Gimme Something Better (58 page)

Noah Landis:
They were being courted by IRS. But they weren’t born from the same world as bands like Christ on Parade or Crucifix or Conflict. That was our thing, but that wasn’t their thing. They were coming down from Rodeo and discovering Gilman and writing some catchy rockin’ tunes.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
We talked about it for about a year. Larry had people calling him every once in awhile, and I think he kind of shooed them off. After
Kerplunk
we started to become our own thing. We still played Gilman and we still considered ourselves a Gilman band. But we would draw lines out the door at Berkeley Square. So we started to wonder, where do we go after this?

Bill Schneider:
They had grown to the size where they were kind of too big for the scene. They were too big for Lookout! They could play any club across the country. Green Day would go on tour opening for Bad Religion, and then half the crowd would leave after Green Day played.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
This guy Dave was a paralegal, who worked for Cahn and Saltzman, this management and legal firm. He asked if we had thought about being on a major label. We were petrified. We loved Larry. He was like a father figure to us, and he gave us a lot of great guidance. But we ended up meeting with these lawyers and making a demo tape. We did it without saying anything to anybody. But because this scene is so incestuous, it started to leak out.

Larry Livermore:
I found out about it by rumor, and confronted Tré about it, and he said, “We’re talking to a management agency.” I said, “Get the band in here, we gotta talk about this.” During the course of the conversation it became obvious that they were already determined to go on.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Larry called us over to his house. He said, “Wow, so you guys really want to do this thing?” And when we said yes, he said, “We can offer you something.” I looked at Lookout! as the ultimate independent label. For that era, it was perfect. But I didn’t want to be with an independent that was subsidized by a major. And I didn’t want to be somewhere in between. I just wanted to go for it.

Larry Livermore:
We’d sold about 55,000 of those records by then. That was pretty big for an indie label in those days. I thought there was a pretty good chance they’d go on to a major label. But I felt really strongly they should do one more indie record. They needed to be in a better position for contract terms. ’Cause I’d seen bands already get dropped if they didn’t do well right away. Sweet Baby was one of the examples I was using.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
He said, “You gotta know what these people are like. Some of them aren’t going to care about you. And there’s going to be a huge backlash around here.”

Larry Livermore:
I thought they were making a mistake. I said, “The chances of you guys doing well right away are fairly marginal.” They said, “No, we want to try it.”

Billie Joe Armstrong:
There was just this heavy feeling of sadness. But I didn’t want to have that huge what-if hanging over me all my life. We walked outside Larry’s house, we were standing on the front steps, and I remember looking at him, saying, “That was a bleak conversation. Maybe we are making a mistake.” And he said, “I think you could be the biggest band in the whole fucking world.”

Larry Livermore:
We were still running Lookout! out of my room, 12 × 12 with no kitchen, when Green Day’s management firm came to meet with us. Elliot Cahn. Cahn Management. He was the one who was in Sha Na Na. All seven or eight of us had to crowd into this little room. There was only three chairs. My bedding was rolled up in a corner.

I didn’t completely trust their management, but they seemed to know what they were doing. As time went on, it seemed like they were getting the hype going, and things were working out. So I thought, “Ah, it’ll probably be alright.”

John Geek:
They were packing Gilman. They were packing Berkeley Square. They were already one of the largest indie bands in America. Everybody knew they were gonna get huge. They knew they were gonna get huge. They never had any qualms about it. They never said they were gonna do anything else. It’s not like they were pretending to be anything they weren’t.

Bill Schneider:
They were still the same people. They were living with ten people in a punk rock house. Mike was the only one that could hold down a job. He worked as a cook. Billie and Tré just lived off the T-shirt money.

Adrienne Droogas:
I was in a different punk scene. These punk scenes coincide, all at the same time, but are very separate from each other. I remember hanging out with Billie Joe, I was dating his roommate Greg. This was before
Dookie
came out. I said, “Billie, I’ve never heard Green Day. I don’t know what you guys sound like.” He was like, “Really? Can I play you something?”

He grabbed a record and put it on, and he was so excited. He was like, “Wow, someone who’s never heard Green Day!” It must have been like
39/Smooth
or one of those earlier ones.

I was like, “This is great, Billie. I just—it’s really poppy, it’s not my musical style.” He was sweet about it. He played us the very first Green Day video. He said, “It’s not out yet. Do you wanna see it?”

It was filmed in that apartment. At the very end of the video he’s stabbing a couch, and feathers are flying. We were sitting on that couch. I said, “So, Billie, was it a fake knife? Like those ones that retract or something?” He lifted up the cushion and underneath were all the stab marks. He had just taken the cushions and flipped ’em.

Ben Saari:
Word got out. The last show before they signed the contract was in Petaluma at the Phoenix Theater. There were tons of people. Everybody knew the next day they were signing the deal with the devil and everything would suck. They would be sellouts, nobody could be friends with them, they would be on tour forever, they would blow up. Things would get really good for them. And people were aware that this was also gonna bring in a whole new level of attention to what we had been doing.

Jason Beebout:
After they moved out of that house, Mike and I moved in together. And then Bill and I lived together after that. It was a weird time. Me and Billie lived together for like a year, and I probably saw him four times.

Bucky Sinister:
I was at BFD [Live 105’s concert] the year they were playing, and they played first. It was an awkward thing. The single had come out a week or two before, and it was shooting up the charts. The next band started, and everyone went out to the concession vendors. It was easy to tell even by the first single they were gonna be a hit.

Jerme Spew:
They sold ten million records their first major-label release—their first shot at a major label. Nobody knew. They didn’t even know. When they hit a million records, I remember hearing how Billie Joe was like, “A million? Who in the hell is buying this shit?”

Martin Sprouse:
Green Day sent Tim Yohannan a gold record of their first record. That was fucking funny. They put either Tim’s name or
Maximum RocknRoll
’s name on the little plaque. That was pretty great. That was those guys being smart-asses.

Howie Klein:
It went gigantically fast. Billie is an amazing songwriter. Yes, they play well, they’re a tight unit. He’s a great performer, they have great stage shtick. But it’s all about the songs.

Anna Brown:
It’s weird when you hear your local band on the radio. It’s even weirder when they get famous enough to play the Super Bowl halftime show.

Jesse Luscious:
The first show I saw them on was Conan O’Brien. I was in southern California with these Germans, we were at somebody’s house. I was like, “Holy shit, it’s Green Day. That’s insane.”

Janelle Hessig:
I was watching
Saturday Night Live
at my parents’ house, and at the end Rip Taylor was throwing confetti, and there’s Roseanne Barr, and then Billie Joe was in the middle of them. That was the first time it really struck me how surreal things were.

Jason White:
I remember taping every bit of it off MTV. I don’t know how long this is gonna last and this is gonna be so funny, I’ll look back years later, “Look, Green Day was on TV. Can you believe that?”

Jesse Luscious:
After Green Day signed, they were really good about keeping Gilman out of
Rolling Stone
. They were very protective. But kids dug and reporters dug and they found out what Gilman was. And so we literally had tour buses driving by saying, “That’s where Green Day started.” Fucking insane.

Martin Sprouse:
They still give Gilman credit for everything. They’ve always been pretty honest about their roots.

Frank Portman:
When Green Day made it big, my reaction was, okay, our side won. Because out of all the things that everybody was trying to do, pop songs won over the hardcore. Pop songs about things that you really think about, or care about, that have verses and choruses, and justify their existence by being real songs. On the other side, the Offspring became big, so their side won, too.

Aaron Cometbus:
After
Dookie
came out, Billie came over and said, “Hey, have you got any records by the Buzzcocks, or 999?” I put them on and we sat around nodding our heads. He said, “Wow, these are great. What a compliment.” All the reviews were saying he ripped them off. He’d never even heard those bands before. He got turned on to a lot of great bands that way. It’s one way to discover new music, I guess, but kind of harsh. Anyway, the press couldn’t have been further off the mark. His influences were mostly the records of his depressed-poet older sister: Replacements and Hüsker Dü, with the Who and a bit of East Bay stuff.

Jeffrey Bischoff:
We had probably played 50 shows together. Anytime it was possible, Green Day, Rancid, Tilt played together. Jawbreaker also, and Samiam. When the
Dookie
record came out, they asked Tilt to come out. It was eight or nine weeks in the States. It started at Slim’s in San Francisco. You could see the buzz progressing as we traveled. It was like watching the world decide they were cool. Venues got pushed up from 600 to 1,500, so we were playing 1,000-seaters and maybe some 1,500s on that tour. We came back and the next U.S. tour started going to even bigger venues.

Bill Schneider:
The ’94 Woodstock on TV, they kinda stole the show with the big mud-fightin’ thing. Every article and every news thing about Woodstock was all about Green Day. It was kinda like, “Oh, okay. This is gonna be something different than just selling some records.”

Jeffrey Bischoff:
Tilt went to Europe in the fall. We were watching the stuff about Green Day on TV and getting the occasional phone call. At the end of ’94 I got a call from Billie Joe and he said, “We’re having our end-of-tour party.” It happened to be the same day we got back from our European tour. And it happened to be at the Oakland Coliseum. We went directly to the Coliseum from the airport, and I saw Green Day just as they were at Gilman. It was just these three kids, up there working the crowd, just doing their thing. For 15,000 people.

Hank Rank:
The first time I heard a Green Day record: I was at Sun-dance, and their record label was giving
Dookie
away in a pile of other junk. I brought it home and put it on, and I just laughed. I thought, “This is preposterous. I can’t believe there’s a band doing this today.”

Howie Klein:
I was working at Warner Brothers at the time. The CDs were going around the building, and I had heard snatches. But it wasn’t until the record was finished that I got to hear it, and it floored me. This was
Dookie
. I went back and listened to the earlier records, and I thought, “Oh my god, this band is amazing.”

Eventually I became the president of Reprise. The first thing I did when I became president was go to England. Because the Europeans didn’t understand Green Day. It was already double platinum in this country, and not selling anything in Europe. I went to the head of our U.K. company, who was very respected all through Europe, and I said, “Rob, we’ve known each other for a really long time.” He had bankrolled my publishing company, when I was at 415. I said, “Rob, you gotta believe me. This is gonna be the biggest band in the history of Warner Brothers. Don’t blow this thing. We need you.”

He said, “Fuck you. This band is corporate rock.”

We fought about this. I was the president of Reprise, but I couldn’t force him to do anything. So I went to the head of our German company and said, “Look, this is the biggest band that we have. This is a fucking great band, and the English aren’t helping us with it. You do it. Don’t wait for them.”

Within months, they had green carpets in front of every major record store in Germany. It went platinum. And they forced the English into taking it seriously. It was the biggest no-no you could ever do. It was so not allowed inside of the Warner system, and I did it anyway.

I used to live in England, I knew they were gonna love Green Day. I went to one of the big festivals, in the middle of fucking nowhere, and Green Day was playing, and they were the biggest band in England that day. And I was so happy, thinking, alright, it worked.

Zarah Manos:
I remember kicking Billie Joe out of Gilman. Like, “I know who you are, you need to leave.”

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I personally got 86’d after the fact.

Zarah Manos: I had to fuckin’ work at the Gilman worker party, which I’m still bitter about, my own fuckin’ party for us. And they were all drinking in the bathroom.

Jesse Luscious:
Aaron Elliott, Billie Joe, Janelle, Robin, people from a bunch of different bands who all knew better. They were having a party in there, kinda drunk, throwing cans of beer.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I think about three years later, Aaron said, “I went to a meeting and you’re not 86’d anymore.”