Growing Old with Green Day
In your younger years did you have a boyfriend or girlfriend that you kept coming back to? A person you’d date until the flame went out, only to go off and find someone else until the two of you couldn’t stand one another any longer, and then end up back with that first love realizing you were meant to be together all along. Lather, rinse, repeat. I never experienced that in a romantic relationship but I’ve been in a relationship like that my entire life with the band who changed my life: Green Day.
I’ll never forget the first time Green Day entered my radar. It was 1994 and baseball was my life. Music was also important to me but at the time it was still second to America’s pastime. Rock ruled the radio and bands like Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Bush served as my soundtrack. One night at practice while I was playing up on the B-team with kids a year older than me, a group of them were on the bench huddled around a walkman. In an attempt to relate I asked what they were listening to, receiving a snotty “You’ve never heard of them.” These were three kids who lived in the McMansions on the rich side of town. They were the stars of the baseball team. These were guys who girls paid attention to. They were everything I wasn’t. Desperate to impress them with both my baseball skills and my musical knowledge I pressed for the name of the band and when they begrudgingly said Green Day I lied through my teeth saying that I had heard of them. After practice I told my mom that there was a band that I needed to hear and being a massive music lover herself, she drove me straight to the record. After that night I stopped trying to impress those yuppies as I’d be too busy immersing myself in the world of punk rock.
Dookie:
The first Green Day album I owned along with my Idiot Club membership form that I never filled out. I wonder if it’s still valid?
Before hearing Green Day’s major label debut, the album that ushered punk into the mainstream, I was a baseball kid who was also into music. After hearing Dookie I was a music head, full stop. This band from the far off shores of California had managed to encapsulate all of my teenage angst and spit it out in the form of blistering three minute punk songs. They were loud, sarcastic, and Billie Joe Armstrong was singing about everything plaguing my teenage brain: alienation, figuring out my place in the world, not being able to relate to the masses of the mindless, and, of course, masturbation. I loved baseball but I couldn’t relate to the hulking athletes I watched smash homeruns on the television. I could idolize them and want to be like them but I knew that was a far-fetched fantasy, even for a dreamer like me. But now I had these three punk rockers who dressed in clothes I could afford, playing power chords I could handle, singing about all the neuroses bouncing around my teenage brain. Dookie was (and is) a flawless album that came into my life at the perfect time. I traded my baseball glove for a bass guitar and never looked back.
Insomniac:
As a teenager not yet old enough to drive, life moved at a snail’s pace. Less than 2 years had passed since Green Day released the album that completely changed my life but I'd gone from being a 7th grader to a freshman in high school and by then I had already moved on and was now and idealistic hardcore kid who shunned all things mainstream and all bands that weren’t screaming their brains out over shoddily recorded music about animal rights, machines that were killing the forests, etc. Dookie made me feel okay in being an outsider but now that everyone was listening to them I was on a mission to travel as far underground as I could go so I had turned my back on the East Bay power trio. Insomniac was released two days after I turned 15 and I ignored it, opting instead to spend my time at VFW halls renouncing any album that had a barcode on its back cover. What can I say? I was young, idealistic, and I’d perfected the science of the idiot.
In the most punk rock move ever, Green Day played a new, unreleased song on the VMAs on MTV in 1994.
Nimrod:
By the time Nimrod was released in 1997 my strict underground hardcore-only policy had loosened. I was 17, had my driver’s license, and was playing bass in a pop punk band . I don’t remember exactly which song off Nimrod brought me back into the fold but the entire album hit me hard. They were still the Green Day I remembered from the Dookie days with their infectiously catchy hooks and clever wordplay but they were also a bit more grown up, mixing up their straightforward punk rock anthems with mid tempo rock songs, a surf rock instrumental, a song with a horn section, and even a vicious hardcore song. Oh yeah, and then there was that ballad. By now you’ve heard Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) 434,614,889 times and might be sick of it but that is to be blamed on radio’s refusal to grow, not Green Day. It’s an incredible song that showed every suburban teenage punk like yours truly that it was okay to embrace your soft side. To hear it played on the Seinfeld finale, the greatest sitcom of all-time, solidified the fact that I was an idiot for leaving but now I was back. One benefit to my bullheaded hardcore phase was that I now got to discover two albums at once as I went backwards and drank in Insomniac, realizing what a schmuck I’d been to ignore this brilliant punk rock album.
Warning:
Changing things up yet again by turning down the distortion and on their next album, Warning, Green Day continued to grow. I, on the other hand, did not. This wasn’t the Green Day I knew. How could they go and change their sound so drastically without first consulting with me? With their most diverse collection of songs on Nimrod they had put out their London Calling and now with this stark departure they had released their Combat Rock and I just wasn’t ready. This was the first time Green Day played with a ragtime sound, something they do as well as anyone, and Billie Joe Armstrong’s lyrics were at the top of their game with brilliant lines such as: “a conscientious objector to the war inside my mind.” But I had fallen victim to my own denial and wasn’t ready for their shift in sound. It would take me a good fifteen years to realize the brilliance of the songs on Warning. Once again I’d hopped off the Green Day train. I’d always hold dear the records they wrote for me but now they were someone else’s to love.
American Idiot:
During the end of my teenage years into my early twenties I did my best to emulate the style of James Dean. He was the epitome of cool and I loved that 1950s rebel look. I combed my hair up and back, cuffed my jeans to expose my white socks, and wore my white t-shirts a size too small. Back then I worked at the mall and every day on my way into work I passed by the frame shop and located in the front window was a print called Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It was a fictional diner scene with Elvis behind the counter serving milkshakes to a nearly empty counter, the only customers being Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and James Dean. I longed to own this print but it cost something crazy like 400 bucks so I never did get it. In 2004 when Green Day released a single that shared a name with the print that for years hypnotized me, the feeling of seeing a long lost love bowled me over. American Idiot came out a few weeks shy of my 24th birthday. It’d been 10 years since Dookie changed my life and I’ll be goddamned…they went and did it again. I don’t have to describe the impact American Idiot had on the world; how they reinvented themselves with a punk rock opera, how it propelled them to a stadium act, and how they were the voice of a generation…again. Green Day was everywhere and deservedly so. They released (another) perfect album. Every song is a banger, the cover art is iconic, and I had my favorite band back.
Boulevard of Broken Dreams
21st Century Breakdown:
Oftentimes when a person falls in love with a band’s music, the audience feels a connection so deep it’s as if the artist is writing the songs directly to the listener. This was certainly the case for me when I first heard Dookie. Green Day was touching on all the subjects bouncing around my teenage brain. Ten years later it seemed they were no longer writing directly to me, they were now writing about me, though I wouldn’t realize this until a few years later when I’d come to realize that I was the American Idiot for writing off their follow-up so quickly, declaring they were repeating themselves without truly listening. I may have technically been an adult in 2009, but clearly I still had a lot of growing up to do.
When they released 21st Century Breakdown Green Day were on top of the world, having reinvented themselves and rock music (again). Instead of writing catchy 3 minute verse/chorus/bridge bangers they were now in the business of writing epic songs, throwing traditional songwriting structure out the window. As I alluded to earlier when Warning came out, I wasn’t ready for this album. I thought the most punk rock thing they could do after releasing a rock opera was to get back to their roots by putting out a blistering punk rock album a la Insomniac. One day I’ll learn to leave it to the professionals. Green Day does what they want, they always have and that’s what makes them great. I dipped out once again, holding my OG GD albums close to my chest, declaring (once again) that their new stuff isn’t for me. A few years later I’d come to realize that this was not, in fact, American Idiot II. It was a brilliant rock ‘n roll album with songs made to be played in stadiums. Green Day had created another masterpiece but I had some regressing to do before I would catch up and realize this.
Uno, Dos, Tre:
Up until this point, my on-again off-again relationship with Green Day albums fit a pattern:
Dookie: On
Insomniac: Off
Nimrod: On
Warning: Off
American Idiot: On
21st Century Breakdown: Off
If math could be believed, their next album (which just so happened to be a trilogy of albums released within 4 months of one another in 2012) was going to bring me back into the fold. As I was shouting from rooftops all throughout high school with none of my teachers (or my parents, for that matter) bothering to listen: math is full of shit. This was the first time that Green Day released two successive albums in which I did not find myself groveling at the feet of my favorite band, telling them I made a mistake by leaving, pleading with them to let me back into Idiot Nation. In fact, the trilogy of Uno, Dos, Tre is the only Green Day release(s) that I didn’t circle back to, realizing that I’d shit the bed again by not embracing it sooner. Although I love the album covers which are frequently on display as my Records of the Week in my home office, I have yet to connect with these albums aurally. That said, in 2014 for Record Store Day Green Day released an album entitled Demolicious, a collection of demo versions of songs from Uno, Dos, and Tre. I’ll never forget the first time I heard this album. While randomly scrolling through Spotify in search of a soundtrack to cut the grass to, I stumbled across Demolicious, not knowing what it was. I put it on and was blown away by these songs which have a power pop feel and a rawness that reminded me of Green Day’s Lookout Records output. I’m far too nerdy to include Demolicious on a list of Green Day’s best albums as it’s not a “proper” release (I know…my brain is broken) but if it were it’d be in my Top 5 for sure. This is the one that led me to revisit 21st Century Breakdown, realizing the error of my ways by disregarding that brilliant album. The trilogy may not be for me but Demolicious is the album that made me realize that I had such a deep history with this band and their albums meant so much to me that no matter what came next, they’d always be my favorite band. All that said, I still wasn’t done writing off new Green Day albums just yet.
Revolution Radio:
Bang Bang was the first single released from Green Day’s (then) forthcoming album, Revolution Radio, and my oh my is it a banger (heck yeah pun intended. I couldn’t pass that up). The song is fast, in your face, and sounds like it could’ve come straight off Insomniac, their most blistering album to date. The follow-up (title track) single, Revolution Radio, was another kickass tune. It didn’t quite have the teeth of Bang Bang but coming out with a bang like they did (I just can’t help myself) was going to be impossible to match. Still, this was a 1A to Bang Bang’s 1. It was apparent that Green Day had gone back to their roots to show these young punks how to write a 3 minute anthem. When the album came out a day before my 36th birthday I was at my beloved Vintage Vinyl (RIP) with all the kids twenty years my junior buying the special edition CD. On the car ride home as I dove into the album I kept hearing Johnny Rotten in my head asking if you “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated.” It’s not that the other songs were bad but the two lead singles were straight blazers leading me to think this was going to be Insomniac II. I was now in my late 30s and needed to show these kids that I still had some fight in me and Green Day was going to be the soundtrack to that daydream. Now they’d gone and put out a song of mid-tempo rockers. Nah, not for me. The kids can have ‘em. After my mini-midlife crisis subsided, I revisited Revolution Radio, this time with an open mind. I came to realize that I didn’t need an Insomniac II. Why would I when I could simply go and listen to Insomniac any time my aging heart desired? Green Day isn’t in the business of repeating themselves so I needed to trust in them. And I’m sure glad I wised up. It’s a solid album and a nice addition to their catalog. Tre Cool is at his best on this one.
Father of All…
Before Father of All… was released I was already knee deep in the writing of Nimrod. I had also branded myself a Green Day fan for life, having my tattoo artist turn Gorilla Biscuits’ GB logo into a Green Day homage. With a forthcoming novel that found Green Day at its center and a tattoo on my arm, I was shouting from a rooftop that Green Day was my favorite band. And then they went and released their new single where Billie Joe Armstrong sang…hark…falsetto. What the…? Their next single was even more dancey than the first. What was happening? I’d come to terms with (and related to) the notion that we all slow down a bit as we get older but where was the passion? Where was the edge? My brother heard an interview with them declaring that their new album was going to piss off their punk fans. ME! How could they do this to me? What about my novel?! What about my tattoo?! What about my reputation?! I’d be turning 40 later in the year and I needed people to know that the angsty suburban punk was still in me, he now just eats better and practices yoga (please don’t tell 16 year old me, he’d mock the hell out of me). The day Father of All… was released I was set to see Tim Barry whose shows always put me in a good mood. So the plan was to listen to Green Day’s new album on my ride home, front to back. I’d listen to it once so that I could tell myself I gave it a fair chance (cuz nothing says fair chance like giving years of someone’s hard work 30 minutes of your time. Ugh) and then I could set it aside and be done with it. True to my word, I listened. And…I didn’t hate it. It was different. It wasn’t the Green Day I knew but it stuck with me enough to listen to it again first thing the next morning; again start to finish. And then I listened again, probably a good 6 times. And I haven’t stopped listening since. Father of All… is a perfect record. It’s a succinct 27 minute collection of infectiously catchy songs that make it clear that after 30+ years of being a band, Green Day isn’t done growing which is an incredible feat.
SO THERE YOU HAVE IT, THE HISTORY OF MY STORIED RELATIONSHIP WITH my favorite band that no one asked for (and perhaps no one wanted). For music nerds like yours truly, the question of “Who’s your favorite band” can induce panic-sweats as it usually does not have a simple answer. I’m fortunate that my answer is clear as day: Green Day. I also recognize how fortunate I am that the band that started everything for me way back in the 7th grade is still inspiring me to this day. My love of Green Day is not attached to nostalgia. Sure, I hold dear the memories their music gave me back in my formative years. But it’s not only those early records that mean something to me. They all do. Many people use the phrase: punk rock saved my life. That’s a bit too dramatic for me as I had a good upbringing and have no complaints about my childhood so my life didn’t need saving. But I will save that punk rock absolutely shaped my life. At times I may have strayed but I’ve always come back. Even if I was late to get to them, every era of Green Day sounds right to me and I’m looking forward to hearing what’s next.
