60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Basket Case”—Green Day

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Rob looks back at the first band he ever interviewed in his hometown while diving into Green Day’s rise to stardom.Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Hanif Abdurraqib Producer: Justin Sayles Associate Producer: Jonathan Kermah Additional Production Support: Abou Kamara Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody? It's Austin Rivers from the Minnesota Timberwolves. It's a new year and I have a new podcast here at the Ringer, Offguard, hosted by me and my guy, Pasha Higigi. Austin and I go way back and talk so much hoop already that we figure it was time to fire up the mics and let you in on all of these conversations. Every week, Pasha and I will hit on the biggest stories happening in the league.

And get Austin's perspective of someone currently hooping in the NBA. Tap into Offguard every Friday on the Ringer NBA show feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. The very first rock band I ever interviewed was named Babushka. That's Baboucheca with two O's, B-A-B-A-B-A-O-S-H-KA. From their 1995 self-released cassette, which they called Young Whippersnapper. That was Babushka with a little tune called, called, Mammary Glans.

I have been cracking up at the all day. Holy shit. That's amazing. These dudes went to my high school in Ohio. These dudes went to my high school while I went to my high school. Nate, Mark, Sean, and Rob. Not me, another Rob, a much cooler Rob.

Apparently, three of these dudes were in my grade. Maybe they sat next to me in English class, maybe sang with me in the choir. They sat with or maybe just near me in the lunch, Trim normal guys, mere civilian teenagers, classmates, peers, and they started a band. I couldn't believe it. The initiative. The audacity, a band.

They played songs. They wrote songs. They gave their songs titles like Mammerie glands and Olapero Guaoguow and Mark Dun got some in Spain. Mark was the bass player. One time he went to Spain, they recorded some of these songs. They made an album. They somehow manufactured it then sold. cassette tapes of their album. I bought one. I cannot convey to you my awe, my incredulity, my profound

respect, my bewilderment, that they could just do that. You can just be in a band. It was like finding out that some of my classmates could juggle chainsaws or breathe fire or fly. I get the sense you'd like to hear a little bit of Mark Dun got some in Spain. Don't ask me how I know that. I just know that you'd like that. And I respect it. True story. I think. So there in high school, I fancy myself a young, aspiring rock and roll journalist, the audacity, the overconfidence, the ineptitude. And somehow I wind up interviewing. I wind up profiling babushka for my hometown newspaper. I don't remember what I wrote or what I asked them

or how they answered, whatever questions I asked them, or where this interview transpired, or if I even used a tape recorder or what. All I've got now is a vague sense memory of awe and fear to be in the presence of a rock band. They were not classmates or peers or mere teenage civilians to me. In that moment, they were a band. Yes, they were in a band that had written and recorded a song called

Ola Piero-Gua-Gua-a-Po-Wao-Gua. I believe that song was also inspired by a trip to Spain. Nate's mom was my Spanish teacher, but long before my exclusive sit-down interview with these fellas, one before they'd even put out of tape, long before I had any idea that Mark had ever been to Spain, I already revered Babushka. I revered them from the very moment. One day in English class, when some kid sitting next to me was talking about Babushka, and he said, with a palpable bewilderment and awe of his own, in his voice, he said, they can even play basket case.

Do you have the time to listen to me wine? Do you have the time to listen to me, wine? Two intersections in the town I grew up in, two intersections less than a mile apart. First, we got the corner of East Union and North Harmony right in front of my junior high. April 8th, 1994. I'm on the school bus. The radio's on where the corner of East Union and North Harmony, and the radio informs us that Nirvana frontman, Kirk Cobain, has died by suicide.

I won't tell you that I collapsed in a heap or anything so melodramatic. I don't think any of the kids on the bus did. I don't remember what I did or what anyone else did or said. I do remember the intersection, though. I think that's melodramatic enough. Do you have the time to listen to me wine? Second intersection is the corner of Woodland Drive and Route 3. Less than a mile away, a few months later.

My best guess is late spring, early summer, 1994. I'm in somebody's car this time. I'm riding shotgun, I believe, in my buddy Gary's car. He's got a tape he wants to play for me on his car stereo or a CD. The details are vague. The intersection of Woodland Drive and Route 3 is crystal clear, turning right off Woodland onto Route 3. on our way, I believe, to Reagan Park to play basketball or something.

That's what it's called Reagan Park. That's funny. Gary's got the tape or CD blasting in his car stereo. We're listening to Green Day. Do you have the time to listen to me wine? When I read about 1994 now, the historical perspective, the wonky rock critic analysis, the melodramatic summary of the year I turned 16. I read a lot about how Kirk Cobain's death and the subsequent collapse of grunge

created this vacuum, right? We needed a new kind of rock star and preferably a whole new sound, enough grunge. We needed something less dower and monochrome and self-loathing. We needed something catchier and more colorful and upbeat, even if it was still often driven by self-loathing. Pop punk filled the vacuum. Green Day filled the vacuum. That's the narrative now.

I read about this a lot now. Naturally, I get a little suspicious the 50,000th time I read that pop punk replaced grunge. And yet, I have a vague sense memory of sitting in my living room the first time Green Day's basket case video came on MTV. Billy Joe Armstrong's teal guitar, the hyper-saturated colors in general. Trey Cool's wheelchair, he's the drummer, the rad drumming in general, the realization that Green Day had a rad drummer, actually.

This is not a super melodramatic moment for me either. I do not collapse in a heap of joy. I do not say out loud, man, I sure needed this after the dower monochrome self-loat of grunge. I'm just a 16-year-old knucklehead. Sitting there watching MTV, watching a new video I like. I do this literally every day in 1994, but I do remember how colorful the basket case video was. in multiple senses. I do wonder now if I wondered then

if that's how you pronounce the word melodramatic. I am one of those melodramatic fools. I am one of those melodramatic fools. Saturday, September 10th, 1994, Green Day play the Blossom Music Center, a stately Cleveland area amphitheater with terrible parking, King, five bucks a ticket. Bunker sold out show, legendary show.

Green Day are the biggest and coolest band in America. Pop punk has replaced grunge. Sure, roughly 23,000 teenagers frolicking on the Blossom Music Center lawn. Welcome to Paradise. This is a Saturday in early September, major over-amped back-to-school vibes, right? A truly fearsome physical quantity of explosive, nervous teenage energy to dispel. I know a guy, he's also a rock critic now, who took a limousine to this Green Day show somehow, and there was a mosh pit in the limo after the show. Legendary show. It ended with a grass fight,

an amphitheater wide grass fight. It had rained recently, I believe. And now you've got 23,000 teenagers ripping out clumps of wet grass and throwing them at one another and throwing them at the band. I picture of myself now standing on a hill with a panorrizona. view of the blossom lawn, green day on stage, grass flying in all directions, this feral and jovial war zone, like it's a scene from apocalypse now or braveheart. I'm almost certainly embellishing this memory now in a self-serving panoramic melodramatic sort of way. But that's what teenagers do, man. Neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it. melodramatic fools. And so I buy a t-shirt at the merch booth at the big Green Day concert.

Dark green t-shirt, green day and red bubble letters, floating over a big brown pile of poop. Green Day's album is called Duky. What are you going to do? I buy a t-shirt and I buy a Green Day bumper sticker as well. I proudly slapped that Green Day

bumper sticker on the back of my 1987 Chrysler-Liberin. And I drive my LaBeron to Monday morning, whilst wearing my dark green green day t-shirt. And I'm thinking, I'm the coolest dude in America right now. Look at my green day t-shirt. This is my identity now. This is the expression of my individuality. Nobody else thinks like me or listens to the cool music I listen to all the chicks in school are going to go crazy for me. And my green day t-shirts get sent me apart from all these other chumps. I'm an iconoclast, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I walk in a school and literally everyone is wearing

the same Green Day t-shirt. I am one of those melodramatic bulls. A veritable roiling dark green ocean of Green Day t-shirts. You think I'm exaggerating fine. At least one-third of the student body is wearing the same green day t-shirt. Hundreds of dark green t-shirts with brown piles of poop on them roaming the halls. we are all iconoclasts. We are all rugged, punk-rock and avatars of individuality.

Pop punk is replaced grunge and Green Day is the biggest band in America and we are all Green Day fans. Now, I thought this band was still kind of sort of my little secret, but I was mistaken. Sometimes I give myself the creeps. Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me. Sometimes I give my mind. myself the creeps. Sometimes my mind placed tricks on me. There was a rumor going around school that the dudes in Green Day had stopped at the Denny's in our town on their way out of town after that show. And what a delightful image that is. The fellas in their pop punk regalia, their spikes and

mascara and whatnot, Green Day, kicking back with a French slam or a moods over Miami in our town, sitting in the same Denny's booths that we languished in, drinking the same black coffee, breathing the same stale oxygen, the Green Day tour bus all taking up 10 spots in the parking lot. I don't think the logistics of that work at all, though they probably wouldn't leave Blossom and then drive by our town on the way to wherever they were going, right? Seems unlikely. This feels like the Chiching guy from the rallies commercials died in a car accident type bullshit teenage rumor. I'm pretty sure that was Seth Green and he's doing fine. Teenagers make up all kinds of melodramatic shit.

Sometimes I give myself the creeps. Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me. So a couple decades later, I will write a novel. A whole ass novel. Nobody asked me to do this. Nobody wanted this. And as it turns out, nobody was willing to publish this. Don't worry, I won't make you read it.

But I did the whole shit. I downloaded Scrivener. I read bird by bird, and I wrote like 111,000 words about a fictional suburban teenage rock star who is radicalized after attending a very lightly fictionalized recreation of that Green Day concert at Blossom Music Center on September 10th, 1994. The Green Day part was not fictionalized. I just wrote, then he went to a Green Day concert. Literature. Turns out nobody wanted to read this novel. I was flabbergasted.

Sometimes I give myself the creeps. Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me. But in 1994, as a 16-year-old knucklehead sitting in English class, still wearing my Green Day t-shirt all the time, though everyone else had the same shirt because I already paid for it, man. And if you want the truth, I was relieved,

to have my good taste affirmed by so many of my peers. I can be an iconoclast and still crave belonging. What do you want? I was 16. In that moment, the coolest thing that you could possibly be was in a band. And with all apologies to Mamory Glans, this was the coolest song your band could possibly play. It all keeps setting up.

I think I'm trying to. I just paranoid. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 87th episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s, and this week we are discussing Basketcase by Green Day. From their Blockbuster 1994 album, Duky, if you know, you know, and if you were 16 in 1994, I'm almost positive, you knew.

Much respect, though, if you were 16 back in 1990, and you knew this. Billy Joel Armstrong and the bass player known professionally as Mike Dernt met in the fifth grade in the northern California town of Rodeo, located 20 miles or so north of Oakland, and, thanks to its oil refineries, highly regarded as one of the stinkiest places in the state, if not the country.

That's an official formally measured quantity, stinkiness. As 15-year-olds, Billy Joe and Mike start a punk rock band, they call Sweet Children, which is, for the record, a terrible band name. So they change it on May 28th, 1989, the band, now consisting of Billy Joe Armstrong on guitar and lead vocals, Mike Durnt on bass, and a drummer named John Kiffmeyer, better known as Al Sabrante. They play their first show under their new name, Green Day. It's a drug reference.

A lot of people don't like that name either, but too bad. This show takes place in Berkeley, California at 924-Gilman Street, otherwise known as the alternative music foundation, otherwise known simply as Gilman, one of the stinkiest and most legendary punk rock venues in the country, if not the

world. On this particular evening, Green Day are opening for the also legendary ska punk band Operation Ivy. This is the blueprint for East Bay punk rock, my friends, the glorious, impossible utopian ideal.

Likewise, Gilman, As a punk rock venue, as a physical location, is also the glorious, impossible utopian ideal. Gilman's vibe, broadly speaking, is deconstructed punk rock club, no frills, no bullshit. Gilman's rules established by committee are spray painted right there on the wall. No racism. No sexism. No homophobia. No alcohol.

No drugs. No fighting. No stage diving. And added a little while later, this one ain't spray painted on the wall. but it's tremendously important. No major label bands. Billy Joe Armstrong will up the place. Talking to the journalist Ian Winwood

in Ian 2018 book, Smash Green Day of the offspring, No Effects, Bad Religion, and the 90s punk explosion, Billy Joe says, Gilman was my first real taste of what it was like to be a punk. It wasn't just about music.

It was about a community and a movement. Every single weirdo and nerds, nerd and punk around the Bay Area would be there, and it was great." End quote. Young Green Day do a great, raucous cover of an Operation Ivy song called Knowledge. The first Green Day EP, four songs, self-titled, comes out in 1989 on Lookout Records, a bold new enterprise co-founded by a deep thinking and remarkably prescient punk rock oracle type gentleman named Larry Livermore.

In the mid-80s, Larry had been living in Spy Rock in Mendocino County about 200 miles, north of Oakland, and also a very stinky place to live on account of all the marijuana growing there. Larry was already well into his 30s by the mid-80s, but he'd formed his own punk rock band called The Lookouts with some teenagers in the area, including a super-excitable 12-year-old drummer named Frank Edwin Wright III, who would soon wisely rename himself Trey Cool. The Lookouts play a very early show with Sweet Children. Sweet Children changed their name to Green Day. Larry Livermore helps start a label called Lookout Records. And Green Day very quickly emerges one of the label's preeminent bands and arguably one of the best pump bands in the States, if not the country, if not the world.

That's the one I want from the first Green Day EP in 1989. When people write about pre-supernova Green Day now, the lookout years, the earliest shit, most critics and authors and whatnot end up saying something to the effect of it's all there the melodies the hooks the choruses the songs the essence of supernova era green day is all there from the very beginning none of that stuff was quite great yet and those songs aren't recorded with a big shot producer firepower to which the world will grow accustomed but this band's appeal was never terribly hard to grasp larry livermore talking about green day and Dan Ozzy's great 2021 book Sell Out, the major label

Feeding Frenzy that swept punk, emo, and hardcore. Larry says, The very first time I saw them, within minutes, I thought they could be

the next Beatles. End quote. He's exaggerating, obviously, but exaggerating by how much exactly. That sounds

called going to Pasalakua. I don't know what or where Pasalakua is or what it smells like there.

That song appears on Green Day's debut full-length album, 39 Smooth, released in 1990. That year, the band also put out the Slappy EP. That's got the Up Ivy cover on it. And the Sweet Children EP, that's got the Sweet Children song on it. Green Day otherwise spent 1990 touring their asses off. So, are you familiar with Comet Bus? The famous Berkeley punk rock zine comet bus started in 1981 by a guy named Aaron Comet Bus. It's mostly handwritten. If you read even a few pages of any issue, you get very

intimately acquainted with Aaron's handwriting. It's very neat and blocky print. Aaron is a major 924 Gilman guy. He's in his own band starting with crimpshine in the 80s, but Comet Bus, the zine takes on its own legendary status. Aaron's been doing it in some form for upwards of 40 years. And as far as Bay Area punk goes, you're not going to find a more direct and street level and first person account of this place, this scene, this era. It's unbelievable. In 2003, I was living in Columbus, Ohio, and I moved to Oakland. I took a job at a Bay Area paper, and before I left, my friend Scott, a rock photographer, dude, he gave me a book called Despite Everything, a comet bus omnibus, a collection of the zine's early years. Scott's inscription, and Scott had

quite lovely handwriting as well. It was, this should serve as a good introduction to the good, bad, and disgusting of Bay Area culture. It was one of the most thoughtful gifts anyone's ever gotten me. So in this book, in a reprinted old issue of Comet Bus, there's a giant map of the United States spread across two pages, and it's labeled On Tour with Green Day. This tour started on June 19, 1990. Aaron was one of two roadies for Green Day,

crammed into the van along with Billy Joe, Mike, and Al Sabrante. First of all, allow me to read you an excerpt from Green Day's tour writer. Thanks for booking Green Day. This is Green Day's first tour, and we hope it will be fun. We are asking for a few things that will make our trip a little easier. You do not have to give us any of these things. Of course, we don't have to tune before we play either. We are asking for $100. More if you can spare it. This is not a guarantee. We are only asking. End quote. In return for $100, if you can spare it, Green Day will come to your club or house or VFW Hall or whatever and hopefully play my favorite early Green Day song,

a suspiciously wistful for a bunch of teenagers tune from the 39 Smooth record called I Was There. In this tour rider, Green Day go on to ask for food and a place to stay or at least a safe place to park the van. They also request intel and places nearby to get a cup of coffee and maybe thrift some t-shirts. So in this comet bus zine, around this map of America, Aaron has handwritten little vignettes from Green Day's very first tour, tracing an itinerary arc that takes them from Oakland all the way north to Canada, then across the country all the way to New York City, then all the way down to Florida and back. These vignettes include, for example, cool looking club, bad fucking neighborhood, aptly named Junkie Row. No audience except for friends of Al's parents Who pinched his cheeks and took photos

Miserable Eight ice cream Miss Ferry to Canada Van got rear-ended Hassled by totally insane Cop Found cool stuff in dumpsters Rad old buildings

Great wandering Got 35 mosquito bites 35 Had to take Billy to the hospital for really bad poison ivy. Green Day in Green Bay show Cancels. That's funny. That's too bad. This one's in New York City.

Went to 53rd and second, but Al wouldn't take a left so I could try to turn a trick one block over. That's in Manhattan. He's referring to the prostitution themed Ramon song, 53rd and 3rd. The first Waffle House of

the tour. Very festive. And finally, God offered a buck for each tooth we could knock out of the promoter's mouth and were very tempted. End quote. Aaron drops off the tour back in Minneapolis. That's Green Day's first national tour. I have to tell you that in 1990, I could not imagine anything cooler or more gratifying than touring the country in a rock band, piling into a van with all your shit, playing some tapes in the stereo, reading some books, getting some drama meme before I read the books, I get carsick otherwise, bonding, taking restorative naps, eating a lot of Wendy's, seeing a million faces, and rocking them all. If I'm honest with you and with myself, and I try to be right now, as a guy in my 40s,

I still can't imagine anything cooler or more gratifying than being in a touring rock band. I over-romanticize the shit out of touring in a rock band, even though I know it sucks, or sucks like 85% of the time. Cops, van wrecks, dumpsters, mosquito bites, poison ivy, asking for $100 a show and probably not getting it. Asking for a place to sleep and probably not getting that either, I know touring sucks. But even as I say that, I don't think I believe it and I never will. I will over-romanticize the shit out of this shit for the rest of my life. life. Errant Cometbus writes about going on tour with Green Day again the following year in August 1991, and even he's already way less romantic about it, or is he? He says, touring is everyone

dozing off and back while you ride shotgun and Billy drives and you share the hugest cup of weak coffee, listen to the same Ramon's tape over and over, and zoom along the highway through the desert and through the night. Every once in a while, Mike jumps up, startled, yells some jimps and then realizes it was just another tour nightmare and mumbled some excuse and goes back to sleep. Aaron writes, touring is pulling into town at 4 a.m. and finding mattresses in the mattress factory dumpster and setting up camp behind the Denny's parking lot and waking up at high noon feeling like complete shit. And finally he writes, touring is, of course, fucking wonderful. And quotes. See? Touring is fucking wonderful.

In 1991, Green Day sound like this. In 1991, Green Day released their second full-length album, Kerklunk, on Lookout Records. That song's called 2,000 light years away. It is about Billy Joe's girlfriend, Adrian. They met at a show in Minneapolis.

Eventually, they got married, and they're still married. That's lovely. Drummer Al Sabrante has left the band at this point to go to college, and your drummer on Karpunk is Trey Cool. The Green Day lineup of Billy Joe Armstrong, Mike Durnt, and Trey Cool will endure henceforth. You could say they're still married if you wanted to get all romantic about it.

Kruplunk is a vast improvement. No offense to Alcibrante, but Trey Kool, first of all, is a vast improvement. But to my mind, the real upgrade on Karpunk is that even the slow songs are rad now. This song's called Christie Road. It's about teenage boredom. It will not be Green Day's last song. about teenage boredom, nor will it be the erratest, but it will, possibly, be the slowest. We better jump to the end of the chorus. That's the second best song on KERPUNK. The best song is called Welcome to Paradise.

First of all, I have thought that that line was, some call it soup, some call it nuts for like 30 years. And I've known, of course, that I'm wrong, but I don't care. And even right now, I still sort of believe that it's some call it soup, some call it nuts, even though it isn't. You know what I mean? I've heard this song 300,000 times, and I didn't know any of those lyrics, if you want the truth. It's all just a delightful spikes and mascara blur of consonants to me. Pay attention to the cracked streets and the broken homes.

Some call it slums. Some call it nice. Sure. That's plausible. I'm not entirely convinced, but sure. Welcome to Paradise is the song about Oakland. Talking to Rolling Stone in 2020, Billy Joe Armstrong says, I had moved out of my house in the suburbs to West Oakland into a warehouse that was rat-infested and in a really fucked up neighborhood with a lot of crazy punks and friends.

I was paying $50 a month for rent, which was great because being in a band, you got paid a couple hundred bucks here and there, so it was easy to pay for rent, eat top ramen and buy weed. It was an eye-opening experience. Suddenly, I was on my own. Smack out in one of the gnarliest neighborhoods in Oakland. You look around and you see cracked streets and broken homes and ghetto neighborhoods, and you're in the middle of it. You're scared, thinking, how do I get out of here? Then suddenly it starts to feel like home. There is a sort of empathy that you have for your surroundings when you're around junkies and homelessness and gang warfare. Also, the songs about soup and nuts, end quote.

I added that last part, but it's plausible, right? Billy Joe also adds, I think the musicality of the bridge is a foreshadowing of what things were to come for us in the future, whether we knew it or not, end quote. I think we can agree that the bridge is the best part of Welcome to Paradise. Yes? From the very first time I heard it as a doofist teenager, this part of the song always struck me as a faithful recreation of my internal doofist teenager monologue. This is what it sounded like in my head in 1994 and also every year previously and every year thereafter. This is what it sounds like in my head right now. Just a frantic descending baseline on a loop. Zero chill ever. It's awesome. It's great. I feel seen.

by this part of Welcome to Paradise. I feel heard. All 300,000 times I've heard this song, whether it's on the radio, on CD, streaming, whatever, I stop what I'm doing and just concentrate on this part of the song. I merge with it, or I suppose it merges with me. Anyway, it's time to get these fellas signed to a major label. This is going to go great. So Karpunk is doing fantastic for a small, independent, defiantly bare bones label like Lookout. A 50,000 copies sold by 1993, that's fantastic. But Lookout can't keep the record in stock. Lookout can't get the record into bigger record stores, chain stores.

Kepunk probably should have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first couple of years out. Meanwhile, Nirvana blew up and the major label Alt Rock Arms Race is on. Everybody's getting signed. Everyone's getting the big bucks. Everyone's getting a fancy touring van. Everyone's moving past the sleeping on dumpster mattresses and the Denny's parking. lot phase of their careers. Green Day want in. Green Day want to be huge. Green Day are going for it. And broadly, but quantitatively speaking, nobody gets more of what they're going for than Green Day does

when they go for it. But nobody loses more than Green Day loses when they get it. They're going to lose a daunting percentage of their Bay Area punk rock friends. They're going to lose Gilman. They're going to lose their home. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? That's melodramatic. But to the no major labels hardliners, maybe it isn't. Green Day are about to become zillion-selling magazine cover major label rock stars. They're about to become gods. They're also about to be expelled from paradise. A copy of Karpunk finds its way to an L.A. record producer an aspiring label mogul named Rob Cavallo, who in that sellout book says,

it reminded me of the Beatles meets the Buzzcocks with a little of the sex pistol's snotty attitude. I also felt this working class anti-establishment thing about them like the clash had, end quote. So, you know, a measured proportionate response. Green Day are courted. They play the field. They weigh their options.

They contemplate this Faustian bargain. They have a sense, I think, I hope, of what and who they might lose with this jump. And then they jump. They go with Reprise Records, a Warner Brothers label. Rob Cavallo produces their major label debut album. It comes out in 1994. It's called Duky. They re-record a few older songs.

It was always pretty much all there for Green Day from the very beginning. But now all of it is all the way there. Listen to those massive, gorgeous, sugary harmonies. on some call it soup, some call it nuts. Delightful. Duky comes out in February 1994. Green Day make the cover of Rolling Stone for the first time in January 1995. The same month, Duky peaks on the Billboard album chart at number two.

It's funny. Garth Brooks' greatest hits album beats them out for number ones. Too bad. Rolling Stone put Green Day on the cover anyway and name them best new band. Here's a fun, triumphant quote from Billy Joe Armstrong. in his first of five Rolling Stone cover stories. That place and that culture saved my life. He's talking about Gilman.

It was like a gathering of outcasts and freaks. It wasn't about people moshing in a pit and taking their shirt off. That's one thing I hate about the new mainstream thing. Blatant violence. We get lumped into this bandwagon of this fucked up mentality. To me, punk rock was about being silly, bringing your carpet to Gilman Street and rolling your friends up. up in it and spinning it in circles or having a pit with people on tricycles or big wheels.

The whole thing had a serious message to people, but at the same time it was silly, and people weren't afraid to talk about love. It's a different thing going on there now. End quote. Billy Joe is not a part of that different thing. Green Day have been banned from Gilman, no major labels. Green Day are lamb-based in the pages of Underground Magazine and Punk Rock Bible, maximum rock and roll. I believe Green Day are compared to Billy Idol, which however you feel about dancing with myself is not a compliment coming from that particular magazine at this or any other time. The chapter on Green Day and Dan Ozzie's sellout book is harrowing in its way. I feel awful for Green Day. I feel weird feeling awful for Green Day, who will sell 10 million copies of Duky alone in America

alone in the 90s alone. But then I read Lookout Records boss Larry Livermore, saying they were very young and felt they were being rejected by the scene that had been so vital and important to them. It's got to hurt a lot. On one hand, you've got everybody. Sometimes even famous people you've looked up to

your whole life telling you, oh, you guys are geniuses, you're wonderful, you're amazing. And on the other hand, you're thinking, yeah, but all my old friends hate me. I think it came very close to destroying them. Welcome to Paradise.

There's Billy Joe Armstrong in Spin saying, we've played in front of 20,000, 30,000 people, and I still haven't felt the same thing that I felt playing in that place. End quote. Is all my old friends hate me overstating it a little, maybe? Is that a bit melodramatic? Maybe not. Green Day come up again later in this great book of old Comet Bus zines.

Aaron Comet Bus writes an essay called Worms, in which the worms are punks, and the birds are music industry vultures. And some worms agree to go into business with the birds, etc. It's mostly written in code that's not supposed to be hard to crack. But Aaron writes, I went to visit my old worm friends who had become big stars, and they were miserable. They missed the yearning and struggling and working hard and going nowhere with the other worms. They were loved in the bird world, which they hated and hated in.

in the worm world, which they loved." End quote. Fine. Fine. Green Day's old friends hate them now. You know who loves Green Day now, though? Me. It is Longview playing in my buddy Gary's car.

When we turn right off Woodland Drive under Route 3 that first time I hear Green Day. I don't know that there's a song we've discussed on this show that requires less explanation than a long view. In terms of the appeal, it might hold for a 60th. year old knucklehead such as myself. This song Longview is named for the town in Washington State where Green Day debuted it. The melodies, the hooks, the choruses, the songs are all vastly improved on Dookie versus Green Day's back

catalog. But in another sense, all that shit was already there and had been there the whole time. And it's just a matter of our pal and producer Rob Cavallo giving the drums here a surround sound feel. It's a matter of compression. If you're trying to entice 16-year-old knucklehead specifically. It also helps that Longview has like 20 pound swear words that had to be aggressively bleeped out on the radio. I miss radio edits. Big deal in the suburbs that this scene with me in Gary's car turning right on Route 3 off Woodland Drive as Longview is playing. This is very nearly

and I can remember the precise quality of the light type deal for me. This is one of a handful of moments in my teenage years where I can remember having the tangible visceral thought, I'm a teenager. This is a teenage moment. This is teenage music. This is what being a teenager is all about. How pompous and silly and yet how immortal one feels in these I'm a teenager moments in my experience. Ridiculous and yet exhilarating. And then the fucking chorus hits.

I'm so damn bored. going blind and I smell like shit. I don't think the radio edit even bothered, bleeping out the shit there. It's all just a delightful blur of consonants. The gargantuan distorted guitar explosion there, the high-end dynamic punch, the glossy melodiousness, that's major label shit. Dookie is a major label album. I would be remiss not to mention that Dookie also has one of the most confounding track lists of any 90s albums. I find the sequencing quite vexing.

The first song is called burnout, and people seem to quite like burnout. And yeah, this is a pretty excellent thesis statement for the first 10 seconds of your major label debut, starting with the drums. But Duky, for me even today, is divided into ungodly colossal hit songs and merely normal songs. And Longview at Track 4 is only our first ungodly colossal hit song. And in fact, starting there, five of the next seven songs are ungodly colossal. Like, I heard one of these five songs on the radio every hour of my life for the next decade. Welcome to Paradise. My internal monologue is always.

She, the semi-sensitive character study that somehow combines distorted guitar explosions with glossy melodiousness. When I Come Around, which proves that Green Day's slower songs are getting ratter all the time. I think Billy Joe's sweater and the When I Come a Redder. come around video is underrated in the pantheon of old sweaters and alternative rock videos. It's all I'm saying. I don't need to buy Duky on CD as a 16-year-old. Duky is in the very air I breathe. That's so gross. Dooky is on the periodic table. In 1994, this is the year for blockbuster punk albums that penetrate even the densest and

lamest parts of the suburbs. Punk and drublich by no effects. Stranger Than Fiction by Bad Religion, part of their Holy Trinity, or anyway, my personal holy Trinity of bad religion albums. Let's Go by Rancid. 24-hour revenge therapy by Jawbreaker,

if you go for those guys. Fucking Smash by the offspring, even if you don't go for those guys. Smash is going to sell 6 million copies or so in the United States alone. Smash, in fact, is going to spend quite a few years as the best-selling independent album of all time. It's on Epitaph Records. So are.

rancid and no effects. Bad religion are on a major label right now, but they'll be back on Epitaph before you know it. We're heading for the Warp Tour era, folks, the hot topic era. Punk rock is everywhere and everything. The birds are super into the worms, as Comet Bus put it. But Green Day are the biggest worms of all. And this song is emerged as the 1994 worm anthem to rule them all. Billy Joe Armstrong quoted on the website Louder in 2020 says, Basketcase is about anxiety attacks

and feeling like you're about to go crazy. At times, I probably was. I've suffered from panic disorders my entire life. I thought I was just losing my mind. The only way I could know what the hell was going on was to write a song about it. It was only years later that I figured out I had a panic disorder.

end quote. The appeal of basket case, first and foremost and always, is the uncomplicated three-minute freight train sugar rush of it, the concise bombast, the simplicity. If you're a dorky teenager and you're forming a band and your dorky teenage band is going to take a shot at a Green Day song, and that's going to happen if your dorky teenage band is forming in 1994. Basketcase is the song you're choosing. Longview swings too much. It's too much for your bassist to handle. Trust me. When I come around is too slow. The Welcome to Paradise breakdown is too complicated. She is just a touch too emotionally sophisticated. You're doing basket case. Your drummer insists that you do basket case. And it's a fun song, right? It's funny, right? Sometimes I give myself the creeps. Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me. The video is set in a mental institution. The orderly is the stretcher, the pills, the disapproving nurse, the other patients wandering around those weird masks. The very explicit one flu over the cuckoo's-hus-ness vibe. The video's fun. The video's funny. But as a teenager, I didn't meet many fellow teenagers who didn't sometimes give themselves the creeps.

Calling Basketcase a mental health anthem is overstating it. That's a bit melodramatic. But let's just say we got this song and it got us. One more time. Dig the harmonies. Lookout records, meanwhile, as a consolation prize for losing Green Day was selling millions of copies of Green Day's old records, namely KERplunk and the Early Stuff compilation, 1,039 smoothed out sloppy hours. According to that sellout book, Lookout made $10 million in one year, largely thanks to Green Day. That's how big Green Day got. Green Day went on to make other records with other bonkers hit songs. Ooh, here's one. I'm

On my own, here we go. Yes. It's the Godzilla remix of Brain Stew, the North Star of this podcast. Apparently, that's a great song. It was quite strange to move to Oakland in 2003, just for the green day of it all. When the iTunes store opened that year,

the first MP3 I ever bought off iTunes, American Idiot. I spent a little time in a very, superficial touristy way going to punk shows and whatnot in some of those gnarly old warehouses billy joe armstrong sang about but i also ate a few meals at rudy's can't fail cafe the sort of upscale east bay diner co-owned by mike durnt i have tasted the combat mac and cheese at rudy's can't fail cafe that's a clash reference those are both clash references green day in 2003 were both punk and not were both too big for the East Bay and too big to ever truly leave the East Bay.

I ended up having to write a giant arduous cover story about Green Day taking their old records back from Lookout over unpaid royalties. I ended up having to edit a giant cover story about the famously major label of verse rancid, finally putting out a record on a major label, kind of, sort of. It was complicated. That kind of shit still matter to some people. and Green Day, for various reasons, still matter to everybody. I went to Gilman, too. I saw a few shows at 924 Gilman.

I used to edit the weekly concert listings for my paper, and one time there was a band playing Gilman named Ye Old But Fuck. And I did not go see that band, but I will never forget that band name as long as I live. So good for them. But I have this vibe I exude at famous music venues, you know like when i'd go to cbgb's or preservation hall or whatever i'd stand there and it'd be like yes yes so historic this place is cool look at how cool this place is it's historic look at how cool i am

being here in this cool historic place but standing in gilman listening to whatever band i was listening to not ye old butt fuck it was somebody else in gilman for the first and only time i had the tangible thought this isn't mine this was never mine and i could never make it mine It wasn't a hostile, antagonistic, I don't belong here feeling, but just this sense that I don't belong to this place and it doesn't belong to me and I can never have what this place gave to the people who belonged here. And I respected that immensely. That was beautiful to me. I already had more than enough, I think. This belonged to me. This actually doesn't belong to me either. Come to think of it. This is Green Day at Woodstock 94. The apex, the

culmination, the zenith, the nadir of Green Day is 1994. 500,000 plus people at Woodstock 94. I wonder if that crowd gave Billy Joel the same feeling as Gilman. I doubt it. The mud fight, right? The Green Day set at Woodstock 94 ends with a colossal mud fight. Stage crashers, total chaos. Mike Dern gets mistaken for a stage crasher and a road he tackles him and he cracks a couple

teeth. In that smash book, Billy Joe says, Woodstock was about the closest thing to anarchy I've ever seen in my life, and I didn't like it one bit. End quote. I wasn't there. Yeah, that's not mine either. The Back to School Green A Show at Blossom Music Center near Cleveland with the modest grass fight, that's totally mine.

Being there is just about as cool as I've ever felt. Speaking of which, as penance for playing goofy babushka songs from back when those dudes were all teenagers themselves, I feel compelled to tell you that Nate from Babushka lives in my neighborhood now, and he leads another band called Shape of the Sun. He's still putting out music all the time. He put out this song today. This song's called Have You Had Enough? He's come a long way since Mammerie Glans, but haven't we all? You know Super Drag, the great power pop band, sucked out and so forth. I love those guys, and I get a real super drag vibe off shape of the sun. I see Nate around town. He's got kids too. I see him at the park. Our kids are playing at the park. I see him at the

soccer field. Our kids are playing soccer. He's a cool guy. He's a normal guy. He's a civilian. But he's not, though. Is he? He's much cooler than that. There's a vague awe and intimidation that I still get talking to him now. And of course there is. He's in a band. We are so excited to welcome back Hanif Abdu Rakib, author, poet, podcaster, and proud Ohio. And his latest book, A Little Devil in America was a National Book Award. There's a great updated edition of his earlier book. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Out. Read Everything, please. Hanif, welcome back. It's great to talk to you. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be back on. Awesome. Absolutely. So you appeared on the second ever episode of this show, and I've wanted to have you back on forever. And you seemed very into talking about Green Day, but not so much into talking about Basketcase. And so just to quickly dispense with that song, like, does Basketcase,

do anything in particular for you? Like, did it ever? No, if I'm thinking about Dukey in particular, I think it's maybe one of my least favorite songs. I think it's definitely the worst single for me. I think Longley and Welcome to Paradise and when I come around her much better.

I actually think Doogie as one of the great track one, side one things of all time, like, you know, burnout. And then... The fun fact is that I think it's a second track. on the album, but having a blast was written in Cleveland. No kidding. That is a fun fact.

So there's an Ohio connection to it. I didn't know. That changes that whole song for me. See, I always thought that the record was weirdly sequenced because it didn't start with the big hits, right? Like, it's just like three songs and then Longview is how I thought of it growing up. But knowing it was written in Cleveland changes absolutely everything. Yeah, but Baskin case, you know, I mean, I've never enjoyed it. It's not one of those things that I, you know, when I was young, this song, this album was huge. And I was, um, 10 or 11 when this came out, which meant that for me, I was just getting

to a point where I was internalizing what albums were and knowing out, knowing things beyond just like songs that played around my house or my brother's car or whatever. And my oldest brother, who was about like 11 years older than he told me years old and he loved this record. I really loved Green Day. And so I heard it a lot. But basket case was always, you know, one that I skipped in,

particularly, you know, like, I'm pretty open about this. I've written and talked pretty openly about, you know, I live with anxiety and all this. So when I got older, it was always funny because people would be like, oh, you know, like I would be in, you know, groups with other folks who have to anxiety. And like, you know, Baskey case was really pivotal for me because it's a song that like, like, I first saw my experience reflected. I was like, damn, you know, which I could say the same, but I was skipping it.

I was, you know, I was skipping over it. Yeah, I mean, the video, obviously, like, it's set in a mental hospital and it's like, it's very joky. Like, they're not making light of it exactly, but it doesn't scan as a serious, like, you're seeing yourself reflected type of song for me. You know, I'm glad that it did for other people, of course. I actually like the video more than the song, because I do think there is a bit of, at least my manifestation of anxiety that is a little goofy by design, you know, like I think. by design, your brain is, your brain is thinking about the most extreme situations that could go wrong at all times, which is a bit goofy, you know? So I remember, I don't know, the video, I'm certain the video has an age well. But I remember being a kid and really liking the video more than the song, so much so that I would occasionally watch it on mute.

This was back when my family at least like would record, you know, on VHS record music videos. and I would often just watch it with the sound off. Okay, that's an interesting experience. Did you do that with a lot of videos? Not a ton, but there were a handful. I remember for, you know, like we don't have to go too far out track, but I remember the video for Put Your Hands or Eyes Could See, which is a song that I like more now than I did when I was younger,

but when I was younger, I did not love the song, but just adored the video, and I would play the video with Sound Off. This is an interesting case where I look at the Spotify play, counts, right? And like, I'm curious if a band's biggest song has shifted over time. But like, Basketcase is far in a way, you know, the most played song off Duky and also Green Day's most played song overall. Like, does that track for you? Did you think back then that like Basket Case was going to emerge as like the biggest single and like the single biggest Green Day song overall? No, because, you know, I was in high school in the late 90s, early 2000s and good

riddance was just kind of like before vitamin C's graduation, which I don't know the year on that. I'll top my head on the year I came out. But I think it's 90s. Yeah. You know, Good riddins kind of like superseded that for my generation. Like people were playing Good riddance. My high school played it. I graduated in early 2000s in my high school, like actual high school played it at the graduation, you know. Um, and so for me, the songs that are most memorable are good riddance in when I come around. And weirdly, though it's not, I am aware that it is not a big, big Green Day single.

I really love waiting. I was very, very briefly in a band. Oh. And we were not very good. And we broke up in the midst of our first show. But one of the songs that we were, one of the songs that we were essentially a cover band. And one of the songs we covered was waiting.

And I actually think waiting is a very, very good, um, free and day song. And, you know, like, I am, um, I like, I don't know why I'm like whispering this, but I like American idiot. I don't actually know. Um, I actually don't know where people are on American idiot now because I remember when American idiot came out, people were very unsettled by the grandiose nature of it. Um, right, the rock up at all. Yeah, like, I think if you're talking, of course, an argument can be made and I would make it that, um, every album released in America is a wartime album of some sort, but a very specific,

uniquely specific to wartime album, wartime album, you know, for me, it's like American Idiot and Slater Kinney's one beat. It's like those are the two that I adore. And so I like a lot of those songs, but,

you know, Baskett case, what I think of my, like if I'm thinking about if I'm putting together a playlist of Green Day songs that are essentials, now Baskett case would be on it because it doesn't matter if I like your, or not. It is an essential Green Day song. It's one of those, right. But I don't think, like, I actually don't think my brain would register and put it. I would, like, have to think hard to put it on

there. Okay. Before I forget to ask it, did you, did your band get to play waiting before you broke up midway through your first show? Did you break up during that song? Okay. You didn't get to play. I wish we could have played waiting. I wish you could have broken up during it. But no, we didn't. Our version of waiting was not very good. We were not a very good band. What was the cause of the break? I don't want to fixate on this, but what caused you to break up midway through your... The rhythm section, the rhythm section had a whole falling out.

Yeah, the bassist and the drummer had a whole... They had like a real argument on stage. To me clear, no one was at the show. I mean, it's not like we were playing. You know, we were like, all of us. It's just our friends. You know what I mean? Okay.

And so, you know, we like had an argument. Essentially it was like we had a... We were just in rehearsal and had an argument in front of our friends. That's kind of what it showed down to. Okay. That's beautiful. But the good news is that those band members were all still cool now. One of them got married, our front woman got married a couple years ago.

We had like a little band reunion at the wedding. We didn't play anything. That's beautiful. I love band reunions at weddings are awesome. That's a great experience. It was good. Duky for me is one of these records. I never need to hear it again, right?

Like it's just, it was so ubiquitous. I played it so many times. Like, do you have to go back to this? record to listen to it ever again necessarily? I do because I really, really love, like, I love the back half of this record. The reason why I think Baskett case is such a like extractable song for me is because I think, as far as how Duky is sequence, I think everything after Baskett case is just perfect. Like I think the back end of this record is, you know, come and clean.

in the end, like all that stuff, I just love, love, love. And so I tend to, Dukey's not the, I don't know if I return really heavily to any Green Day album except Plunk maybe. But other than that, I don't really return a lot to any, even though I was like, you know, American idiot, so I don't really return to whatever. But it's not because I think these are bad records, to be clear. I think these are really good records.

I just actually think that Green Day, even now, makes kind of weighty music that is, for me, very of its time. And it makes reintering that time really challenging. Like, I tried to go back and listen to American Idiot. And I still enjoyed the songs, but I was like, gosh, there's a weight to this that makes getting through it somewhat challenging, which to me, I know that might sound that, but to me that's kind of complimentary of.

Well, sure. It's a wartime album, as you say, say. I agree completely. Yeah. You achieve something, I think, if you make something that is a monument to a time, um, that is hard to, to reenter. Sure. I mean, I was going to say of the really huge alternative rock bands in 1994, like Green Day,

you know, had a big record in the 2000s. Like American Idiot itself is almost, I think it is 20 years old at this point. But like, they still have more longevity, arguably than like a lot of their peers from 1994. Does it surprise you that they're the band that was still putting out great work, big, you know, huge records in the 2000s and it's still around today at all? They're like 30 plus years old now. Is that surprising that longevity? I think it's surprising though they've had, it seems like they've had the good fortune of just going about it, going about their practice and their relationship with each other in a way that is smart and healthy. And they also haven't been

they also haven't really endured the same tragedies as some of the bands in the, you know, like Jeff Buckley could have still been making records. You know, like, Hull, for example, has had a lot of homemade great records in the 90s

and they just had to slog through a lot of pain and griefs. And then their bands are still rolling, but not making, like, big, big records. You know, like Manick Street Preachers are still or, and then you have bands like, I mean, with all love, you know, there's bands like Weas are kind of just like have,

it feels like they've kind of just like found the format. I mean, I don't know. The Weiser, I'm going to just be frank. The Weezer stuff has not been good to me for a long time, but they're still here. Thank you for your candor. Yeah. Yeah. There are bands that are like are just still here.

And it does seem like Green Day has at least kind of put some thought into the projects, the full album projects, even if some of them feel a little like grandiose, like I liked parts of the last Green Day record. And I liked parts of the kind of triple album they came out with a bit of a bit ago. And so it's these things where at least they're kind of,

I like that they're taking really big swings often. I think that's actually the thing that interest me. Yeah. You've written so beautifully about Fallout Boy in particular, and I have to say, like, that Green Day fallout boy Weiser package tour, I don't think it lasted very long, you know, but like that, that pairing really weirded me out for a reason I can't explain. Like, does that make sense to you, that pairing, that progression of bands? I thought Weezer was the odd band out a bit because I don't really see I mean I went to no I did not go to that show

I wanted to when they came to Columbus and I was out of town but Weiser did not really feel to me like the Fallout Boy to Green Day arc I don't know how to say this gently it seemed like that was a thing where it was like Blink 182 is currently unavailable and we need somewhere

one, you know? Totally. I think Blink would have made a little more sense. So I think at that point, Blink was, we were not in the, you know, Blink back with Tom DeLong era. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, it made sense to me because I do think Green Day, you know, for better or worse, people can talk about selling out. And I think that conversation is pretty, at this point, it's like pretty useless. But in 19, in the early 90s, it was. more useful perhaps, or at least the idea of what selling out was had a different, you know, there was a different weight to it and there were different consequences to going against the almighty purity of the scene, of the capital S scene. But for better or worse, you know, like Green Day's becoming very large. It paved the way for a lot of bands to do some things who might not have

had as much access to them. You know, like, I'm from the Midwest, and, you know, I grew to love Bay Area punk a great deal, but as like a 10-year-old in Columbus, Green Bay was the only punk band from that area I knew. Right, right. And I was going to ask you. I found out the other ones because of them, you know, like, the only reason I was able to find so many of these bands was, because I first got into Green Day.

And so, you know, there's, there's something, you know, there. Yeah, I was going to ask you if when you were growing up in the Midwest, if like Bay Area Punk created any particular, like, geographical image in your head. Like when you listen to Green Day or Operation Ivy or Rancid or even the Dead Kennedies or whatever, like, does this music have an especially vivid sense of place for you? Yeah. I mean, McKenade is a biggest, one of my favorite bands of all time. And, you know, Flipper is a band I loved a lot.

And Avengers is a band I loved a lot. And like these kind of, you know, there's kind of just like a lot of bands from that area that, I think more than a sense of place. there are like sonic differences in Bay Area Punk than there was, you know, like for the Midwest punk I grew up with. Lyrical differences too, quite frankly, because people are dealing with different set of imagery, different set of, you know, all these things. So there was a way that much like when the chronic came out,

or even before the chronic, you know, kind of like when NWA was out, but for me, because of my age, like specifically the chronic, all this stuff kind of opened up an understanding of the world beyond my world. And that was cool. It was weird for me because, you know, I got into Green Day when Green Day was on MTV all the time, right? I like, they weren't, they didn't strike me as a Bay Area punk band. They just struck me as like a huge MTV band. Like they weren't from Oakland.

They were from MTV. You know what I'm saying? Like I didn't really perceive of the geographic. signature that they had, like all of that came much later. Yeah, I mean, I think I was always interested in where people were from. And I don't know, like, from my early age, I was really interested in that.

And so I was more interested in Green Bay as a geographical, you know, because for me, I love this idea that everyone was just massive and on my TV screen. But I was in, part of me got drawn the music because of the narrative, you know, like I wanted to know where people were from and I wanted to know what they were listening to and I wanted to know how they became

I mean I just liked working backwards right? Right right. And that's kind of how I got to you know, dead canv's and Operation Ivy and you know how I got a lot of like lookout record stuff because it was like

you know this is how you find this how you find this stuff you know like neurosis was a massive band for me because the only reason I knew who they were is because they like played early shows of Green Day and I somehow found that

out. You know, it's like this was also pre-streaming. And so the work that went into finding bands was, you know, it was worth your time if you could do it. But it took a lot more work.

A lot more work. Yeah. And a lot more reward too, arguably. And in my case, like a lot more like bugging older people. It's a key part of that work, absolutely. Yeah, like tucking, tugging the shirt of the guy at the record store and, you know, that kind of thing. Sure. You mentioned the lyrical, the nature of the West Coast.

Like, how do you read Billy Joe Armstrong as a lyricist? Like, he's not super clever or fancy, but, like, he's ambitious, right? He's taking big swings. He's thinking rock operas. He's thinking, like, stadium anthems. And that's something he's proved to be very. very good at. How do you hear him, you know, as a lyricist? Yeah, it's interesting because I think that people were very surprised about Adam American Idiot when it came out, the album. But I actually

think Green Day was always kind of angling. It's much like when people were, you know, a little surprised when my chemical romance came out black cradins. Like, well, this was kind of always what they're angling for Green Day, maybe not so much as my Kim. But because as a lyricist, I think you know, I think because Billy John Strong doesn't really rely on metaphor or these other kind of lyrical tricks, he really relies on, he's very efficient with language, but there's also kind of within that efficiency. He's trying to convey a lot of the motion. But as he goes on, like around, like I think around morning, you know, morning he kind of, he kind of, loses that efficiency and that's where I think we start to steer him into like a more robust amount of language to say a lot of things. Right, right. And then an American idiot, like fully, you know, he kind of veers into this like, which again, this is, this works for me

on that record. But Boulevard of Broken Dreams is like, that's almost like listening to a novel narration, you know? Right. It's Broadway. Obviously, it literally became Broadway, you know, but it was destined for Broadway, it felt like, in real time. Yeah. I think he does his best writing when he's not writing, when he is writing using his voice to articulate the experience of another person. Like, he's stepping into a persona, but using his voice. And so, like, you know, the me and Wake Me Up when September ends isn't like him,

but it is, he is the speaker articulating the experience that someone else is desiring. And I think he works really well in that range because, you know, all of our lives are only so interesting, you know? It's true. You know, we can only do so much with what we have at our disposal as as narrators of an experience. And if you can, if you are very good at saying, I am the speaker, but I am becoming someone else, you know, then I think you can really play. Thinking about that, the song, she, you know, it's starting. strikes me as like fairly mature, sophisticated for his age. Like that's a very explicit example of him, you know,

stepping outside of himself and talking about somebody else with like a great deal of empathy given it's on an album called Duky, you know, and it's surrounded by all these other songs. Like that's a, that's a beautiful, you know, and tender song, you know, for him to write at whatever young age he was at. And that's one of the rare times,

I think, where he uses, um, he kind of paces through it. using imagery and whatnot. You know, there's the like smashing silence with a brick of self-control. The brick of self-control. Yeah.

So he has that in his toolbox. I also think that he's a bit more of a romantic writer than he gets credit for, maybe even got credit for. You know, I think there's a lot of longing in his, in his writing. Even when the songs are kind of silly, you know, I also don't think green it was ever like as silly as ES albums. called Duky and whatever. And it's like,

but I actually don't think it's that silly. You know, they're not like, um, we're not talking like take off their pants and jacket. Yeah. Like like, you know,

dude ranch era blink stuff. Um, I think that, you know, Billy Joe's always been a bit, um, really what I love about his writing is that, uh,

he does seem to be romantic and have, a real relationship of longing. And, um, kind of like, what it is. to want to be somewhere you're not. Yeah.

Just to wrap up, you wrote a feature for the New York Times Magazine a couple years back about that great band, Meet Me at the Alter. And I think they told you, I think they told you they wanted to be as big as Green Day, at least. Like, how do you think, now we're, you know, allegedly in the midst of a pop punk revival or whatever,

do you think Green Day is a direct influence, you know, on bands like that, younger bands now, or is it just we want to be that, big. I think I can't speak for a meeting at the altar, but I will say, I think for them, it's a question of we want to be that big. Because another thing they said in that interview, Taya, the guitarist, very gifted guitarist,

it's like, you know, we want to bring it. This was so funny to sit there as someone might hear this. And Taya was like, we want to bring, we want to bring like mid-2000s radio back. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And so I think there, but there is a sure, there is a way that you look at Green Day and say, this is what success looks like to play the music, to play music like that.

Totally. You know, to play music like that and have success is what is. Now, of course, like, the face of pop punk has changed like 10 times over since Duky came out. And like probably five to seven times over since American Idiot has come out. And so even saying like we aspire to be Green Day, I don't even know if it's aspiring to a sound or shape of a band just aspiring to a place, and this is not knocking, you know, surely these bands are in some way

on the Green Day tree of inspiration just because of what Green Day, Green Day represented to so many people. But, you know, I think in some ways it's just like, how do I get to a level of success where we're, you know, the biggest band in the world making this kind of music, you know, but we've now seen, you know, there was a, there was a point where I don't know if there's ever been a playing or fallout boy was the biggest band in the world but they were maybe in the top 10 yeah and i mean you know paramour is not a small band you know like these there are bands who have come out of these scenes that's come out of the warp tour set so to speak and have have achieved you know blink has been big all these a lot of bands been big um yeah

and so i'm not saying green day made that possible but uh they are definitely i think a blueprint and have been a blueprint for a lot of years for some folks yeah and that's any we want to be green day as easy way to say we'd like to sell 20 million copies of one record you know that's a useful shorthand because they didn't know way you can do what you want yeah so right yeah and they did and then and then they did what they wanted for the next you can make a rock up you can make several you can you put out triple records you know yeah you can antagonize everyone for the next three decades you know and we're all very grateful for that uh thank you so much for coming back on and if this has been No doubt. Thanks for having me. This is great.

Thanks so much to our guests this week, Hanif Abdurakib. Thanks as always to our producers, Jonathan Kermah and Justin Sales. Thanks to Abu Kamara for additional production support. And thanks very much to you for listening. And now, if I were you, I would go listen to Basketcase by Green Day. We'll see you next week.