continued from page 26
itself inducted into the prestigious Rock &
Roll Hall of Fame on its first nomination.
The next time I spoke with Armstrong,
he’d battled through an addiction to pre-
scription medication, but also delved into
acting and tracked a dusky duets disc with
Norah Jones, Foreverly, covering the Everly
Brothers folk album Songs Our Daddy
Taught Us note for note. “I just kind of go
where my voice takes me,” he said at the
time, after stumbling upon the stark classic
in a record store. His wife, Adrienne, sug-
gested Jones as a singing foil, and the pair
kept the project hush-hush until its 2013
release.
That’s what has kept Green Day going
for over three decades now — a restless
need to explore, to push sonic boundaries,
to maintain that initial level of excitement
that came with Dookie. And — with punk
and politics inextricably linked — the band
was afforded the opportunity via the
inventive knob-twiddler Walker to speak
its mind and reveal even more of its vin-
tage rock influences on Father.
The album opens with Armstrong
singing falsetto on the jarring title track (“I
got paranoia baby/ And it’s so hysterical/
Cracking up under pressure/ Looking for
a miracle”), segues into the wah-oohed
“Fire, Ready, Aim” (“Stick a hammer in
your mouth/You’re a liar/ Knock your
teeth out”), the “Twist”-echoing “Stab You
in the Heart" (“Pictures don’t lie when
you’re front-page news/ Dagger to heart
coming down on you”), the stomping
“Junkies on a High” (“I’m not a soldier/
This ain’t no new world order..rock ’n’ roll
tragedy/ I think the next one could be
me”), the Duane Eddy-booming “Take the
Money and Crawl,” and the Gary Glitter-
ish closer “Graffitia” (“This city isn’t big
enough for dreamers/ We were all believ-
ers/ It’s the perfect crime”). All of the
material is anchored in Cool’s propulsive
Brontosaurus patterns and so many walls
of handclaps that the band gave them its
own moniker, Captain Hey. Whenever
Walker requested the studio presence of
Captain Hey, it was — quite literally — all
hands on deck.
The band prepared meticulously for the
sessions. Cool began practicing drums
every day in anticipation and whittled the
huge collection that he brought with him
Walker’s SoCal studio. And the
Donnas/Brian Fallon producer surprised
him at each meeting. “He would just bust
out his organ,” he blurts, then stops him-
self, laughing. “Hey, now don’t take that
the wrong way! “He’d play the organ or
maybe put some huge line of backing
vocals on a song and go, ‘Hey —
Whaddaya think about THIS?’ And we’d
be like, ‘That works really well!’ We just
gave him carte blanche to be creative, and
we weren’t keeping it too sacred. It was
like we were just a bunch of dudes jam-
ming, like, ‘Let’s have fun!’”
Armstrong honed his compositional
continues on page 47
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