Gimme Something Better (59 page)

Orlando X:
The sad thing is that Billie Joe liked to go out to shows, and it got harder for him to go out. There were times you would see him and he’d be trying to disguise himself. He used to be a normal person, have a good time, but then he started getting mobbed by people.

Zarah Manos:
Billie Joe always was rockin’ the wigs. A black curly wig. There was a blond one, too, like a mullet. He was just doing it to get attention, I think, like fuckin’ with us. It wasn’t malicious at all.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I wore a pair of glasses and a hat. No wig. I went to see Dead and Gone play with AFI. I wasn’t sneaking in. Green Day had just gotten really big and it got really uncomfortable. I just wanted to kick it with my friends and see the show.

 

 

James Washburn:
Billie actually told me once—and it kind of stopped me in my tracks—he said that a lot of the inspiration for the things he writes comes from stuff that I say. I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Billie Joe Armstrong:
James is our buddy and he comes out on tour with us sometimes, just to hang out. He’s one of those permanent fixtures in my life. He’s become the subject of folklore because he’s kind of this indestructible person. He got shot in the back of the head. The bullet shattered on his skull. He’s got a big scar. He got the name Brain Stew because he wrote for
Absolutely Zippo
.

James Washburn:
I have a lot of respect for Billie. He’s been very successful just as a person. He’s very bighearted, very generous. And I’ll love him to death forever. Being where he is, in the eyes of society, in the music world—they’re like a fuckin’ supergroup now. But to hear those things now, I guess it sets me back a little bit and I’m just like—I guess it completely embarrasses me.

Sweet Child: Billie Joe Armstrong at Gilman

He has given back a lot, and he respects the scene and respects the people that are here and in it. I think he feels proud that Gilman’s still alive. Billie does a lot of things in helping the scene. Whether it’s through donations, or whether it’s still making punk rock known.

Kate Knox:
The things that Green Day has done in the scene—in terms of keeping their money in the East Bay and still working with T-shirt companies and hiring friends and that kind of thing—I think is fantastic.

Bill Schneider:
They’re a rock band. They’re not politicians. They don’t want people to think they’re trying to save the world. But in their own way, of course, they want to contribute and make things better. I think it goes back to the Gilman scene in general. We were all young and impressionable when we got into punk rock. That scene helped shape who we became later in life.

Winston Smith:
People figure they’re just a band of loony punks doing their own thing. Which they certainly are. But they also have a deeper side to them. After some horrible earthquakes in Nicaragua, they were fortunately in a position to make a contribution that was significant to people.

Ben Sizemore:
I remember they played a benefit at Henry J. Kaiser for Food Not Bombs, and raised thousands of dollars.

Penelope Houston:
When I was on Warner Brothers, Howie Klein said, “You should write with some people who have had hits. What about Billie Joe Armstrong, from Green Day?”

So pretty soon I got the phone call. “It’s Billie Joe, I’m a big fan of the Avengers, blah blah blah. Come on over, we’ll write something together.” I was like, okay.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
She came over to my house and we talked. I was just blown away.

Penelope Houston:
Brought over some lyrics, he looked through them. Pulled one out. Said, “I could do this.” He did it as a demo. Then he said, “You can come over and we’ll record it with these guys I know, Joel Reader from the Mr. T Experience, and Danny Panic from Screeching Weasel.” I was like, cool.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
We put it together and got Kevin Army to engineer. She wanted to rerecord the Avengers’ “Corpus Christie,” which was awesome because it is one of the best songs ever written. The Avengers should have gotten more credit than they did.

Penelope Houston:
We had a couple rehearsals. He had a recording studio in his house. The living room wall, all the way up to the 20-foot ceiling, was just covered in Gilman flyers.

We gave the recording to Howie, and Howie’s like, “I wanna get this on a soundtrack.” They were gonna put it on the soundtrack for
Lois and Clark
. But it died. So then they put it on the soundtrack of
Friends
, which was even better. Every time that show gets rerun, it’s like my BMI check. It’s decent, I’m not living off it, but it’s nice. And then I put the version of “Corpus Christie” on one of my best-of records.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
It was a great experience and then she ended up putting her band together, which is really cool.

Oran Canfield:
I didn’t want to be seen at a Green Day concert. One day I got a call from my mom. She was like, “You gotta get over to Laney, I’m playing with Pharoah Sanders.” I drove over to the community college and went down to the music rooms, and my mom, Pharoah Sanders and Tré Cool were playing in this intermediate jazz combo trio together. It was like, what the fuck? Green Day was huge at this point. Tré was fucking great.

Larry Livermore:
We used to see Winston Smith at various cultural events up there. He lived about 50, 60 miles south. Tré met him when he was 12 or 13 and always got a kick out of him: “Man, that old hippie’s crazy.” That’s how he ended up doing the
Insomniac
record cover for Green Day many years later.

Winston Smith:
I got a call from Tré, “Hey, can we come over and check out your stuff?” He and Bill came over, and Rob Cavallo, who was their producer at the time. We looked through a bunch of pictures. I thought they were still gigging around at garage sales in the East Bay. I asked Tré how things are going. “Do you have a day job?” And he said, “Oh, our last record sold nine million records.” Shit, I nearly fell down.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
He stayed up all night doing the album cover. I think that’s why we ended up calling the record
Insomniac
.

Winston Smith:
Billie Joe noticed the title I had on it: “God Told Me to Skin You Alive.” They all recognized immediately that that was a line from the Dead Kennedys’ first record. I think they liked that it had gone full circle.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
On the cover, there was a guy sleeping in a hammock and a blonde woman holding a gun to his head and my guitar. When it came out, people were saying it was some kind of metaphor for Kurt and Courtney. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Winston Smith:
I wasn’t going to get any royalties or residuals, and I had been through that with Dead Kennedys and other bands. So I thought I’d just take the highest that anyone had been paid for artwork, and double it. I said, what about $25,000? They were cool with it.

Quite awhile afterwards, I was sitting having a pizza in Berkeley. This guy came up to me and gave me a big kiss. I was like, “Hey, man, back off.” Didn’t know who it was. It was Tré, they’d just gotten back from Japan. Somehow the subject got brought up about payment for the artwork. I made some remark like, “Oh, be glad that you guys were with this major label, that was able to foot the bill.” And he said, “No no, you don’t understand.
We
paid that.”

Bill Schneider:
The
Insomniac
tour was kind of a total disaster. They still wanted friends to work for ’em, but they needed to find people that actually knew how to tune a guitar and fix stuff. Billie came to me right when he came home and was like, “Hey. You need to work with us. Come out with us, be a guitar tech, be a bass tech. Just come on out and it’ll be fun.” That was in ’95.

At the time I was a partner in a music store called Black Market, which turned into Univibe. I was already the guy that was fixing all their stuff anyway. So we just went headfirst in and started doing all kinds of festivals, and then years of touring. I’ve worked for ’em for about 12 years. Started guitar teching and then doing all their day-to-day management. If you’re gonna have somebody that’s gonna drive you around the world and do press and make you show up at the lobby in time to get to the gigs, it may as well be me, I guess. I’m the one that wakes everybody up every day when we’re on tour. And makes sure they’re on the bus at the end of the night.

Jason Beebout:
Jason’s allowed to be in videos now, and he’s allowed to be seen onstage. He’s been playing with them for a long time.

Jason White:
The first show I did with them was Shoreline in front of 20,000, and that was huge. Billie and I, we had been friends for years at that point. I lived on his couch for a long time. It was ’99, one of the Neil Young Bridge show benefits. He said, “We’re doing this acoustic thing. We kinda want to get another guitar player so it’ll beef up the sound. You think you can handle it? Are you gonna get nervous and freak out?” And I said, “Yeah, I can do it.” I was ecstatic.

It was definitely shocking. There’s a huge crowd, the P.A.’s a lot bigger, the stage is a lot bigger, but you look beside you and it’s the same guys you’ve been sitting in the living room practicing the show with for a month. That’s what made it comfortable.

Adeline Records was a label started by Billie Joe and his wife Adrienne, and Jim Thiebaud, who had been a pro skater, and his wife Lynn. Doug Sangalang was around when they first started it. They just wanted to start a local label. It’s named after Adeline, the street that runs through the East Bay.

I worked for ’em right after they started it in ’98. Jim had a warehouse on Adeline where he had a ramp, and it became the de facto location of the label. It grew and grew. Lookout! helped us out quite a bit. AFI, the Criminals, a lot of Minneapolis bands like the Crush, and the Soviettes. We put together a package tour, the Adeline Showcase. We did shows in L.A. and San Diego, and at Gilman. It was a cool label. In its East Bay incarnation, it was 1998 through 2004.

Jesse Luscious:
Green Day played Gilman during a set at some Adeline showcase. I wasn’t there. I would have been like, “Oh, they shouldn’t be on that stage.” But people who were working were like, “We grew up on Green Day, we’re not gonna fucking stop that.” They just jumped up on the end of that set ’cause they were all there.

Jason White:
The feeling in the air was very strange. It was like four days after September 11th. We had this thing booked, and we’re like, “Well, I guess we’re gonna go ahead and do it.” Everybody was just feeling a little crazy and weird, and why not? Green Day got up and played and blew off some steam. That was the only time they’d played Gilman since
Dookie
.

Jesse Luscious:
I think the people who were there were just so happy. A lot of them had never seen Green Day in such a small place.

 

 

Fat Mike:
Green Day got big ’cause they were better than everybody else. And all the bands that weren’t very good faded away. I always thought Bad Religion should get bigger. But it shows you how much charisma plays into it. Green Day had a lot more charisma than Bad Religion. And Greg Graffin is not Billie Joe.

Ben Sizemore:
It’s just weird that people you used to hang out with, and that your band would play with, are now millionaires. Green Day are like literally one of the biggest bands in the world. Personally I could never really generate that much animosity towards them. They’re all perfectly nice guys. They’re millionaires, and I’m a social worker, working with crazy people in the city, and really don’t make any money at all. Who’s to say I did the right thing and they didn’t? More power to them.

Noah Landis:
I always felt proud. Here’s some guys I know who’ve always been nothing but nice to me, actually finding some success in this world. Before that happened, nobody who played in a punk rock band ever even thought about success. It wasn’t even on the menu. We were making anti-music, we were making music that was not going to ever be that.

And to see the world finally catch up, desperate for music that makes you feel something, music with emotion, honesty, truth and aggression. These feelings that are undeniably in every young person born on the planet, especially people who have had to—god forbid—live through hard shit. The world finally caught up to that and wanted some. They wanted their Green Day songs about teenage alienation and masturbation.

Scott Kelly:
Billie Joe’s just as real as we are. The stuff he writes is the same shit that he wrote when he was 14 years old, sitting in a fuckin’ party in Oakland. He’s true blue. He’s one of those artists who is able to tap into a larger sort of general feeling.

Noah Landis:
Music is for anybody who feels it and wants it. The angst and the darkness in Kurt Cobain’s songs—they reached people. And you think about the youthful energy and freedom you feel listening to Green Day—that’s for anybody who feels it. It’s not just for those who were there in 1977, or like me in 1982. It’s bigger than that, and that’s the beautiful thing about music.