Rock and Hard Places Page 9

  Four surnames between the lot of them, doubtless, but they bought tickets for tonight’s Green Day show fast enough to sell the Aitken Centre out three weeks in advance. Even up this dismal side-road from nowhere, the devotion commanded by Green Day, this apparently unprepossessing trio, is impressive, bordering on the phenomenal.

  Or even the ludicrous.

  PHOTOGRAPHER STEPHEN SWEET and I had not arrived in Canada in the most optimistic frame of mind. We had been told two weeks previously where and when our photo session and interview would happen, and how long they would last. We had been told we couldn’t travel with the band, or spend any informal time with them at all. We were told that Green Day had a low opinion of press, and didn’t want to endure any more of us than they really had to. We had been led, basically, to expect all the pettiness and egotism that tend to run rampant in the entourages of big American bands.

  Sweet and I had braced ourselves accordingly. We both knew well, by now, the truth of Charlie Watts’ oft-quoted adage that his twenty-five years in The Rolling Stones had been “Five years playing, twenty years hanging around,” and its little-recognised corollary that rock journalism is the same, but without the five years’ playing. We spend the flight to Toronto, and the connecting flight to Halifax, and most of the Green Day gig we see in Halifax, and the flight to Fredericton, and the time we spend trying to stay warm by walking laps of what passes for Fredericton’s main street, telling each other that this assignment is going to chomp out loud, that we’ll be doing well to go home with a picture of the drummer raising a finger through the back window of the bus, and a quote of two words from the singer, one of which will be “Get,” and that if we’d both paid more attention in school, we could have got real jobs.

  Our contact in Green Day’s crew is the tour manager, who rejoices in the name Randy Steffes. Sweet and I have become gloomily obsessed with this unlikely monicker. “Randy Steffes,” one of us will murmur, apropos of nothing, to break the frequent despondent silences. “Christ on a bike,” the other will respond. We have developed a mental image that we feel fits: a large, middle-aged man with a receding hairline, an over-compensating ponytail, a tour jacket embroidered with the dates from a mid-80s James Taylor tour, a small constellation of unnecessary laminates giving his neck a permanent crick and a halfhundredweight of equally pointless keys hanging from his straining belt. He will hate us. We will hate him. He will make Sweet take pictures of the gig from the back of the hall. He’ll make me sit through the entire soundcheck before giving me five minutes with the band.

  “Randy Steffes,” sighs Sweet.

  Christ on a bike, I reply.

  WE GET TO the venue, persuade the student security of the truth of our story that we’ve come all the way from England—they don’t appear to have heard of it—and announce ourselves at Green Day’s production office. On the door hangs a sheet of photocopied paper, headlined “The Daily Whiner,” which lists the day’s travel arrangements (Green Day are heading out of Fredericton straight after the show—perhaps they’ve been here before), crew schedules, press commitments and a couple of in-jokes. Melody Maker is mentioned in this dispatch, and they’ve not been unduly rude about us, and as this is more than Melody Maker can say it’s been about Green Day, we’re inclined to be pleasantly surprised.

  We’re looking for Randy Steffes, I tell somebody, being careful to neither mispronounce nor giggle.

  “I’ll call him,” somebody says.

  The next thing we hear is a lawnmower-like buzz from around the corner behind us, followed by a loud shriek of “Fuuuccckkkloookoooouuuttt.” Sweet and I take cover as a blond apparition riding what appears to be a motorised skateboard with handlebars screeches to a skidding halt in front of us.

  “Sorry,” says this creature, from somewhere beneath a dishmop of blonde dreadlocks.

  “Randy Steffes,” the thing on the scooter explains.

  Is . . . ?

  “Me,” it says. “I still forget how quick these things seem when you drive ’em inside.”

  Ah.

  “Anyway,” he continues, still getting his breath back. “The band are here. That’s the good news. But they’ve just seen the review you guys ran of the album, so they’re likely to be a bit hostile.”

  Tremendous.

  “Put these on and wait here,” he says, handing over two VIP laminates, each bearing a cartoon picture of an unshaven drunk pissing on a visibly distressed daffodil. “I’ll go and get ’em.” He zooms off down the hall, bellowing “Coooommminggggthroooo.”

  He returns, on foot, with an obviously recently woken young pop group. “Green Day,” he announces. “Da-naaa.”

  The introductions are awkward. To Green Day, I am an agent of a paper which has just reviewed their new album, Insomniac, in much the same way that Air Marshal Harris could have been said to have “reviewed” Dresden. My esteemed colleague Neil Kulkarni has dismissed Insomniac as the work of “quacks and mountebanks peddling placebo enervation which is in fact tranquiliser to kids stupid enough to know what they want and how to get it,” before informing the sections of our readership that mightn’t have followed that argument that “Green Day suck for real.”

  To me, Green Day are three people who have no real reason not to make my life difficult—sell ten million copies of one album and one Melody Maker cover more or less doesn’t make much difference. The photographs seem a good place to start, so Sweet suggests some seats down by the football field outside the venue. This elicits a massed negative response.

  Aha! Spoilt whingeing brats who can’t cope with the idea of getting their fingers cold for ten minutes?

  “Um,” says Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day’s singer and guitarist, “the trouble is that there’ll be people out there who’ll be waiting to see the show.”

  Yes! Stuck-up nouveau megarich who reckon they’re now too good for the people who made them what they are!

  “And, well,” he shrugs, looking monumentally embarrassed, “we do get hassled. I mean, really. Especially in small towns.”

  There’s a bit of self-conscious giggling as the absurdity of the situation comes into focus. Green Day’s current status is the stuff of the most piquant silliness. I keep thinking, and I suspect they do too, that they’re just a spirited, if straitlaced, power-pop outfit, a standard-issue one-two-three-four ramalamalama three-chord garage band with better than average tunes. But Green Day are, unarguably, much more. That number again: ten million.

  It occurs to me that I wouldn’t have thought of suggesting to Robert Smith, or Bono, or Michael Stipe, or Eddie Vedder, that they run the gauntlet of the kind of people who might have travelled across a state to watch them play. Green Day’s last album, Dookie, sold more than any of the following: The Cure’s Wish, U2’s Zooropa, REM’s Monster, Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy or, come to that, Nirvana’s Nevermind. It is possible that the three dopey, dishevelled wretches before me are the component parts of the biggest band in the world right now.

  “Look,” says Billie Joe, who seems to find the situation as baffling as we do, “you think about it, and we’ll see you after the soundcheck.”

  Green Day wander off, leaving Sweet and me feeling like we’ve fallen through the looking glass.

  GREEN DAY FORMED longer ago than most people give them credit for in Rodeo, the unfashionable end of the fashionable Californian town of Berkely. Billie Joe and Mike Dirnt, Green Day’s bassplayer, assembled their first band when both were aged eleven. Sweet Children, as they were known, failed to make a significant impact outside their own bedrooms, and the project was abandoned in favour of a succession of punk covers acts. Under a variety of long-forgotten names, Billie Joe and Mike took skiploads of speed and played around the Bay Area of San Francisco during the boom years of the peculiarly ascetic version of punk spawned by such grimly conscientious acts as Dead Kennedys and True Sounds of Liberty, and developed by the likes of Operation Ivy and Neurosis. At one of the all-ages concerts that characterised the hey!-if-the-
kids-are-united ethos of the genre, Billie Joe and Mike met Tre Cool, a drummer. There is a possibility that Tre’s name is some sort of cunning fraud.

  The three became Green Day, an invigorating fusion of the hardcore they’d grown up on and the pop sensibilities of their transatlantic infatuations: The Who, The Clash, The Buzzcocks and The Kinks. They took more skipfuls of speed, played more gigs, and released two albums, 39/Smooth and Kerplunk on an excitingly obscure local label. These sold about 30,000 copies each and got ecstatic, semi-literate reviews in fanzines with names like Pocketful Of Vomit and The Urine Sample.

  In 1993, some bright spark in an A&R department in a thumping great American record company noticed that every other thumping great American record company was signing punk-influenced guitar groups and making shedfuls of money: at the height of the Nirvana-inspired grunge goldrush, it seemed that a major deal and major success were there for the taking for anybody who could operate a guitar without hurting themselves, whinge convincingly about nothing in particular and cope with a few fashionable indignities being wrought with their hair. Green Day, present and correct on all three counts, were offered a deal. Hoping that here lay a way to make a living from their music, they signed it. Green Day were pleased with Dookie, their major label debut. It seemed to them a solid and likeable piece of work, well recorded but not oppressively polished. Who knew, with a bit of luck, it might sell 100,000 copies.

  It did. Then it sold another 9,900,000, and counting—a turn of events that has confused nobody more than Green Day. When they talk about their good fortune now, they do so with the perplexed air of people who’ve been knocked down in the street by a runaway dustcart full of cash. They’re defensive, almost paranoid. They almost sound like they feel guilty.

  In Britain, the conventional critical wisdom on Green Day, for what little it’s worth, is that they’re smart, cynical charlatans, living high on some spurious notion of adolescent alienation, and milking the affections of their deluded fans for every last cent. This case collapses within seconds of arriving in their dressing room.

  Bands of Green Day’s status generally ensure that they’re well looked after backstage. There will be ample food of the junk and fresh varieties, a selection of drinks alcoholic and non, magazines, a couple of contractual eccentricities like fresh socks or bowls of M&Ms with the red ones carefully separated—even televisions, stereos and video games are not unusual. Green Day’s backstage rider consists of one espresso machine, and whatever eye-reddening herb the room is reeking of, and they bought all that with them. This self-imposed austerity is all in the name of keeping overheads, and therefore ticket prices, as low as possible. For similar reasons, Green Day travel with minimal crew—Randy doubles as a soundman—and subject themselves to a punishing tour schedule that often sees them playing stretches of fifteen gigs in as many nights, travelling between them overnight on the tour bus, thereby obviating the expense of hotels.

  “It is now two weeks since I had a shower,” grins Tre, welcoming us in. Tre, from the vertiginous blond bouffant, to the immovable deranged grin, to the continuous high-pitched giggle, is going to walk one of the parts if anyone ever casts a stage production of Beavis and Butt-head. When I tell him this, he replies, without missing a beat, “Huh-huh. You said ‘parts.’ Huh-huh.” The ice is breaking, slowly but surely. “Do you want an espresso? We don’t have anything else.”

  Billie Joe and Mike are sitting on benches, and seem warily amicable. Their determination to keep their shows as accessible as possible for their growing legion of fans is laudable, but Green Day are hampered by their tendency to protest rather too much. The first minutes of conversation sound like a rehearsal for Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.

  “I guess,” begins Billie Joe, “that the biggest misconception about Green Day, at least as far a Britain is concerned, is that we all come from rich backgrounds, which is bullshit. Rodeo, which is where we come from, doesn’t have a low, low class, but it doesn’t have a really high, high class. It has no class. It’s a refinery town, a smudge on the map of California.”

  “My mom was living in a trailer last year,” adds Mike. “And she’s a Native American.”

  Tre is engaged in single combat with the espresso machine, preventing him from regaling us with tales of a childhood spent in a shoebox in t’middle of t’road, or something very like it.

  “I was the youngest of six kids raised by a single parent,” continues Billie Joe. “She had a waitressing job. She is still a waitress. But if people read a few things from various British publications . . .”

  We both know who he’s talking about.

  “. . . they’d just think we brought together by some record company or something.”

  Would that matter?

  “Well, yeah . . . I don’t want people to think we were this thing that was put together.”

  The American strain of punk is plagued by the same craving for “authenticity” as every other form of American music. American musicians talk about being “real” and “meaning it” with genuine fervour, believing that the central virtues of rock’n’roll are sincerity and credibility. To the British pop consumer, such considerations as background, motivation and underlying morals appear rather quaint. Whether Green Day were raised in paper bags in septic tanks or are all architecture graduates whooping it up on trust funds is a matter of supreme irrelevance, surely. They’ve made at least three belting pop singles (“Basket Case,” “Longview,” “Stuck With Me”) and those are all the credentials they’d need, you’d think.

  “I know what you’re saying,” nods Mike. “When I was growing up, I didn’t really think bands had backgrounds. They weren’t real. But we have ideals that we carry with us, and they matter. I’m a momma’s boy, totally, and that instilled good morals in me, I think. I’m not saying our backgrounds were completely fucked, but they weren’t great. We’ve been through as much shit as anyone, but we keep reading that we’re rich college kids.”

  Let’s drop the college thing. That leaves “rich”—and you must have made a few bob by now—and “kids.” Your average age is around twenty-three. So “rich kids” is hard one to refute, surely.

  “I bought my mom a house, yeah,” says Mike. Mike stares at his shoes. He seems a bit frail, and will later tell me that he suffers from a heart condition that gets exacerbated by stress. “But we don’t have high standards of living. People think that once you gain money you suddenly have no feelings and no problems. We all have a life to live, and monetary stability brings another list of problems that comes with it. I can’t expect people to understand or relate to that—they’ll just say ‘You’re a rich rock star, what are you bitching about?’ Well, I’m bitching because I’ve been gone from my fiancee for a year and a half. That still hurts.”

  Go and see her, then. That’s the whole point of being rich. You don’t have to do this (Green Day all have other concerns—Billie Joe is married with a young son, Joey).

  “When we stop having fun, we will stop,” says Billie. “I’m still having a total ball playing gigs. I don’t know if you noticed the other night in Halifax, but I was having fun.”

  People don’t usually come on naked for the encore when they’re feeling a bit downbeat, no.

  “If people pay to see us play—and we are entertainers—we have to put out as much as we possibly can. We can’t go, ‘Duh, I’m a rock star, this sucks, the people who are paying to see me now are the kind who used to beat me up in high school, I want my mummy.”

  Billie Joe is starting to lighten up a bit.

  “I don’t want to sit here and complain about being a rock star. I don’t want to be whining and moaning. Fuck that, you know. I’m not gonna take for granted the fact that I have the ability to play music for the rest of my life if I want to. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. For one or two or a few people to understand what the hell I’m talking about in my songs, that’s more than I’ve ever asked for, for people to fuckin’ get it.”


  WHICH BEGS THE question of what people are getting when they get Green Day. You don’t shift ten million records without hitting a fairly significant seam in the cultural firmament. Nirvana’s astonishing, and astonishingly sudden, success demonstrated that America was crying out for a punk-influenced rock trio articulating a large and hitherto unrecognised undertow of alienation, but it all got a bit messy and ugly for comfortable consumption when Kurt Cobain reacted to the fame, acclaim and wealth visited upon him by shooting himself.

  Enter Green Day with their cute, catchy songs about television and school and masturbation, their pop-eyed cartoon of a singer, their funny videos, their implicit assurance that it’s all just a lark, The Ramones all over again, and here’s your licence to print money.

  “Mmm,” nods Billie. “That’s the bleakest analysis I can come up with. It’s what kids are talking about in their high schools, or their grammar schools, for that matter. I don’t like to belittle people, though, because they happen to be liking my music at the same time. There again, kids are some of the most brutally honest critics there are.”

  If I could just play devil’s advocate for a second, do you ever wonder—as a parent, even—what effect your relentlessly bleak lyrical view has on the kids buying your records?

  “Maybe people take it the wrong way,” says Billie. “I don’t think I complain that much. A lot of our songs, I guess, are kind of about other people that whine. ‘Brat’ is about waiting for your parents to die so you can get your inheritance. That’s where everyone starts saying, ‘Oh, you’re rich kids.’ But that song’s not about me, it’s about fucking college kids. I mean, I don’t know if you’re a college kid . . .”

  No, I’m not. Or at least wasn’t. Or at least not for long enough to deserve the name. But we’ve done this bit.