, they released their major-label debut, Dookie, which made them, in their early twenties, instant stars and MTV staples, selling 8 million copies in the United States. They followed up with the pummeling Insomniac (1995) and the more friendly Nimrod (1997), at which point the band seemed to run out of steam. With all three members then married with kids, Armstrong's lyrics increasingly turned inward, expressing navel-gazing fears that he was getting old, boring and apathetic -- a "grouch sitting on the couch," as he put it on Nimrod. Three years passed before they released Warning, in 2000. The title track and the song "Minority" ("down with the moral majority") showed the band reaching for wider themes than middle-aged angst, but the music was lackluster and so were sales. By 2003, Green Day were asking themselves if they even wanted to continue as a band.

(Excerpted from RS 987, November 17, 2005)



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