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great little kids who write songs about
shyly seeing a girl you like in the library,
but when you peek back over the top of the
book you’re reading, she’s gone. They’re
called Green Day, and they’re just awe-
some!” Coincidentally, I had already set up
an interview with them back in Berkeley
the next week to preview their then-
upcoming Dookie disc, and their personali-
ties were evident from the start. They were
tapeworm-thin, and Armstrong’s close-
cropped hair was dyed green and spiked
with Sonic the Hedgehog tufts, but behind
his and Dirnt’s sleepy gazes you could feel
a fierce, street-savvy intelligence crackling.
Case,” and “When I Come Around”
topped Modern Rock charts and sold over
10 million copies of Dookie, stateside alone.
It also earned the band a 1995 Grammy for
Best Alternative album. But what happens
when your anonymity and privacy sud-
denly evaporate in the wake of MTV
superstardom? In one of the only inter-
views he granted for 1995's followup
Insomniac, Armstrong wasn’t sure if he
wanted such notoriety, ironically ham-
mered home by two giggling schoolgirls in
the next booth over at a Berkeley diner,
who immediately recognized him but were
too timid to say hello. Even though it was
technically Green Day’s fourth effort (after
two on indie imprint Lookout!), it felt like
he was feeling the sophomore-jinx pres-
sure. Slumped low in his seat to avoid fur-
ther detection, it didn’t help. He was clever
and analytical enough to rationalize his
way out of it, which he did in grand style
on the eclectic 1997 followup Nimrod, with
more Bay Area, fraternal pride. It show-
cased his genuine love of — and enduring
fascination with — the nuts-and-bolts craft
of songwriting. He saw beyond the three-
Tré Cool, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt
Cool — conversely bright-eyed and impish
— always looked like he was up to — or
had just gotten away with — some prank.
They were punks, in the truest sense of the
word. They practically had their own lingo
and laughed readily at each other’s in-
jokes, which they were more than happy to
explain to outsiders if they inquired. A
week later, they sat around their kooky
crash pad with a giant smoking device
they’d dubbed Bongzilla, leaning against a
Twister mat inexplicably taped to a wall, a
Sea Monkeys tank frothing on the win-
dowsill, and sharp-pointed springs pro-
truding from almost every weathered liv-
ing-room chair. Dirnt still remembers our
first innocuous summit with Duritz. “At
Sproul Plaza!” he chortles. “Adam was
great! He caught on to us really early, and
he was telling everybody about us. That
was so great of him to do — I was like,
‘Wow! Thanks, man!’”
Of course, no one outside of producer
Rob Cavallo had any idea the stratosphere
the lads were rocketing to at the time.
But Green Day’s brand of snotty punk rock
would soon go mainstream, as chart-top-
ping anthems like “Longview,” “Basket
chord limits of DIY punk, like all great
composers. Aptly enough, the gentle bal-
lad “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”
would go on to becomes one of the group’s
signature sonnets. It even closed out the
final episode of the “Seinfeld” TV series,
and it still finds its way onto easy-listening
radio playlists.
A few years later, I sat in Cavallo’s
Burbank office at Reprise Records, left
alone with a top-secret, then-unreleased
copy of American Idiot for a story I was
doing. I was suitably stunned. Green Day
had topped itself yet again with an ambi-
tious concept album that just seemed per-
fect for a Broadway stage. Armstrong’s
eyes twinkled in the ensuing chat as he dis-
cussed that possibility. You could tell he
was already considering his next big move,
which would — with the help of “Spring
Awakening”’s Michael Mayer — eventual-
ly hit the stage in 2009. And the reinven-
tion never stopped. Green Day would go
on to release its own Rock Band video
game; have its series of Converse All-Stars;
issue a bountiful trilogy of records (Uno..
Dos...Tre!); put out two greatest-hits compi-
lations; and — on April 24, 2015 — find
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26 illinoisentertainer.com february 2020