I’ve asked people to submit their stories of finding Green Day, so I thought I should write mine, some of which I’ve talked about before in bits and pieces. [To read other people’s stories, look here and here. To send in yours, check the About page.]

When I was a teenager, music wasn’t really a big part of my life. It was the 70s: there was disco, which was fine for a laugh but to my mind was mostly unlistenable, there was Kiss… (need I say more?), and there was Southern-fried rock, which a lot of the guys at my school were especially fond of. I didn’t think it was that bad musically, but songs about cheating hearts and the call of the open road sung by greasy guys with long beards were about as far from my personal experience, of lugging around piles of notebooks and worrying about math tests and boys who wouldn’t give me the time of day, as you could get.

There was a lot of other great music that was being made at the time, of course, but it was mostly off my radar. In college, my boyfriend had all of the Dead Kennedys albums, and they held a powerful fascination for me, though I couldn’t exactly say why. I was nerdy and quiet. I didn’t see myself as a likely Dead Kennedys fan. They seemed so angry and bitter, and I was too busy trying to be what I thought I was supposed to be — dutiful, hardworking, shy, fretful — to realize I was angry and bitter too. If I had told anyone I liked the Dead Kennedys they would have just looked at me quizzically, or thought that I was making up a preposterous lie. My then boyfriend, who was himself a big nerd who played Dungeons and Dragons, had been to see them at clubs in D.C., where he was from, and had once gotten a bad cut on his lip in the pit. That didn’t seem particularly appealing to me.

Over the years, my relationship with music continued to be at arm’s length. If rock and roll is supposed to save you from your dreary and worried life, it wasn’t extending itself to save me from anything. All it really told me was that I wasn’t cool enough. From where I stood, it held me at a distance, possibly in contempt.

Green Day came along when I was 30. I was watching the Conan O’Brien show and this band came on. They were three scruffy kids with enormous energy and this dizzying combination of aggression and sweetness, with all the power of the Dead Kennedys but wrapped up in a delicious melody and catchy hooks, something like caramel and cayenne pepper put together. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was love, instantly. (The song was Welcome to Paradise.)

Instead of putting you off, like so much of rock music that’s all wrapped up in attitude and aloofness, Green Day has an earnest kind of generosity that pulls you in. Every note, every spit and snot trick, every stupid bit of goofiness is a gift.

Not that being a fan of Green Day was easy to explain. Dookie was considered bubble gum punk for amped up teen boys. Because it was so unpretentious, its brilliance was easy to overlook. As a 30 year old woman, I didn’t know any other Green Day fans. My boyfriend had an artist’s fellowship with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, along with a dozen other up-and-coming artists. Those were the people we knew. They liked difficult, obscure music, not kid stuff like Green Day. My drooling adoration wasn’t something I could share with anyone.

Because of Green Day, I started learning more about punk rock. I loved MaximumRocknRoll, the punk zine, though it was bittersweet because at the time they hated Green Day so much. But it was funny and raunchy and stupid and smart. It was a window into a whole world of people who were disgusted with the world’s meanness and injustice, and who were smart and clear headed about it, and dealt with it with loud music and a lot of silliness, along with serious activism.

I went to see a lot of punk bands at small clubs. None of them were quite Green Day, but they had some of the same magic. Being at a show was like a suspension of your mundane day-to-day for a few hours of wide eyed wonder. Shortly after that, I moved to New York, where I started volunteering for Food Not Bombs at a DIY space that also hosted punk shows, but they mostly had crusty political hardcore bands that weren’t exactly my cup of tea. I met squatters, college kids, high school kids, intellectuals, travelers, musicians, dreamers, back bloc anarchists. I was good friends with a homeless guy who helped out with Food Not Bombs. The heady ideals of punk and anarchism are a strange brew when mixed with the reality of the sometimes difficult personalities that gravitate toward that culture. It was both wonderful and awful to be a part of it, and after a few years I withdrew.

So what’s the moral of this story? It doesn’t have one. Everything you do is part of a journey, and everyone you come in contact with touches you somehow, for good or bad. I don’t know if Green Day saved my life, but their influence made it a lot more interesting, and their music still gives me a lot of joy.

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