Green Day, Kerrang! May 9, 2009
IT’S FIVE years since Green Day last found themselves with a new album to talk about and now they’re back, to paraphrase AC/DC, it would seem they’re back in black. In black shirts, jeans, t-shirts and leather jackets they arrive here at San Francisco’s Mandarin Oriental hotel having driven from their homes across the Bay Bridge.
Drummer Tré Cool, hair slicked back into a low-slung quiff, stopped briefly at the toll booth that ushers cars into the city and paid his fare. Then he did what he often does, he pulled out another four dollars and paid the fare of the car behind him, the one he’d just cut up in order to make its occupants’ day that little bit brighter.
Upstairs in the Mandarin Oriental, Green Day have three suites on hold within which they will hunker down to conduct the various interviews they have scheduled today – Radio 1, Australian radio and Kerrang!. Downstairs, though, Billie Joe Armstrong surveys the ballroom that’s been converted into a makeshift photo studio for their arrival. “It’s weird,” he says. “I know hotels all over the world but San Francisco is the one place where I’m lost in them. I guess because I don’t really need them here.”
His hair is recently dyed jet black and he brushes it forward over his forehead, almost Beatles style. The reason is that, after another recent photo shoot, he saw his picture – all shaggy peroxide blonde mane with dark roots underneath – and decided he looked a mess.
He’s here, alongside Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt, to continue to talk up their new album, the magnificent 21st Century Breakdown. Previous interviews have been taking place at their HQ, back across the Bay Bridge, but it’s been getting stale there so a change of scene is needed. That and, secretly, Cool fancies a night in a nice hotel and, since the record company are paying for today, he can have this one gratis. He confirms this with a cheeky smile before Dirnt decides he may as well do the same.
It’s the sort of break the pair might just need before the album is released. All three, but Armstrong in particular, say their heads are still very much immersed in the record.
“We’re still right in it,” admits the singer. “We’re still having to separate ourselves from it a little bit.”
“We’ve incubated it and given birth to it but we haven’t cut the umbilical chord,” adds Cool. “It’s like having a Tasmanian Devil in a crate – it’s still in the crate but we don’t know what will happen when we let it go.”
It’s a separation that will have to come soon, though it’s one Green Day have been delaying. They were still in the studio right up to the wire. A day of interviews with the European press the other week was cancelled at the last minute so final tweaks could be made. Never mind the 13 hour flights the writers and photographers had taken to get there.
Next, after the album had been handed to the record company, it was taken back by the band so that a new song Armstrong had written could be added at the eleventh hour.
“We had the whole record almost done,” he says, bashfully. “Then I wrote a song called Murder City and I thought, ‘This is just too perfect, it works so well’. It was that one ingredient that added to everything.”
“It was a matter of not letting go,” continues Dirnt. “We’d say ‘Okay we’re ready… Ah, actually not yet. Let’s give it another listen tomorrow… ah, not yet’.”
“Yeah, I was like, ‘I haven’t had enough sleepless nights, let’s go back in’,” laughs Armstrong.
They were songs that had to be perfect, not only to sate the band’s ambitions but also because they knew their efforts would be held up against their 12 million-selling 2004 album American Idiot.
That was a record that yanked Green Day from what some considered a creative backwater and pushed them, once again, into the spotlight. It would take some following.
“I was perfectly honest about it,” says Armstrong. “There was pressure. There still is.”
The results are a sprawling opus of 18 songs, divided into three acts entitled Heroes and Cons, Charlatans and Saints and Horseshoes and Handgrenades. In each two characters weave their way through the meandering narrative of the album. The first is Gloria, an idealist, a picture of strength, beauty and morals. “She holds a torch,” says Armstrong. “She does things with fire in her blood”.
The second is Christian, “And the fire in his blood makes him want to take that torch and burn down the whole city,” adds the singer. One, you suspect, is who Armstrong would like to be. The latter is who, deep down, he really is.
And on Gloria and Christian’s journeys they update the view of “mindfuck America” Green Day first detailed on American Idiot. In songs that take in The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, The Kinks, Pink Floyd and The Who, they see panic, chaos and revolution. In the direct and deceptively simple-sounding chords in which Green Day cut to the heart, they describe technological overload, information excess, self-destruction and religious mania. There’s fire in the streets, there’s hypocrisy and there’s cultural emptiness. There is, contained within the grooves of this record, all of America and, hence, the rest of the world: naked in all of its ugliness.
WHEN GREEN Day finished touring American Idiot in 2006, they found themselves in a difficult frame of mind. Exhausted, they needed to take a break. However, none of them actually much wanted to.
“I wasn’t ready to get off tour by any means,” says Dirnt, perhaps the most level-headed of the three. “There’s an inertia when you come off tour, because you stop and everything else keeps coming in. For three guys who probably have attention deficit disorder, it’s pretty hard to keep still. I felt like I was unemployed. I was thinking, ‘I had the best job in the world a minute ago, now I’m just sat here’.”
There had been problems in the band before American Idiot was released – issues that were “a little overblown” by the media, according to Armstrong. The story went that before even American Idiot, back in 2001 ahead of the release of Best Of compilation International Superhits, the singer had become distant from Dirnt and Cool, afraid to bring his songs to them, unable to communicate with the pair. All three were drinking too much, they’ve admitted, and Armstrong had entered one of his rumoured and periodic self-destructive phases. Episodes that he almost always declines to talk about.
“But Superhits solidified a lot for us,” he says. “We’d been around for 15 years at that point and we thought, ‘Wow, look at what we’ve done’. That kind of recharged us.”
The success of American Idiot further cemented relationships. It helped, too, that almost everything they’d pointed to politically on the album began to ring true.
“I was a little surprised when we wrote American Idiot that more people weren’t saying the same thing,” says Armstrong. “That was the thing about [that album], it seemed the government were fulfilling the prophecy we’d written. Things got lamer and lamer to the point where it seemed the record was making more sense every day.”
“George Bush might as well have been selling copies of American Idiot out of the back of the presidential limo,” quips Cool, always ready with a smart line.
But with mounting success came mounting pressure, especially when it came time to start writing a follow-up.
“As things got more and more successful, pressure was always something that was lurking in the back of my mind a little,” says Armstrong. “You ask yourself when the appropriate time is to acknowledge it. But for me, anytime there’s a challenge, I’m like a mosquito going towards the light – I have to grab onto it. That’s the way I’m made. You have to hit it head on and have the balls to do it. But that does take a lot of patience. You have to drive yourself a little bit crazy.”
And crazy is precisely the destination to which Armstrong has driven himself in the past. In 2002, he went on a binge in New York to find inspiration. He found, mostly, the bottom of a vodka glass. It wasn’t the first of such incidents. However it’s not something he likes to talk about – though he acknowledges anxiety can make him do peculiar things.
“I don’t go straitjacket, lock-me-up-in-a-rubber-room crazy. It is close, though,” he says. “I think if you’re going a bit mad, then you’re onto something. As long as it doesn’t get the better of you, if you’re willing to look into it eye-to-eye, things work. The issue is that you’re dealing with the dark places you go to when you write songs; you’re dealing with where those dark things are coming from. When you write songs, they’re a reflection of what lies beneath the surface. You might not always like what you see when you go there.
“I guess [writing] is cheap home therapy. You uncover a lot of stuff. You put yourself out there and you’ve just got to have the guts to do it. You uncover things about yourself and how the world around you affects that.
“It’s hard because sometimes you don’t know what you’re writing about. I stopped once and asked myself, ‘What are you doing here?’ I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. All I was doing was writing shit down. It takes time for me to step back and go, ‘Oh! That’s what’s going on.’”
Armstrong is always writing. He writes journals, he writes notes, he jots down what people say to him. When driving in Wisconsin, alongside his wife Adrienne and her brother, he saw a chapel called The Church of Divine Hope. “We’d been driving a while and we were rambling and laughing,” he says. “I was looking at it deliriously and I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s like calling it the Church of Wishful Thinking’. We started laughing hysterically, so I wrote it down and it ended up being in [religion-bating eighth track] East Jesus Nowhere. I’m writing all the time.”
THE WRITING sessions proper for 21st Century Breakdown began over three years ago in January 2006. Green Day say they were describing what they felt, reflecting where their heads were. Armstrong says he was just absorbing what he saw around him.
“The songs are photographs of the last five years,” he says. “They’re things you see on television or on the web – the chaos and desperation.”
“Times are different now,” adds Dirnt. “There’s a lot of shit going on, especially in America. There’s a crisis every week. We’ve just got out of eight years of hell with the presidency and there’s a lot going on. You can’t ignore it. Even though there’s light at the end of the tunnel with the new president, there’s still a giant mess to clear up. The United States is probably in the worst place it’s been since the Depression era.”
Then, by Easter time that year, they broke for a while to “recharge our batteries,” as Dirnt puts it. He took his then girlfriend, now wife, backpacking around Europe. Cool snuck under the border to Cuba, where US citizens are forbidden, and took drum lessons. Armstrong brought his wife and family to New Orleans where they helped build houses for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. He also spent time in France and Mexico, learning to surf, riding a motorcycle, gathering his thoughts. It was time they all remember fondly.
“In Cuba I was drumming, learning new rhythms, taking lessons just outside Havana,” says Cool. “I was hitchhiking around, going to shows every single night. We’d jump in old busted cars piling smoke. They’d cost a penny to ride and you’d go as far as they’d go, jump out, walk a bit, flag down another car. It was cool.”
“I’d be standing in the middle of a street with 500 Sicilians all around me partying like fucking crazy,” adds Dirnt of his five week European jaunt. “Everyone was speaking Italian, I didn’t understand a fucking thing that was going on, I was so drunk, it was great. We all live for experiences. That’s kind of how we learn. Travelling is an education.”
Armstrong, meanwhile, had grown a beard and was sitting atop roofs helping reconstruct the flood-destroyed Ninth Ward in New Orleans. “It was more for the experience than anything,” he says. “And as an example to my kids. It was about ingraining something in them: that they need to be conscious of things like that.”
It was also a good way to blow off steam, to experience what it’s like not being in Green Day for a while. It’s something they also found necessary two years later when, shortly before they began to demo 21st Century Breakdown, they hammered out an album in a day and toured dive clubs under the garage-rock pseudonym Foxboro Hot Tubs. There, they played tiny venues to delirious fans who have since, almost to a man, described the shows as the greatest they’ve ever seen.
“It was just such a good fun departure from what we were doing that there was a period when I started liking Foxboro Hot Tubs more than Green Day,” says Armstrong. “I remember guzzling two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer straight down, crawling to the side of the stage, puking, then coming back to the microphone, drinking another can and thinking, ‘Oh my God, I wouldn’t want to be any other place right now! This is badass!’ We partied so much I ended up with walking pneumonia at the end of that tour.”
“It really afforded us the freedom to go out and get on a small stage – we hadn’t played as a band in a long time – and just have a fucking great time,” adds Dirnt. “It meant we could get some swagger back. And we took that swagger and all that fucking energy back to the studio.”
It also put them in front of a crowd – exactly where Armstrong is most comfortable. “I fear too much isolation,” he says. “I have to feel I’m connecting. You have to be a member of society to be able to comment on society. You can’t just disconnect.”
And connecting with society was exactly what they hoped to achieve with 21st Century Breakdown.
BY AUGUST last year they were ready to move into the studio alongside Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins producer Butch Vig, rather than Rob Cavallo, producer of every Green Day record since and including Dookie, except Warning. Amicably, it was felt a fresh pair of ears might be interesting. “Butch brought a sense of calm and class to the project,” says Armstrong. “That took some getting used to because I don’t think we’re used to either one.” And, once in the studio, they worked and worked and worked.
“You know you want to make something great,” says Armstrong. “That’s what drives you the most crazy though. You want it to be great but you don’t know if it is. You just have to keep on chipping at the stone until something starts to form.”
From that chipping, came the loose narrative that shapes the album as, slowly, the characters of Gloria and Christian emerged.
“I think it’s a musical narrative. It ebbs and flows,” says Armstrong. “It takes you from a saloon somewhere in the 19th Century, to a dark melancholy place, to driving down a street, blasting your radio as loud as you can while throwing beer bottles out of the window. I love to find the irony in things – there’s all this chaos and desperation, there are angry mobs and buildings on fire and then there’s a couple kissing in the middle of it. It’s got a lot of dimension to it. That’s kind of what the album is about.”
Such ideals, such ambition, help explain why, just weeks ago with the clock ticking, they were still in the studio making things perfect. When it came time, finally, to draw a line under the album and to take it to the people, there was trepidation.
APRIL 15 found a couple of thousand people queuing outside the 400-capacity Uptown bar in Oakland. On the radio, at 11am that morning, a DJ had announced that Green Day would be playing a not-so-secret show in the bar. Those lucky enough to get in witnessed two sets, the first of which consisted of each of the new album’s songs, played in its entirety, before a second hour of covers and Green Day classics.
There are two reasons why the most relevant rock band in the world did this. One is the more prosaic motive that they needed to practice the songs they’ll be touring for the next two or three years.
The second, though, is far more important. They wanted to claim ownership of these missives. They wanted to see how it felt when their hard work was unleashed. They wanted, mostly, to stand back with pride as they displayed the music that contains their blood and guts.
“It was completely about making a memory for ourselves before anyone else gets their hands on [the songs],” says Armstrong. “That way we could create our own memory before other people’s memories merge into ours.”
And why do they want to cling onto these songs for that little while longer? Why do they need a period reflecting on 21st Century Breakdown? This is why:
“When we finished this album, there were a lot of mixed emotions,” explains Armstrong. “Mostly, we looked at ourselves and thought, ‘Holy shit, look what we just did.’”
Then, with a twinkle, a swelling of the chest and a glint of that pride, he pauses to wrap things up. “I’m feeling really confident that we just made the best album of our lives.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
Drummer Tré Cool, hair slicked back into a low-slung quiff, stopped briefly at the toll booth that ushers cars into the city and paid his fare. Then he did what he often does, he pulled out another four dollars and paid the fare of the car behind him, the one he’d just cut up in order to make its occupants’ day that little bit brighter.
Upstairs in the Mandarin Oriental, Green Day have three suites on hold within which they will hunker down to conduct the various interviews they have scheduled today – Radio 1, Australian radio and Kerrang!. Downstairs, though, Billie Joe Armstrong surveys the ballroom that’s been converted into a makeshift photo studio for their arrival. “It’s weird,” he says. “I know hotels all over the world but San Francisco is the one place where I’m lost in them. I guess because I don’t really need them here.”
His hair is recently dyed jet black and he brushes it forward over his forehead, almost Beatles style. The reason is that, after another recent photo shoot, he saw his picture – all shaggy peroxide blonde mane with dark roots underneath – and decided he looked a mess.
He’s here, alongside Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt, to continue to talk up their new album, the magnificent 21st Century Breakdown. Previous interviews have been taking place at their HQ, back across the Bay Bridge, but it’s been getting stale there so a change of scene is needed. That and, secretly, Cool fancies a night in a nice hotel and, since the record company are paying for today, he can have this one gratis. He confirms this with a cheeky smile before Dirnt decides he may as well do the same.
It’s the sort of break the pair might just need before the album is released. All three, but Armstrong in particular, say their heads are still very much immersed in the record.
“We’re still right in it,” admits the singer. “We’re still having to separate ourselves from it a little bit.”
“We’ve incubated it and given birth to it but we haven’t cut the umbilical chord,” adds Cool. “It’s like having a Tasmanian Devil in a crate – it’s still in the crate but we don’t know what will happen when we let it go.”
It’s a separation that will have to come soon, though it’s one Green Day have been delaying. They were still in the studio right up to the wire. A day of interviews with the European press the other week was cancelled at the last minute so final tweaks could be made. Never mind the 13 hour flights the writers and photographers had taken to get there.
Next, after the album had been handed to the record company, it was taken back by the band so that a new song Armstrong had written could be added at the eleventh hour.
“We had the whole record almost done,” he says, bashfully. “Then I wrote a song called Murder City and I thought, ‘This is just too perfect, it works so well’. It was that one ingredient that added to everything.”
“It was a matter of not letting go,” continues Dirnt. “We’d say ‘Okay we’re ready… Ah, actually not yet. Let’s give it another listen tomorrow… ah, not yet’.”
“Yeah, I was like, ‘I haven’t had enough sleepless nights, let’s go back in’,” laughs Armstrong.
They were songs that had to be perfect, not only to sate the band’s ambitions but also because they knew their efforts would be held up against their 12 million-selling 2004 album American Idiot.
That was a record that yanked Green Day from what some considered a creative backwater and pushed them, once again, into the spotlight. It would take some following.
“I was perfectly honest about it,” says Armstrong. “There was pressure. There still is.”
The results are a sprawling opus of 18 songs, divided into three acts entitled Heroes and Cons, Charlatans and Saints and Horseshoes and Handgrenades. In each two characters weave their way through the meandering narrative of the album. The first is Gloria, an idealist, a picture of strength, beauty and morals. “She holds a torch,” says Armstrong. “She does things with fire in her blood”.
The second is Christian, “And the fire in his blood makes him want to take that torch and burn down the whole city,” adds the singer. One, you suspect, is who Armstrong would like to be. The latter is who, deep down, he really is.
And on Gloria and Christian’s journeys they update the view of “mindfuck America” Green Day first detailed on American Idiot. In songs that take in The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, The Kinks, Pink Floyd and The Who, they see panic, chaos and revolution. In the direct and deceptively simple-sounding chords in which Green Day cut to the heart, they describe technological overload, information excess, self-destruction and religious mania. There’s fire in the streets, there’s hypocrisy and there’s cultural emptiness. There is, contained within the grooves of this record, all of America and, hence, the rest of the world: naked in all of its ugliness.
WHEN GREEN Day finished touring American Idiot in 2006, they found themselves in a difficult frame of mind. Exhausted, they needed to take a break. However, none of them actually much wanted to.
“I wasn’t ready to get off tour by any means,” says Dirnt, perhaps the most level-headed of the three. “There’s an inertia when you come off tour, because you stop and everything else keeps coming in. For three guys who probably have attention deficit disorder, it’s pretty hard to keep still. I felt like I was unemployed. I was thinking, ‘I had the best job in the world a minute ago, now I’m just sat here’.”
There had been problems in the band before American Idiot was released – issues that were “a little overblown” by the media, according to Armstrong. The story went that before even American Idiot, back in 2001 ahead of the release of Best Of compilation International Superhits, the singer had become distant from Dirnt and Cool, afraid to bring his songs to them, unable to communicate with the pair. All three were drinking too much, they’ve admitted, and Armstrong had entered one of his rumoured and periodic self-destructive phases. Episodes that he almost always declines to talk about.
“But Superhits solidified a lot for us,” he says. “We’d been around for 15 years at that point and we thought, ‘Wow, look at what we’ve done’. That kind of recharged us.”
The success of American Idiot further cemented relationships. It helped, too, that almost everything they’d pointed to politically on the album began to ring true.
“I was a little surprised when we wrote American Idiot that more people weren’t saying the same thing,” says Armstrong. “That was the thing about [that album], it seemed the government were fulfilling the prophecy we’d written. Things got lamer and lamer to the point where it seemed the record was making more sense every day.”
“George Bush might as well have been selling copies of American Idiot out of the back of the presidential limo,” quips Cool, always ready with a smart line.
But with mounting success came mounting pressure, especially when it came time to start writing a follow-up.
“As things got more and more successful, pressure was always something that was lurking in the back of my mind a little,” says Armstrong. “You ask yourself when the appropriate time is to acknowledge it. But for me, anytime there’s a challenge, I’m like a mosquito going towards the light – I have to grab onto it. That’s the way I’m made. You have to hit it head on and have the balls to do it. But that does take a lot of patience. You have to drive yourself a little bit crazy.”
And crazy is precisely the destination to which Armstrong has driven himself in the past. In 2002, he went on a binge in New York to find inspiration. He found, mostly, the bottom of a vodka glass. It wasn’t the first of such incidents. However it’s not something he likes to talk about – though he acknowledges anxiety can make him do peculiar things.
“I don’t go straitjacket, lock-me-up-in-a-rubber-room crazy. It is close, though,” he says. “I think if you’re going a bit mad, then you’re onto something. As long as it doesn’t get the better of you, if you’re willing to look into it eye-to-eye, things work. The issue is that you’re dealing with the dark places you go to when you write songs; you’re dealing with where those dark things are coming from. When you write songs, they’re a reflection of what lies beneath the surface. You might not always like what you see when you go there.
“I guess [writing] is cheap home therapy. You uncover a lot of stuff. You put yourself out there and you’ve just got to have the guts to do it. You uncover things about yourself and how the world around you affects that.
“It’s hard because sometimes you don’t know what you’re writing about. I stopped once and asked myself, ‘What are you doing here?’ I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. All I was doing was writing shit down. It takes time for me to step back and go, ‘Oh! That’s what’s going on.’”
Armstrong is always writing. He writes journals, he writes notes, he jots down what people say to him. When driving in Wisconsin, alongside his wife Adrienne and her brother, he saw a chapel called The Church of Divine Hope. “We’d been driving a while and we were rambling and laughing,” he says. “I was looking at it deliriously and I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s like calling it the Church of Wishful Thinking’. We started laughing hysterically, so I wrote it down and it ended up being in [religion-bating eighth track] East Jesus Nowhere. I’m writing all the time.”
THE WRITING sessions proper for 21st Century Breakdown began over three years ago in January 2006. Green Day say they were describing what they felt, reflecting where their heads were. Armstrong says he was just absorbing what he saw around him.
“The songs are photographs of the last five years,” he says. “They’re things you see on television or on the web – the chaos and desperation.”
“Times are different now,” adds Dirnt. “There’s a lot of shit going on, especially in America. There’s a crisis every week. We’ve just got out of eight years of hell with the presidency and there’s a lot going on. You can’t ignore it. Even though there’s light at the end of the tunnel with the new president, there’s still a giant mess to clear up. The United States is probably in the worst place it’s been since the Depression era.”
Then, by Easter time that year, they broke for a while to “recharge our batteries,” as Dirnt puts it. He took his then girlfriend, now wife, backpacking around Europe. Cool snuck under the border to Cuba, where US citizens are forbidden, and took drum lessons. Armstrong brought his wife and family to New Orleans where they helped build houses for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. He also spent time in France and Mexico, learning to surf, riding a motorcycle, gathering his thoughts. It was time they all remember fondly.
“In Cuba I was drumming, learning new rhythms, taking lessons just outside Havana,” says Cool. “I was hitchhiking around, going to shows every single night. We’d jump in old busted cars piling smoke. They’d cost a penny to ride and you’d go as far as they’d go, jump out, walk a bit, flag down another car. It was cool.”
“I’d be standing in the middle of a street with 500 Sicilians all around me partying like fucking crazy,” adds Dirnt of his five week European jaunt. “Everyone was speaking Italian, I didn’t understand a fucking thing that was going on, I was so drunk, it was great. We all live for experiences. That’s kind of how we learn. Travelling is an education.”
Armstrong, meanwhile, had grown a beard and was sitting atop roofs helping reconstruct the flood-destroyed Ninth Ward in New Orleans. “It was more for the experience than anything,” he says. “And as an example to my kids. It was about ingraining something in them: that they need to be conscious of things like that.”
It was also a good way to blow off steam, to experience what it’s like not being in Green Day for a while. It’s something they also found necessary two years later when, shortly before they began to demo 21st Century Breakdown, they hammered out an album in a day and toured dive clubs under the garage-rock pseudonym Foxboro Hot Tubs. There, they played tiny venues to delirious fans who have since, almost to a man, described the shows as the greatest they’ve ever seen.
“It was just such a good fun departure from what we were doing that there was a period when I started liking Foxboro Hot Tubs more than Green Day,” says Armstrong. “I remember guzzling two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer straight down, crawling to the side of the stage, puking, then coming back to the microphone, drinking another can and thinking, ‘Oh my God, I wouldn’t want to be any other place right now! This is badass!’ We partied so much I ended up with walking pneumonia at the end of that tour.”
“It really afforded us the freedom to go out and get on a small stage – we hadn’t played as a band in a long time – and just have a fucking great time,” adds Dirnt. “It meant we could get some swagger back. And we took that swagger and all that fucking energy back to the studio.”
It also put them in front of a crowd – exactly where Armstrong is most comfortable. “I fear too much isolation,” he says. “I have to feel I’m connecting. You have to be a member of society to be able to comment on society. You can’t just disconnect.”
And connecting with society was exactly what they hoped to achieve with 21st Century Breakdown.
BY AUGUST last year they were ready to move into the studio alongside Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins producer Butch Vig, rather than Rob Cavallo, producer of every Green Day record since and including Dookie, except Warning. Amicably, it was felt a fresh pair of ears might be interesting. “Butch brought a sense of calm and class to the project,” says Armstrong. “That took some getting used to because I don’t think we’re used to either one.” And, once in the studio, they worked and worked and worked.
“You know you want to make something great,” says Armstrong. “That’s what drives you the most crazy though. You want it to be great but you don’t know if it is. You just have to keep on chipping at the stone until something starts to form.”
From that chipping, came the loose narrative that shapes the album as, slowly, the characters of Gloria and Christian emerged.
“I think it’s a musical narrative. It ebbs and flows,” says Armstrong. “It takes you from a saloon somewhere in the 19th Century, to a dark melancholy place, to driving down a street, blasting your radio as loud as you can while throwing beer bottles out of the window. I love to find the irony in things – there’s all this chaos and desperation, there are angry mobs and buildings on fire and then there’s a couple kissing in the middle of it. It’s got a lot of dimension to it. That’s kind of what the album is about.”
Such ideals, such ambition, help explain why, just weeks ago with the clock ticking, they were still in the studio making things perfect. When it came time, finally, to draw a line under the album and to take it to the people, there was trepidation.
APRIL 15 found a couple of thousand people queuing outside the 400-capacity Uptown bar in Oakland. On the radio, at 11am that morning, a DJ had announced that Green Day would be playing a not-so-secret show in the bar. Those lucky enough to get in witnessed two sets, the first of which consisted of each of the new album’s songs, played in its entirety, before a second hour of covers and Green Day classics.
There are two reasons why the most relevant rock band in the world did this. One is the more prosaic motive that they needed to practice the songs they’ll be touring for the next two or three years.
The second, though, is far more important. They wanted to claim ownership of these missives. They wanted to see how it felt when their hard work was unleashed. They wanted, mostly, to stand back with pride as they displayed the music that contains their blood and guts.
“It was completely about making a memory for ourselves before anyone else gets their hands on [the songs],” says Armstrong. “That way we could create our own memory before other people’s memories merge into ours.”
And why do they want to cling onto these songs for that little while longer? Why do they need a period reflecting on 21st Century Breakdown? This is why:
“When we finished this album, there were a lot of mixed emotions,” explains Armstrong. “Mostly, we looked at ourselves and thought, ‘Holy shit, look what we just did.’”
Then, with a twinkle, a swelling of the chest and a glint of that pride, he pauses to wrap things up. “I’m feeling really confident that we just made the best album of our lives.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
