A Green Day Fan Site

Green Day was interviewed by Jello Biafra (of the Dead Kennedys and other projects) for a magazine called Huh (or huH, I guess), in 1996. Jello Biafra is not the usual interviewer, so it’s more like a conversation among punk rock colleagues. To a certain extent, it reflects the issues Biafra is interested in more than it does Green Day’s.

Although they share similar political views and concerns, the members of Green Day and Jello Biafra have very different perspectives. Jello wants to talk with the guys about the evils of major labels, and Green Day are kind of ho-hum about it all. Billie Joe says: “I wanted to live off of what I was fucking doing, and that’s as honest as I can be. I don’t have a diploma, I know how to play music.”

But if Jello comes off as maybe a little whiny, it’s because he really did pave the way for later bands. He says as much, jokingly, in the interview: “You younguns have no idea what we were up against to create a punk scene for you to walk into!” And Billie Joe replies, laughing: “You jaded old bastard!” But when the Dead Kennedys became popular in the early 80s, punk rock really did seem dangerous and threatening to many in the mainstream. Jello was even criminally charged for “distributing harmful matter.”

The interview is so long that there’s a lot of great stuff, like Billie Joe talking about the hospital patients he sang for when he was little, Green Day’s first gig with Crimpshrine and Sewer Trout, the benefit they played for Food Not Bombs, which raised 30 grand, Billie Joe going to Gilman in disguise, and the heavy metal band called Bloodrage that Billie played in when he was 14. Biafra: “Did any of the lyrics make it into Green Day songs?” Billie: “Oh yeah, like fiery graves and bloody bones…”

Continued:
Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8, Page 9, Page 10, Page 11,
Page 12, Page 13, Page 14, Page 15.

The magazine is a weird format that didn’t fit on the scanner, so it’s scanned in slightly odd sections.

I got my grubby not-so-little hands on another old magazine with an interview and photos of the boys in Green Day. The magazine is called Huh, and the issue is from 1996. To be honest, I had never heard of Huh magazine, but I was intrigued because the interviewer is Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. I haven’t scanned the interview yet, but here are some of the photos that ran with the article. Click the links and thumbnails for larger versions.

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The East Bay Express has a pretty cool review of the new book Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day, which I posted about recently, here.

I haven’t grabbed a copy for myself yet, but Nothing Wrong With Me’s own Amanda has, and she wrote up her impressions in a her always evocative and personal style. She writes: “Gimme Something Better is as crazy, vibrant, and mildly horrifying as the music it is devoted to. It’s a free-for-all in the best possible sense.” Read the whole post on her wonderful blog, here.

In part because news of the book got me thinking about the subject, the history of Green Day and the East Bay punk scene has been a bit of a theme here lately, so here’s a zine that Aaron Cometbus made in 1997 for the tenth anniversary of 924 Gilman St. It gives a sense of how difficult and chaotic but also impressively dedicated the effort has been to keep a completely independent punk rock club going. Bringing together the very disparate personalities that are attracted to punk is a challenge in itself. It’s the story of a labor of love, but not without struggles and mistakes along the way. There’s nothing specifically about Green Day in the zine. Click on the thumbnail for the full size scan.

Continued:
Pages 5 and 6, Pages 7 and 8, Pages 9 and 10, Pages 11 and 12, Pages 13 and 14.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any old magazines. This article is from the August 1996 issue of Guitar World. It was a bitter time, less than a year after the release of Insomniac and after the abrupt cancellation of their European tour. Here, the guys are dealing with the stress by being completely and hilariously obnoxious, ranting about all the old-time punk bastards who have been complaining about Green Day’s success. Click on the thumbnail for the full size scan.

And here’s a bigger version of my favorite photo from the article.

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Related posts:
More magazine scans.

~Scans of InStyle magazine, with photos of Mike Dirnt’s wedding, are on GDA.

Here’s a break from thinking about the new album and all the excitement that has come with it (who would have expected even a Broadway-style musical?!!!). This is a magazine article about Green Day from September 1994, which is, of course, one of my favorite eras. At the time it was written, Dookie was only a gold album (half a million copies sold), so the article is thankfully more about the guys than it is about how astonishing their rise to fame had been, like so many other articles that were published around that time, and since, and it does a nice job of capturing their inherent contradictions.

On the one hand, the guys were outrageously silly, and they loved ridiculous and gross pranks (“Billie Joe is playing yo-yo with his saliva. He reels out about four inches of drool, sucks it back in, then reels it out again. It’s strangely hypnotic.”), but they were also, even back then, caring, kind, and thoughtful about the important things. (For instance, they think it’s wrong that in the fable about the grasshopper and the ant, the hardworking ant who accumulated food for the winter while the grasshopper played, turns the grasshopper away when he asks her for help. “Something about the story bothers Green Day. ‘ I don’t see anything wrong with giving the grasshopper some food,’ says Mike earnestly. The others nod.”) Their pranks may have gotten less gross over the years, but that combination of enjoying ridiculous fun and caring about serious issues seems to still essentially be their core.

Some favorite bits:

~Tre looks as if his mother lost him on the playground: His pants are torn, his knees slathered in Mercurochrome. He pads around the airport in bare feet, getting amused stares.

~Roughly recorded but surprisingly touching, 39/Smooth captured exactly how vulnerable boys could be to the casual, unthinking cruelty of girls.

~Billie always knew how to get people’s attention. As a kid, he says, “I had a problem keeping my penis in my pants.” Meaning? He shrugs. “Flashing, mostly.”

Click on the thumbnail for the full size image:

~The scans of the new Rolling Stone article on Green Day are up at GreenDay.com.

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