Nobody Likes You Read online

  MARC SPITZ

  NOBODY LIKES YOU

  INSIDE THE TURBULENT LIFE, TIME, AND MUSIC OF GREEN DAY

  For suburban punks everywhere

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: MEET THE NEW PUNKS . . .

  Chapter One: TWIN JESUSES OF SUBURBIA

  Chapter Two: THE GILMAN STREET PROJECT

  Chapter Three: LOOKOUT!

  Chapter Four: OP IVY

  Chapter Five: HUGE IN PETALUMA

  Chapter Six: ANARCHY 90210

  Chapter Seven: INSOMNIACS

  Chapter Eight: “SHIT HAPPENS”

  Chapter Nine: UNCLE BILLIE

  Chapter Ten: CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS

  Chapter Eleven: AMERICAN IDIOT

  Discography

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Introduction

  MEET THE NEW PUNKS . . .

  Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey; very few rock ’n’ roll bands are able to fill it. The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, U2, Dave Matthews Band, and local heroes Bon Jovi and, of course, Bruce Springsteen have all pulled it off at one point in their careers. Sometimes the football team that plays home games here can’t bring in the 78,000 fans it takes to sell out this massive, cavernous building. Inside the big bowl, it seemed like a guitar chord had to travel several hundred yards across the field before the back row could tell it had been strummed. Giants Stadium was not a place for the self-conscious.

  It was shortly before 9:00 p.m. on September 1, 2005, and emo-core group Jimmy Eat World had just walked off a stage the size of three small punk club spaces placed end to end. It was almost time for “Bunny” to do whatever it was “Bunny” did each night.

  Dressed in a black long-sleeve shirt and red tie just as every other crew member, Bill Schneider, the coordinator of this massive production and a burly man with a vaguely Elvis-like hairdo, stalked through the concrete-wall dressing rooms to make sure every member of his team was aware of the time. Some of them nibbled at the cheese, crackers, and fruit that had been placed on the tables. Others gazed at the television screen. The Best in Show DVD flickered away as it had the previous night. This was a backstage area full of small rituals. Comfort and intensity coexisted surprisingly well.

  “Thirty minutes!”

  The bass player, Mike, usually coiled and hyper, was ill with the flu and seemed grayish and drawn. He lifted himself off the couch and padded down in his sneakers to the exercise room to suffer through a few miles on the stationary bicycle.

  The lead singer, Billie Joe, compact, with a thick head of dyed black hair, fiddled with the arm bands on each of his sleeves. One read RAGE. The other read LOVE. He put on his shoes and walked over to the mirror to apply his kohl black eyeliner in lines thick enough to be picked up on the Diamond Vision screen. Close up, he looked fey. Later, from the back rows, while invoking the spirit of a street tough named St. Jimmy, he’ll seem possessed.

  “Fifteen minutes!”

  The drummer, Tre, strong-chinned and jerky, bounded into the practice space and began emulating three-decade-old Keith Moon drum fills he’d clearly memorized.

  “Ten minutes.”

  The singer, drummer, bass player, second guitarist, and horn and keyboard players gathered by the dressing room door and ran through harmonies for two of the most vocally complicated numbers in that night’s set. The singer played guitar as they warmed up.

  “Bunny!”

  The door to the stage opened. A scream, like a Boeing jet engine, was heard as the beloved cheese-disco hit “YMCA” by the Village People pumped out of the stadium’s massive speakers. Then, an intoxicated pink bunny rabbit staggered across the giant stage and clutched its plush and aching head in mock hangover agony while attempting to lead the masses in the song’s spelling dance. (Bunny is actually a crew member, and sometimes Bunny really is hungover.)

  At 9:25 p.m., “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones was pumped out over the field. It was always the last song to play on the mix CD that traveled with the band from city to city. (Small rituals.) When the Ramones’s track faded, the lights went out and another solid, wall-like wave of painful white noise rolled around inside the hollow venue. “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” composer Richard Strauss’s piece of crescendo-building classical gas, played on the crowd’s communal suspense. In the twentieth century, the composition had become a sort of sound track for pomposity (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), disco smarm (it was a big hit for Brazilian instrumentalist Deodato), and the bloat of Fat Elvis’s white jumpsuit years. In the twenty-first, it functioned as an ironic but affectionate nod to such things. The band about to take the stage knew this well. In some ways, the members were as shocked as anyone that they had made it into that elite group with Mick, Keith, Bono, and . . . Dave. After all, they were supposed to be outsiders by nature and by the code of ethics they’d adhered to and had also been haunted by since their teens: punk rock. In other ways, this was where the secretly ambitous and competitive trio, with their unabashed love for pop music, meant to go. These had always been the two opposing sides of Green Day. In the early nineties, their ambitious and pop-loving side inspired them to leave their cozy but limited independent label; sign with a major one; record an album’s worth of radio-ready, three-minute-long, irresistable, and oddly family-friendly music; and show the world what most of their peers in the indie scene already knew: Punk was some catchy stuff. Although they received a beating then at the hands of fundamentalists, Green Day never compromised their sound; they merely favored one side of it. Whenever they tired of being labeled as sellouts, balladeers, or cartoon pinups, they’d favor the other side (as they did with their second major label release, a menacing and frequently ugly bit of punker-than-you music that could stand combat boot to combat boot with any struggling, young, van-touring outfit’s best). This duality was mirrored in the band’s domestic life as well. Sometimes they were larger-than-life public figures: performers, businessmen, and spokesmen. Other times they were boyfriends, husbands, and dads, faced with home improvements and diaper-changing duties (which is about as real as you get).

  The practicality they embraced in these moments was anti-star to the core. Interviews with major rock magazines were frequently scheduled in hotel suites simply so their children would get a chance to swim in the pool for a few hours. The members would show up for photo shoots wearing their own T-shirts, Dickies trousers, and sneakers, and any visual artiste or eager stylist who attempted to point them toward a rolling rack of costumes was met with a firm “No,” a working-class sneer, and sometimes a finger to the chest.

  Throughout the late nineties such constant personality swapping hobbled the band professionally and creatively. It destroyed a few families as well: Mike is divorced, and Tre is twice divorced. By the end of the decade, Green Day seemed less agile, like veteran athletes who trained only when necessary. In photos, they appeared apathetic, puffy, and weary.

  A little more than two years ago, it would not have been shocking to see Green Day at the midpoint of a summer festival bill, slotted under bands almost half their ages—and playing the old hits because they had nothing new that could match them. They could have toured the House of Blues and shed circuit for the rest of their careers, making enough of a living to pay their bills. It wouldn’t have been a glorious end for Green Day, who were once so genuinely exciting. As far as the rock ’n’ roll cycle goes, it wouldn’t have been an uncommon end either. Plenty of bands who’ve impacted the culture in one way or another now feel as if they’ve got nothing left to prove and are happy to collect their pop pensions well into middle age.

  Where they arrived in 2004, however, was truly shocking. Their commercial and artistic resurgence was almost unprecedented in the pop world (Elv
is Presley’s ’68 comeback television special, Bob Dylan’s Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind stand among the exceedingly few return-to-form projects that, in many ways, actually improve on the old form). Personally this was a revolution too. Bands almost never rekindle an atmosphere of fun-seeking, brotherly affection after a decade plus of success (not without breaking up for a few years anyway, something Green Day never did). If anything, they grow even more fragmented. Somewhere in their third decade, Green Day had finally figured out what it meant to be Green Day. They’d become the biggest band in the world, outselling U2, Coldplay, and any other contender by finally allowing those two distinct halves, the compact-carrying Freddie Mercury–worshipper and the quasi-socialist punk pragmatist, to coexist without guilt or boundaries.

  The resulting American Idiot, their eighth album, is revolutionary. It is a consistently brilliant and cohesive full-length album in an age of ninety-nine-cent digital singles. It presents an authentic political statement, but it also commands mass appeal despite the listener’s voting proclivities because of the sheer inescapability of the song craft. American Idiot was a barrier-smashing masterpiece that not only raised the bar for punk rock, it gave the entire subculture (which had become a bit sluggish beneath the weight of its own inflexible musical template, eroding political commitment, and general mall-ification) a new vitality. The irony that Green Day, after all these years, was the band that accomplished this feat is not small.

  Green Day has been subjected to cred-audits from the punker-than-thous ever since Billie Joe and Mike formed their first band, Sweet Children, in the late eighties. Even as they got set to blow away the Giants Stadium crowd at their biggest live show yet, there were fans who still would rather have seen them back on the streets—the Bowery, at Joey Ramone Place, specifically. That very week, CBGB, punk rock’s Bethlehem, the un-cleanable bar where the Ramones, Blondie, Television Richard Hell, Talking Heads, and The Dead Boys got their starts, had finally lost its lease after a long battle with its landlord. A cultural landmark, but sadly, not an official one, CBGB in its original historic location had been condemned to die just a day before the Giants Stadium concert. (It finally closed in September 2006, but there are rumors that it will relocate, as all vital rock touchstones eventually do, to Las Vegas.) The following weeks saw circulating online and paper petitions. Editorials were written, and benefit concerts were staged. Public Enemy played, as did Institute, a negligible band fronted by former Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale. Green Day did not play.

  “Green Day was right across the river?” Kitty Kowalski, of the East Village punk band The Kowalskis, mused. She had attended the rallies the day before and was shaken by them. “Without CBGB, Green Day would not be selling out Giants Stadium, which holds one hundred CBGBs,” Kowalski said.

  Those who keep such sentiments often fail to acknowledge that punk rock really can survive only by staying relevant to young people. Nobody wants a quaint punk. The old guard were already on board. To appeal to a new generation, punk needs to change, mutate, remain exciting. And this, whether you like them or hate them, is exactly what Green Day have done. American Idiot was not only Green Day’s second act, but also, in many ways, punk’s. A great man named Sting once said, and I’m paraphrasing: “If you love punk, set it free.” Green Day proved themselves true punks by finally letting go of it. They proved themselves rock stars by finally . . . letting it be (rockin’).

  Eight years ago, a reporter from the Calagary Sun asked Billie Joe Armstrong (lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter of the Bay Area trio) what punk rock was. Armstrong compared the act of describing punk rock with the act of “describing a smell.” It is intangible, vague, haunting, and even maddening. When someone asked him the same question in 2004, he did not hesitate: “I don’t question it anymore. It’s me. It embodies me.”

  True enough, the guy had the word punx permanently carved into the flesh above his waist with a tattoo needle, but it wasn’t until 2004 that he could finally and truly commit to it. “I’ve passed by Billie Joe a couple of times in our rock lives and can feel it in him,” recalled Lenny Kaye, guitarist for another legendary CBGB-affiliated act called the Patti Smith Group. “He believes in the ideals that perhaps were passed along to him from a place like CBGB. They are continuing a tradition that perhaps has its roots there. That they’re playing Giants Stadium is not important. That’s just quantity. It makes a good end to the movie: When they’re putting the padlock on the door of the club and then the camera pans up and you see Giants Stadium rocking. What’s important is the fact that Green Day plays.”

  If the future of punk was ever in doubt, what with CBGB closing and bands such as Sum 41 existing, then all you had to do to be reassured was look at the wide grins on the faces of all those kids inside the stadium that night. Some of them were only eight or nine years old, brought to the concert by their parents. (Although he turned thirty-four in February of this year, Armstrong still graces the covers of the same teen magazines that he did at twenty-two. He is alone there, as far as his true peers go, representing for Generation X among the Chad Michael Murrays and Lindsay Lohans.) Many of these younguns had spiked hair and brand-new Green Day T-shirts from the merchandise stand. This new punk would mean everything to them, as the old punk meant everything to Mom and Dad.

  One day, those T-shirts might be old and faded. And maybe Green Day will be living down the ghost of American Idiot. Maybe they already are, only two years after Giants Stadium. But it doesn’t matter. Because somewhere in the world, a band will be playing with the formula, taking what was invented with American Idiot, expanding it, and remaking punk rock’s future yet again. It would be foolish, at this point, to rule out that the band may be Green Day themselves.

  Chapter One

  TWIN JESUSES OF SUBURBIA

  On October 13, 2005, Green Day performed one of their last U.S. dates on the thirteen-month-long, 130-date American Idiot tour. The “secret” show at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater (a poorly kept secret, as most secrets are in the information age) was designed to be a triumphant finale and a thank-you to loyal local fans who could see a full Green Day concert at venues a fraction the size of the sports arenas they’d been playing all year. Makeup dates in the Midwest (and a short trip to Australia) prevented the band from fully unpacking, but the sold-out show succeeded as a genuine homecoming because the appropriate emotions were stirred.

  Billie Joe Armstrong was reflective that night. Just a day earlier while onstage at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles he was pissed off as he and the band ran through American Idiot in its entirety for youngish Hollywood types such as Garden State’s Zack Braff and Lost’s Matthew Fox. Maybe his wistfulness was because the Warfield show, unlike the El Rey, was not being broadcast across the universe via America Online. More likely, however, it was because Armstrong may have realized that after selling millions of records and winning dozens of major music awards he’d finally really made it into the city.

  “I grew up in a town called Rodeo,” Armstrong said at the Warfield as a means to introduce the evening’s second song. (The first song had been, as it had all year, “American Idiot.”) “It’s right off the 80 at Willow,” he continued, identifying the actual exit. “And it was the inspiration for this next song. This is ’Jesus of Suburbia.’”

  “Jesus of Suburbia,” the second track on American Idiot and the first of the two suites that classify the album as the first punk rock opera, is Armstrong’s most personal song and, to his mind, the high point of his career as a songwriter. “I think it’s the one I’m proudest of,” Armstrong told me in a 2005 interview in Spin. “I never get tired of playing it live. It always makes me emotional.”

  “Jesus of Suburbia” roils with that weird mix of boredom and anger that’s almost an epidemic among suburban kids. These nameless, faceless millions are the sons (and daughters) of rage and love, as the song’s opening line declares. They’re special, each of them, in their own way, but it seems like nobody knows o
r cares. So they dream of running away to the city, where these qualities will finally be recognized and appreciated.

  “It’s that lost feeling,” Armstrong explains. “Hanging out at the 7-Eleven. Disenfranchised. Alienated. You just get that feeling of ’I’ve got to get out of here. There’s more to life than this town.’ “

  Rodeo has not changed much since the mid-eighties, when a fourteen-year-old Billie Joe Armstrong walked its streets at night, getting stoned and fantasizing about escape. If you really want to get an idea of what it must have been like to be so close to the city and yet, culturally, light years away, spend a few hours, maybe a half a day, in San Francisco before taking the thirteen-mile trip west on Interstate 80 (off at Willow).

  San Francisco is a European-style city where serene beauty and seedy danger are often separated only by a few paces in either one direction or another. As a result, it’s an urban environment that compels you to be alert and engaged. The only source of true peril in Rodeo may be breathing. “I went to elementary school [by the refineries],” Armstrong recalled in a 1995 interview in the punk ’zine hUH. “They used to send kids home all the time for headaches.”

  “You’d get a phone call and you’d have to lock all your doors and windows because something was coming out of the refineries that’s not good for you [to breathe],” says Armstrong’s older sister Anna Armstrong Humann (she still lives there, as do Billie Joe’s mother and several close friends). “We’re on the water and there’s a lot of old architecture, but there’s just no money that comes into [Rodeo]. It’s unincorporated, so there’s no government or any kind of organized group that tries to keep things going. We’ve been called the armpit of Contra Costa County.”

  Rodeo is seven and a half square miles and has a population of about 9,000 (compared with San Francisco’s nearly 800,000 or even Oakland’s 200,000). New Rodeo with its post-war tract houses is the posh section of town. Here, the average family income is about sixty thousand dollars a year. The strip that runs through it is a landscape study of mini-malls and the kinds of modernized gas stations/convenience stores you’d find in any suburb.