May 21, 2012

Historians and underground-music lifers will be the first to admit that scrappy pop-punk trio Green Day certainly didn’t invent punk rock. What guitarist/vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool did pull off was a sonic and cultural trifecta that pole-vaulted across the chasm of Gilman Street cred to Billboard chart placement; offered a bouncy respite from grunge’s morose and jaundiced worldview; and delivered an iron-clad guarantee that pop-punk rock ’n’ roll was here to stay.

In 1987, longtime buddies Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt formed a band, Sweet Children, in California’s Bay Area. When the duo were joined the following year by Isocracy drummer John Kiffmeyer (aka Al Sobrante, a take on the California town of El Sobrante), they changed their name to Green Day, a reference to that part of the week where they would purchase marijuana. In 1989, they aligned themselves with Lookout! Records for the release of their first EP, 1000 Hours. Green Day’s debut full-length, 39/Smooth was issued in April of 1990, displaying all of the joyous characteristics of their snotty, caffeinated sound. Kiffmeyer left Green Day in 1990, when the band got in the way of his college studies; he was replaced by Tré Cool, drummer from another Bay Area punk outfit, the Lookouts. With Cool on board, the band stayed in high gear, releasing their second Lookout album, Kerplunk in 1992, and touring extensively. The trio’s dedicated work ethic got them on the radar of the major leagues and in 1993, they signed with Reprise.

What happened next was essentially thee game-changing event in American underground rock history: Green Day’s major-label debut, 1994’s Dookie, brought punk rock out of dank clubs in bad neighborhoods and into the mainstream. Powered by perfect pogo-fests as “Basket Case,” “Longview” and “Welcome To Paradise,” Dookie won the 1995 Grammy award for Best Alternative Album and ended up being the first diamond-selling punk-rock album (in excess of 10 million copies) in history. The record’s success exemplified both Armstrong’s ability to write killer pop songs (pop songs with teeth, mind you) and the band’s rambunctious, yet tight energy.

Careful not to become their own competition, the band released their next album, Insomniac, in the fall of 1995 once the hysteria over Dookie had subsided. The album featured some of the band’s best work (“Geek Stink Breath,” “Brain Stew”) but didn’t approximate the success of Dookie. The follow-up disc, 1997’s Nimrod, showed a wider sonic diversity to the band, with some tracks bordering on metal and ska (the band has cited Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s first band, Operation Ivy, as an influence in their formative years). Ironically, it was the acoustic ballad, “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)” that propelled the record up the charts. The song—a solo Armstrong affair—received constant MTV rotation, and was featured on an episode of Seinfeld, the most popular television show in America at the time. In 2000, Green Day’s sixth album, Warning, was released. Most of the album’s songs were tinged with social commentary and personal introspection, no doubt triggered by the whirlwind of events and emotions the band witnessed in their breakneck-paced career. Warning is indicative of a creative move that definitely supported the old adage that art imitates life; it’s also the only one of their albums to not reach multi-platinum status. Warning was followed up by two anthology discs: Shenanigans, which pooled together many of the trio’s B-sides and compilation tracks (2002) and 2001’s International Superhits!, a best-of collection. In 2002, Green Day teamed up with pop-punk jesters Blink-182 for the Pop Disaster Tour, a co-headlining trek of arenas and amphitheaters.

The next few years in Green Day’s mythology are filled with rumor and rejuvenation. When it came time to deliver a new album to Reprise in 2003, the band discovered that the master tapes were missing. However, there was a mysterious release issued on Armstrong’s Adeline label, Money Money 2020, by a band called the Network, whose synthesizer-saturated sound was closer to Devo than any kind of punk-rockin’ fury. What’s interesting to note is that in this day and age of internet filesharing, the stolen album (which had the working title Cigarettes And Valentines) hasn’t shown up anywhere on the internet. In addition, no one has ever seen members of the Network in the same room as Messrs. Armstrong, Dirnt and Cool at the same time. Weird, huh?

After discussing the future of the missing record with longtime producer Rob Cavallo, Green Day decided to start anew, abandoning the tracks they had worked on to start from scratch. What they delivered was 2004’s American Idiot, the politically charged, socially frustrated song cycle that resonated in the hearts of many, given the controversial policies of then-President George W. Bush. The breadth of the album included vibrant fist-pumping anthems (the title track) to heart-rendering ballads (“Wake Me Up When September Ends”) that told the story of fictional characters St. Jimmy and Whatsername trying to get by in a screwed-up world. This mix of the poignant and profane connected with listeners in a huge way: Idiot sold close to 20 million records worldwide; a CD/DVD collection of a show in Great Britain, Bullet In A Bible, was released the following year.

In 2008, after taking a much-needed from break from all of the excitement American Idiot generated, the band reinvented themselves as mod rockers for a side project called Foxboro Hot Tubs. The Tubs’ debut album, Stop, Drop And Roll!!!, issued on Jingle Town, was an exercise in power-trio histrionics, owing more to the early days of the Who than anything to come out of the Bay Area punk scene in the last two decades. Nearly five years after the release of Idiot, the band returned with 21st Century Breakdown, an album guided by producer Butch Vig, featuring three story arcs buoyed by some crunching singles (“Know Your Enemy,” “21 Guns,” the title track) and some of the most confessional lyrics of Armstrong’s career. Then, in what seemed positively ridiculous on paper, in 2009, the band were approached by film/theatrical director Michael Mayer to see if they would be willing to team up to create a musical of American Idiot. The band agreed and in September 2009, American Idiot: The Musical premiered in Berkeley, before starting an enthusiastic Broadway run in early April 2010.

While it’s certainly a couple universes away from the punk clubhouse 924 Gilman Street to the New York City theater district, Green Day’s career trajectory has only proven their determination. In their 23-year career, Armstrong, Dirnt and Cool have gone from silk-screening their own tour shirts between opening acts to appearing on the Tony Awards. And while they’ve certainly earned both accolades and record sales, these days the trio have a whole new agenda. “There’s nothing to prove anymore,” Armstrong told AP in January 2009. “We’re just trying to show we have this spirit that rock ’n’ roll can change lives, and it really is a religious experience that means something to us. It’s more about faith now.”