Here’s the article from Musician magazine, from September 1994. It opens with this great description of Green Day upstaging much more seasoned and established performers at an outdoor festival in 1994:

While the other artists basked like geckos, Green Day came on like a blood-scenting Komodo dragon. In a hyper-speed 30-minute set Billie Joe 1) unzipped his fly and paraded his privates around for all to see; 2) handed a dumbfounded fan his beat-up, sticker-coated guitar and encouraged him to play it; 3) happily accepted a rose from a female follower, then beat it to a pulp against his mike stand; 4) destroyed at $600 microphone by smashing it into the ground, was handed a replacement and trashed it as well… Jolted from lethargy to its collective feet, the crowd gave Green Day a standing O. The stage, at least, was never the same again.

Is it any wonder why we love them so much? And why did he do all that? “I dunno, the bands we played with were just boring.”

And I think this is one of my favorite quotes: “I called my mom yesterday and said. ‘Mom, I’m gettin’ married.’ And she said, ‘That’s fine, son. Have fun!’ I can hardly surprise my mother nowadays.”

The last little bit. And the cover.

I’m always happy when I get my hands on a magazine I used to have and then threw away… This is from Musician magazine, which I think is no longer published. The issue is dated September 1994. It has a good article about Green Day, and I’ll post those scans soon (does anybody actually read them?), but for now, here’s some piccies. Some of these are around already, maybe not all.

And here’s a nice little tidbit from the article. Sounds like the author is almost as infatuated with Billie Joe as some of us are…

A year ago, Billie Joe’s hair was green, and spackled with squidlike little tufts so small you couldn’t quite call them dreadlocks; he looked like a sea anemone. But there’s a startling star charisma beneath the ever changing facade; he has the rugged good looks and haunted, glittery eyes of a young Montgomery Clift, and a passionate way with his work, a technique for losing himself in the melodic malaise, that’s beyond his 22 years.

Click on the thumbnails for a larger image (except on the last one, which is the picture from the upper corner of the cover).

And if you’re in the mood for reading, The Lackey recently posted scans of a nice article from 2000 that’s definitely worth a read.

This is an article that was published at the very end of the Dookie tour, in December 1994. Mostly, it brings out how completely exhausted and burned out the boys of Green Day were — which seemed to make Billie Joe especially sharp-tongued, in his cheeky and uh, delightful way — but it also does a good job of capturing the hugeness of their success at the time, and the craziness, giddy excitement, and emotional turmoil of both band and fans. It’s actually nice to see an article that gives a lot of attention to the fans (though it may not exactly be flattering to us…)

Billie Joe: “I’m just exhausted. Totally. We’ve outdone ourselves in a serious way. I have insomnia problems anyway, so it’s hard for me to sleep. That’s the main thing I’m looking forward to: I’ll probably sleep for the rest of the year.”

Gotta love Billie Joe when he snarls: “Everyone just sort of looks at you. Well, what do you want? What do you want me to do? A lot of people, when they talk to me, I just want them to shut up. Like, shut up, you’re a moron. I have nothing to say, you know? I’m not trying to enhance the conversation, so shut up.”

Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 23, 1994:
Cover banner, Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6.

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I picked up an old magazine on ebay, Guitar World from December 1997, with a nice Green Day interview in it. What struck me, when reading it, is the care and thought that Billie Joe and the guys have always put into coming out with their next album. I think it’s good to be reminded of it in light of Billie Joe’s recent comments about his current struggle to craft a worthy and honest follow up to American idiot. Rather than resting on their laurels like so many other artists, Green Day forges ahead every time, and every time gives us something wonderful to love and cherish.

Some of Billie Joe’s comments:

On Nimrod: “You have to continue to change or quit. And the essence of punk rock is never to let things get old and never be hampered by any rules. We put as much power as we could into these songs, and each one has an identity of its own.”

On Insomniac: “Going into Insomniac, I don’t think we were necessarily into selling records; I think more what we wanted to do was put a stop to Dookie. We wanted to get over the sophomore slump that we knew was coming and not wait another year and a half to do it, because then it would have been that much harder.”

On Dookie: “All I did was be honest and sing about myself, and people identified with it. Kids don’t sugar coat anything and that was what they saw in us — something that was fast and hard and got the point across.”

Words that still seem poignant, ten years later:

“I still have something to prove, and I’m driven to find a way to identify myself. I think people get more comfortable with themselves as they grow older, but for now I’m still pissed off.”

“We are a pop band. Maybe it’s not packaged the same way as Duran Duran — it’s definitely more aggressive — but if you strip it down, it’s a hook, a melody, and has good lyrics — that’s all.”

“I want to be a songwriter and there really is no crime in that.”

And this is just funny:

GW: “I assume King for a Day isn’t autobiographical?”

Armstrong: “It is. Everybody dresses in drag at one point or the other. Didn’t you ever put a dress on?”

GW: “No.”

Armstrong: “Oh well. I thought it would be really funny to do that song because it has this Oi! sound to it in the chorus. I wanted to see a bunch of fraternity guys singing about dressing in drag and not know what they were singing about.”

Scans of Green Day’s interview in Guitar World, December 1997: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6.

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From: SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music: Original writing on rock, hip-hop, techno, and beyond, edited by Will Hermes with Sia Michael, published in 2005.

 
[Click on the image for the full size page.]

I borrowed this book from the library. It’s nothing new. These are reprints of pieces that previously appeared in Spin, except for the introduction, which frankly is nothing to write home about. In typical fashion, a professional rock critic can’t bring himself to write about Green Day without distancing himself with backhanded disses and a show of surprise at their success, while superficially seeming to praise them, but always with a faintly smug and disbelieving tone. God forbid he should get caught with his pants down, shamelessly loving a band that makes no attempt to be arty, pretentious, or trendy.

No doubt Dookie really did speak “loud volumes to a restless teen constituency,” but that no more explains the depth of Green Day’s appeal and success than it would for a work like Catcher in the Rye, which is loved by teens but has something for anyone. Great art speaks loud volumes to anyone who cares to listen, and who is touched by it for whatever reason, because there’s more than enough there to reach many constituencies.

Calling Dookie’s cover art “amateurish” and referring to the music as “startlingly mature songs that convincingly celebrate permanent immaturity” is missing the point entirely. Being startled is a matter of expectations, and if one misconstrues honesty and directness as wallowing in amateurishness and immaturity it’s only because one expects to be able to be lazy, to be clued in to a band’s greatness by the outer packaging: their attitude, their clothes, even their cover art. It’s saying: make sure you look really slick in your presentation or I won’t expect you to be any good. Then when it turns out you are incredibly good yet insist on being pranksterish and unassuming I still won’t really believe it, and I’ll keep harping on my own incredulity — and that of the entire music industry, which has always relied on hype and slick marketing to sell mediocre products. “Nobody could have expected [Dookie] to move 10 million units.” Nobody? Not any of the ten million fans who actually bought the album? Who knew that great music didn’t need hype in order to become beloved! Well, smack me on the forehead!

The actual pieces reprinted from Spin have more in them worth talking about, especially the background piece on 924 Gilman Street and the meaning and promise of the punk scene, as well as its disappointments and letdowns, but I guess I’ll save that for another time.

Flipside #66, May/June 1990:

Flipside #66, Cover —— Green Day interview, page 1

Green Day interview, page 2 —— Green Day interview, page 3

Ah, the sweetness… Billie Joe was 18, Mike was 17. (Tre wasn’t in the band yet, of course.) Don’t you want to slap John Kiffmeier just a little bit, for being such a know-it-all? And for acting like he has to apologize for Billie Joe’s not-political lyrics and the band’s not-hardcore style of music? John: “We’re kinda Gilman Easy Listening. Billie got a love letter on stage tonight. I saw a heart on that man!” Billie: “I didn’t get a…” Gilman Easy Listening! The nerve of him! And I bet he wishes he could get letters with hearts on them… :)

Billie Joe’s explanation is matter of fact: “Why don’t you write political songs?” “It’s not our style. I don’t know. We just don’t write them.” And: “I don’t really know much about it.” Now shut up and stop asking me stupid questions about my lyrics! That’s what I would have said, but Billie Joe is much too sweet for that. He just makes little jokes: Rest doesn’t say that gleam in your eyes, it says “that cleem in urize.” And my favorite line from Billie Joe: “If I had sex we’d run out of band material!”

Flipside was an accepting and happy-go-lucky punk zine, and they were clearly fans of Green Day. But honesty often seems to bring out a reaction of: Why, instead of being truthful and making yourself so vulnerable and raw, didn’t you just write something that was more expected and more acceptable? Back then, Green Day could have been on the cover of MaximumRocknRoll, and they almost didn’t get to play Gilman Street because they were too soft. All they would have had to do was write a few political songs to make everyone in the punk scene happy, but they chose to be true to themselves instead. Even when they were still teenagers, Billie Joe and Mike were amazingly steadfast in knowing who they were and what they wanted to be, it seems.

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Some more tidbits from the same issue:

1. — Review of the 39/Smooth LP

2. — Flipside’s staff picks

3. — Print ad for the 39/Smooth LP

4. — Review of a live show with Green Day, March 16, 1990, at Gilman St. (Doesn’t really say that much about Green Day)

Some have heard me whine about this before. I used to have a stack of magazines with Green Day interviews from 1994 and 1995, and two that I had backordered from the punk rock zine Flipside, that were from 1990 and 1992, and I threw them all away.

Okay, I’m an idiot, but the truth is I’m just not attached to memorabilia and other objects: I’d bought the magazines at the time because I wanted to read them. Once I’d read them — uh, a few times… — and they’d gotten to be years old, and I had moved away, form Texas to New York, and had left them behind at my ex boyfriend’s house, it felt foolish to remain emotionally attached to a stack of old magazines. I think I had some delusional idea that I could see myself as a bigger person, someone who wasn’t so pathetically obsessed. Go ahead, slap me! Of course I’m pathetically obsessed! And I’m damn proud of it, now!

Ah, but no need to keep smacking oneself when we now have the wonder of the internet: no scrap of Green Day info shall remain under an unturned stone. Google and ye shall receive. I still haven’t found the issue of Flipside from 1990, but the one from 1992 is on the web in two places (that I know of, there may be more): Green Day Discography posted the text of the interview and scans of the photos, and Operation Phoenix Records has a PDF of the entire issue. I copied the two pages of the Green Day interview from the PDF (since looking through a PDF file that’s over 120 pages long is a bit of a drag). A huge thank you to the people who scanned the zine and put the whole PDF together.

Flipside #78, May/June 1992
 

Page 1, Page 2.

(Yeah, they got Billie Joe’s name right in the introduction, but managed to spell it wrong throughout the interview, but that was one of the charming and great things about a zine like Flipside: its happy, devil-may-care sloppiness.)

A lot of the text is very familiar: some of the most memorable of Green Day’s funny quotes, the ones that you see over and over, came from this interview, apparently — unless the guys keep using the same jokes, which is very possible. (I say that with love and giggly adoration, of course.) But what I thought were more interesting are the guys’ thoughts about the meaning and power of their songs, which are just as true now, probably even more so, and which they were obviously well aware of from the beginning. Mike says: “It’s not [that] the impact of our songs is going to be a person hearing it and going out to change the world. It’s an idea. A feeling that comes across in a song. If a person relates to it, then right on. Ok, cool. Maybe that person’s going to resolve their own thoughts.” At the time it was almost expected that they should offer some kind of apology for being a punk band that didn’t write political songs, but they never apologized for being true to themselves. Their music was and is meant to touch people on a personal level. It’s liberating and life-saving because it’s so gut-wrenchingly honest and true. It isn’t that it’s not out to save the world, it’s just doing it one person at a time.

Billie Joe’s explanation is more cryptic: “Our songs are just like… life. They’re not personal.” I think he means that the truth is universal, it doesn’t just apply to the person telling it, but he’s way too humble to come out with something that sounds so self-important. He does that even now: just hints at what he means. Why should an artist have to explain himself anyway? What he meant to say he said in the work.

And, sigh, I love the picture on the first page, blotchy as it is. Mike and Tre are being goofy, while Billie Joe is staring right into the camera, with just a hint of a sweet little smile, looking like he knows just what he’s thinking. That picture could have been taken during the AI tour: he has that same expression of self awareness and determination that’s also touchingly sweet and innocent.

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