All About Green Day
Mood:
flirty
Topic: Green Day
All About Green Day
Green Day is an American punk rock band consisting of Billie Joe
Armstrong, Mike Dirnt (born Michael Pritchard), and Tré Cool (born Frank
Edwin Wright III).
The beginning
At the age of 12, Tré Cool became a member of the band The Lookouts.
Their album attracted some attention, and Tré began performing at an
early age at the Berkeley, California punk club 924 Gilman Street. In
1988, Billie Joe Armstrong (16 years old) and Mike Pritchard (16 years
old) formed Sweet Children, with Armstrong on lead vocals and guitar,
Pritchard (a.k.a. Mike Dirnt), on bass and backing vocals, and John
Kiffmeyer (a.k.a. Al Sobrante), on drums.
Their first show was in 1988 at Rod's Hickory Pit in Rodeo, California. A
couple months later, they played a high school party with the Lookouts
in a remote mountain location near Willits, California, where Tré and
Kain Kong of the Lookouts lived and attended school. Only five kids
showed up for the party, and there was no electricity in the house, so
Sweet Children had to play using a generator and candlelight, but they
played, as Lookouts singer/guitarist Lawrence Livermore put it, "As if
they were the Beatles at Shea Stadium."
Livermore, who also ran the Berkeley independent label Lookout! Records,
immediately offered Sweet Children a deal, and in early 1989 they
recorded their first EP, "1,000 Hours," and then decided, weeks before
the EP release, to change their name to Green Day. The record came out,
with the cover changed at the last minute to reflect the new name, in
April 1989.
One year later, in April 1990, Green Day released their first album,
39/Smooth, and that summer set out in a van on their first national
tour. Before leaving, they recorded another four-song EP called
"Slappy," and while in Minneapolis-St. Paul they recorded a four-song EP
of some of their old songs for the local label Skene Records, and
called it "Sweet Children". (In 1991, 1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours
was released which re-issued on CD 39/Smooth with 9 additional tracks
from "Slappy" and "1,000 Hours".)
After this tour, at the end of the summer of 1990, Al Sobrante left the
band on what was supposed to be a temporary basis to attend college in
Arcata, California. By this time the Lookouts had become mostly
inactive, and Cool, now 17 and living in Berkeley, began playing with
Green Day as a temporary replacement. The combination worked out so well
that he soon became Green Day's permanent drummer.
During 1991, the band toured and played locally, building up a large
following, and also wrote and recorded their second album, Kerplunk!,
released on Lookout Records in January 1992. The CD version also
included the four tracks from the "Sweet Children" EP. They continued to
tour through 1992 and 1993, ranging as far afield as the United
Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, Holland, Poland, and the Czech Republic
(then still known as Czechoslovakia).
Attention
By 1993, Green Day had sold about 55,000 copies of each of their first
albums, a huge amount for the independent punk scene in those days, and
attracted a great deal of attention from the major labels. Eventually
they decided to sign a deal with Reprise Records, leaving Lookout on
friendly terms, and spent the greater part of the year recording their
major label debut, Dookie, which proved to be an almost instant
sensation, helped by extensive MTV airplay for the videos "Longview" and
"Basket Case."
In 1994, Green Day embarked on a nationwide tour and chose queercore
band Pansy Division as their opening act. At the time this was regarded
as quite controversial; nonetheless, the tour was a success. Green Day
had made their audience aware that they were not just another 'pop' band
with a couple of hit singles. The band joined the lineups of both the
Lollapalooza Festival and Woodstock 1994. Green Day's Woodstock gig
included a gigantic mud fight between the band and the audience, leading
to a melee in which Dirnt lost his front teeth.
They recorded a single called "J.A.R." in 1995, and followed it up with
the album Insomniac. Though the album didn't approach the success of
Dookie, it still sold several million copies in the U.S. Their third
major label album, Nimrod, was released in 1997, and Warning: in 2000.
In 2003, during time spent in the studio, a New Wave band appeared on
the scene, known as The Network. This 5 piece band, at first look/listen
appears to be Green Day. The front man "Fink" bears a striking
resemblance to one Wilhelm Fink (Billie Joe Armstrong's pseudonym).
American Idiot
Fighting burnout after Warning:, the band went into the studio to write
and record new material for an album. After completing 20 tracks — an
impressive album according to those few who heard it — the master tapes
were stolen from the studio. The band chose not to try and re-create the
stolen album but instead started over with a vow to be even more
ambitious.
The resulting 2004 album, American Idiot, is being billed as a "punk
rock opera", or more accurately a concept album telling the story of
characters such as St. Jimmy, Jesus of Suburbia, and Whatsername. Two of
the tracks, "Jesus of Suburbia" and "Homecoming", composed by 5
different parts, are multi-movement suites that are both more than nine
minutes long. The song "American Idiot" has been hailed by the band as
their public statement in reaction to the confusing and warped scene
that is American pop culture. The album as a whole is more political
than their previous ones, if for no other reason than their aging.
Billie Joe has said that they chose to write this way because the band
has obtained respect and sway in the music world, and that this social
commentary is part of the natural evolution of a band.
Their album American Idiot won a Grammy in 2005 for Best Rock Album
along with 5 other Grammy nominations. The song "American Idiot" was
featured in the video game NFL Madden 2005.
