Green Day
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Green Day is a punk rock/pop punk band consisting of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt (born Michael Pritchard), and Tre Cool (born Frank Edwin Wright III). Along with other bands on the Lookout! label, they are credited as being the pioneers of the pop punk genre popularizing the genre to the mainstream with 1994s smash album Dookie.
Lookouts
At the age of 12, Tre Cool became a member of the band The Lookouts. Their album attracted some attention, and Tre 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 The 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 Rods 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 Tre 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, slang in the San Francisco area for a day spent smoking marijuana. The band were joint-smokers since puberty and even Billie Joe was supplying the high school for he was nicknamed "Two Dollar Bill". It is widely reported that when the boys went to their high school principal to say that they were dropping out to become a full-time band the principal observed that "would be a green day in hell" before they amounted to anything. 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 EP 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 Days 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 Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).
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 Days 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 in fall 1995. It was a response to the poppy simplicity of Dookie with the album darker than their previous one. Though the album didnt approach the success of Dookie, it still sold several million copies in the U.S. After that the band abruptly canceled a European tour, claiming exhaustion. Following the cancellation, the band spent the rest of the year resting and writing new material, issuing Nimrod in late 1997. It was their first conceptual record. After that the band took some time out of the spotlight, issuing the poppy Kinksesque Warning: three years later in fall 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, visually and vocally to Wilhelm Fink (Billie Joe Armstrongs pseudonym). John Roecker, director of soon to be released Live Freaky Die Freaky, starring Green Day and other East Bay punk alumni, and Green Days DVD Documentary "Heart Like A Hand Grenade", has spoken of various projects recorded at Studio 808, including a New Wave album and a christmas album, during the American Idiot sessions. Studio 808 is the credited studio in The Networks Money Money 2020 album and Green Days American Idiot.
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 (probably each the same person,) and Whatsername. Two of the tracks, "Jesus of Suburbia" and "Homecoming", composed in 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 since 9/11. In Armstrongs words, "One day Mike was at the studio and he wrote a thirty-second song. I dont know, I liked it so I wanted to do one too. The one that I did, I connected to his and then Tre did one and he connected it to mine and so on and so forth until we had about ten minutes. It was just purely out of having a good time." The album as a whole is more political than their previous ones, if for no other reason than their aging. Armstrong 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.
Some songs on the American Idiot CD come in pairs showing the originality of the 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.
The band at the moment at are touring, promoting the album with a largely successfull tour. Although the record is important for the band, they havent hinted that they will stop with it and also said that they dont feel at all at the peak of their careers.
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