A Green Day Fan Site

Here’s a new review of the Pinhead Gunpowder 7 inch that gets to the heart of it for me:

“I love everything about this band. I love that their songs rule. I love that they’re friends playing music for the love of music. I love that they easily could have a larger label release something for them, yet only release music on their friends labels. The brilliance in Pinhead Gunpowder has always been in their ability to write some of the best East Bay punk this side of late 80’s. As much as I like Billie’s other band (what’s their name again), his lyrics in Pinhead Gunpowder always strike a bigger chord with me.”

Read the full review here.

Pinhead Gunpowder not only has great music, with catchy melodies and driving guitars, and not only does it have great lyrics that grab your heart and paint vivid word pictures, but they also have never wavered from the independent spirit that makes punk rock such a personal and satisfying genre of music. Green Day has held on to that ideal as well, but it may be harder to make out in the harsh light of their enormous mainstream success. That Billie Joe took part in this latest project by Pinhead Gunpowder, playing tiny shows and putting out a record on a small independent label, is a testament to his unflagging connection to his roots in the DIY scene.

That got me thinking about the concept of DIY, and I came across a great definition of it, in a book about zines, which seems particularly appropriate since Aaron is known as much for his zine, Cometbus, as he is for his music and for the lyrics he writes for Pinhead Gunpowder.

From the book Notes from Underground, by Stephen Duncombe:

“Defining themselves against a society predicated on consumption, zinesters privilege the ethic of DIY, do-it-yourself: make your own culture and stop consuming that which is made for you.”

The culture of punk rock, with which zines are closely associated, has always been about doing it yourself, for yourself and your peers, so that the distinction between producer and consumer is blurred or even erased. Whether you start a band, make a zine, volunteer to help independent projects and venues, or knit your own mittens, any time you take on any personal endeavor, you are making your own culture instead of passively taking in a culture created for you, usually by commercial entities that are only after your money.

Green Day’s music now comes to us through commercial culture, but it doesn’t mean we have to passively experience it. The guys in Green Day have always encouraged fans to question, to be active, to act on their values on their creativity. Music can be an inspiration rather than a product, and one can contribute to creating an independent culture in many ways. Billie Joe has said (at 4:43):

“You end up meeting these people that were involved in a different way, like politics, creating a place like Gilman Street, having their own fanzines. I came more from the musical side of it, but there were these other people who were just as important and just as influential as far as the scene was concerned. They were even more important in a lot of ways. People that just put out stuff, they would do cartoons. There was this one one guy who did a cartoon of every single day of his life for like a year.”

And speaking of zines, Billie Joe has been known to contribute to zines now and then. These are his writings over time for Robert Eggplant’s zine, Absolutely Zippo. Highlights of that zine have now been compiled into a book, available here. Thanks to beatupcar for originally posting these scans. Click on the thumbnail for the full size image.

  
Jan. 1989; May/June 1989; around 1995.