Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 more episodes to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 87 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re exploring Green Day’s “Basket Case.” Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.
Billie Joe Armstrong and the bass player known professionally as Mike Dirnt met in the fifth grade in the Northern California town of Rodeo, located 20 miles or so north of Oakland and, thanks to its oil refineries, highly regarded as one of the stinkiest places in the state, if not the country. That’s an official, formally measured quantity: stinkiness. As 15-year-olds, Billie Joe and Mike start a punk-rock band they call Sweet Children. Which is, for the record, a terrible band name. So they change it. On May 28, 1989, the band—now consisting of Billie Joe Armstrong on guitar and lead vocals, Mike Dirnt on bass, and a drummer named John Kiffmeyer, better known as Al Sobrante—they play their first show under their new band name, Green Day. It’s a drug reference. A lot of people don’t like that name either, but too bad. This show takes place in Berkeley, California, at 924 Gilman Street, otherwise known as the Alternative Music Foundation; otherwise known simply as Gilman, one of the stinkiest and most legendary punk-rock venues in the country, if not the world. On this particular evening, Green Day is opening for the also legendary ska-punk band Operation Ivy.
This is the blueprint for East Bay punk-rock, my friends. The glorious, impossible, utopian ideal. Likewise, Gilman, as a punk-rock venue, as a physical location, is also the glorious, impossible, utopian ideal. Gilman’s vibe, broadly speaking, is deconstructed punk-rock club: no frills, no bullshit. Gilman’s rules, established by committee, are spray-painted right there on the wall: NO RACISM, NO SEXISM, NO HOMOPHOBIA, NO ALCOHOL, NO DRUGS, NO FIGHTING, NO STAGE-DIVING. And, added a little while later—this one ain’t spray-painted on the wall but it’s tremendously important: NO MAJOR-LABEL BANDS. Billie Joe Armstrong loved the place. Talking to the journalist Ian Winwood, in Ian’s 2018 book Smash!: Green Day, The Offspring, NOFX, Bad Religion, and the ’90s Punk Explosion, Billie Joe says, “Gilman was my first real taste of what it was like to be a punk. It wasn’t just about music, it was about a community and a movement. Every single weirdo and nerd and punk around the Bay Area would be there, and it was great.” End quote. Young Green Day does a great, raucous cover of an Operation Ivy song called “Knowledge.”
The first Green Day EP—four songs, self-titled—comes out in 1989 on Lookout! Records, a bold new enterprise cofounded by a deep-thinking and remarkably prescient punk-rock-oracle-type gentleman named Larry Livermore. In the mid-’80s Larry’d been living in Spyrock, in
Mendocino County, about 200 miles north of Oakland, and also a very stinky place to live on account of all the marijuana growing there. Larry was already well into his thirties by the mid-’80s, but he formed his own punk-rock band called the Lookouts with some teenagers in the area, including a super-excitable 12-year-old drummer named Frank Edwin Wright III, who would soon wisely rename himself Tré Cool. The Lookouts play a very early show with Sweet Children, Sweet Children changes their name to Green Day, Larry Livermore helps start a record label called Lookout! Records, and Green Day very quickly emerges as one of the label’s preeminent bands, and arguably one of the best punk bands in the state, if not the country, if not the world.
That’s “The One I Want,” from the first Green Day EP in 1989. When people write about pre-supernova Green Day now, the Lookout! years, the earliest shit, most critics and authors and whatnot end up saying something to the effect of, It’s all there. The melodies, the hooks, the choruses, the songs. The essence of supernova-era Green Day is all there from the very beginning. None of that stuff is quite great yet, and those songs aren’t recorded with the big-shot-producer firepower to which the world will grow accustomed, but this band’s appeal was never terribly hard to grasp. Larry Livermore, talking about Green Day in Dan Ozzi’s great 2021 book Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore, says, “The very first time I saw them, within minutes I thought they could be the next Beatles.” End quote. He’s exaggerating, obviously, but exaggerating by how much, exactly?
That song’s called “Going to Pasalacqua,” I don’t know what or where Pasalacqua is, or what it smells like there. That song appears on Green Day’s debut full-length album, 39/Smooth, released in 1990. That year the band also put out the Slappy EP (that’s got the Op Ivy cover on it), and the Sweet Children EP (that’s got the “Sweet Children” song on it). Green Day otherwise spends 1990 touring their asses off.
So. Are you familiar with Cometbus? The famous Berkeley punk-rock zine Cometbus, started in 1981 by a guy named Aaron Cometbus. It’s mostly handwritten; if you read even a few pages of any issue you get very intimately acquainted with Aaron’s handwriting, very neat and blocky print. Aaron is a major 924 Gilman guy, he’s in his own bands starting with Crimpshrine in the ’80s, but Cometbus the zine takes on its own legendary status. Aaron’s been doing it in some form for upwards of 40 years. As far as Bay Area punk goes, you’re not gonna find a more direct and “street-level” and first-person account of this place, this scene, this era. It’s unbelievable.
In 2003, I was living in Columbus, Ohio, and I moved to Oakland. I took a job at a Bay Area paper, and before I left, my friend Scott, a rock photographer dude, gave me a book called Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus, a collection of the zine’s early years. Scott’s inscription—and Scott had quite lovely handwriting as well—was, “This should serve as a good introduction to the good, bad, and disgusting of Bay Area culture.” It was one of the most thoughtful gifts anybody’s ever gotten me.
So. In this book, in a reprinted old issue of Cometbus, there’s a giant map of the United States, spread across two pages, and it’s labeled “On Tour With Green Day.” This tour started on June 19, 1990. Aaron was one of two roadies for Green Day, crammed into the van along with Billie Joe, Mike, and Al Sobrante. First of all, allow me to read you an excerpt from Green Day’s tour rider.
“Thanks for booking Green Day. This is Green Day’s first tour, and we hope it will be fun. We are asking for a few things that will make our trip a little easier. You do not have to give us any of these things, of course we don’t have to tune before we play, either. We are asking for $100, more if you can spare it. This is not a guarantee. We are only asking.”
End quote. In return for $100 if you can spare it, Green Day will come to your club or house or VFW hall or whatever and hopefully play my favorite early Green Day song, a suspiciously-wistful-for-a-bunch-of-teenagers tune from the 39/Smooth record called “I Was There.”
In this tour rider, Green Day go on to ask for food and a place to stay, or at least a safe place to park the van. They also request intel on places nearby to get a cup of coffee and maybe thrift some T-shirts. So in this Cometbus zine, around this map of America, Aaron Cometbus has handwritten little vignettes from Green Day’s very first tour, tracing a tour-itinerary arc that takes them from Oakland all the way north to Canada, then across the U.S. all the way to New York City, then all the way down to Florida and back. These vignettes include, for example:
“Cool lookin’ club, bad fuckin’ neighborhood, aptly named Junkie Row. No audience except for friends of Al’s parents who pinched his cheeks and took photos. Miserable.”
“Ate ice cream. Missed ferry to Canada. Van got rear-ended.”
“Hassled by totally insane cop.”
“Found cool stuff in dumpsters, rad old buildings, great wandering.”
“Got 35 mosquito bites. 35!”
“Had to take Billie to the hospital for really bad poison ivy”
“‘Green Day in Green Bay’ show cancels.” (That’s funny. That’s too bad.)
(This one’s in New York City.) “Went to 53rd and 2nd but Al wouldn’t take a left so I could try to turn a trick one block over.” (That’s in Manhattan, he’s referring to the prostitution-themed Ramones song “53rd and Third.”)
“The first Waffle House of the tour. Very festive.”
And finally, “Got offered a buck for each tooth we could knock out of the promoter’s mouth and were very tempted.”
Aaron drops off the tour back in Minneapolis. That’s Green Day’s first national tour. I have to tell you that in 1990, I could not imagine anything cooler or more gratifying than touring the country in a rock band. Piling into a van with all your shit, playing some tapes on the stereo, reading some books, getting some Dramamine before I read the books (I get carsick otherwise), bonding, taking restorative naps, eating a lot of Wendy’s, seeing a million faces, and rocking ’em all. If I’m honest with you and with myself, and I try to be, right now, as a guy in my forties, I can’t imagine anything cooler or more gratifying than being in a touring rock band. I over-romanticize the shit out of touring in a rock band, even though I know it sucks. Or sucks, like, 85 percent of the time. Cops, van wrecks, dumpsters, mosquito bites, poison ivy. Asking for $100 a show and probably not getting it; asking for a place to sleep and probably not getting that either. I know touring sucks, but even as I say “touring sucks” out loud, I know I don’t believe it and I never will. I will over-romanticize the shit out of this shit for the rest of my life.
Aaron Cometbus writes about going on tour with Green Day again, the following year, in August 1991, and even he’s already way less romantic about it. Or is he? He says, “Touring is everyone dozing off in back while you ride shotgun and Billie drives and you share the hugest cup of weak coffee, listen to the same Ramones tape over and over, and zoom along the highway through the desert and through the night. Every once in a while Mike jumps up startled, yelling some gibberish, then he realizes it was just another tour nightmare and mumbles some excuse and goes back to sleep.”
He writes, “Touring is pulling into town at 4 a.m. and finding mattresses in the mattress factory dumpster and setting up camp behind the Denny’s parking lot and waking up at high noon feeling like complete shit.”
And finally he writes, “Touring is, of course, fucking wonderful.”
End quote. See? Touring is fucking wonderful. In 1991, Green Day sounds like this.
In 1991, Green Day releases their second full-length album, Kerplunk!, on Lookout! Records; that song’s called “2,000 Light Years Away.” It’s about Billie Joe’s girlfriend, Adrienne. They met at a show in Minneapolis. Eventually they got married and they’re still married. That’s lovely. Drummer Al Sobrante has left the band at this point to go to college, and your drummer on Kerplunk! is Tré Cool. The Green Day lineup of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool will endure, henceforth. You could say they’re still married, if you wanted to get all romantic about it. Kerplunk! is a vast improvement. No offense to Al Sobrante, but Tré Cool, first of all, is a vast improvement. But to my mind, the real upgrade on Kerplunk! is that even the slow songs are rad now.
This song’s called “Christie Road.” It’s about teenage boredom. It will not be Green Day’s last song about teenage boredom, nor will it be the raddest, but it will, possibly, be the slowest. We’d better jump to the end of the chorus.
“Welcome to Paradise” is a song about Oakland. Talking to Rolling Stone in 2020, Billie Joe Armstrong says, “I had moved out of my house in the suburbs to West Oakland, into a warehouse that was rat-infested and in a really fucked-up neighborhood, with a lot of crazy punks and friends. I was paying $50 a month for rent, which was great, because, being in a band, you got paid a couple hundred bucks here and there, so it was easy to pay for rent, eat Top Ramen, and buy weed. It was an eye-opening experience. Suddenly, I was on my own, smack out in one of the gnarliest neighborhoods in Oakland. You look around and you see cracked streets and broken homes and ghetto neighborhoods, and you’re in the middle of it. You’re scared, thinking, ‘How do I get out of here?’ Then suddenly it starts to feel like home. There is a sort of empathy that you have for your surroundings when you’re around junkies and homelessness and gang warfare.”
From the very first time I heard it, as a doofus teenager, this part of the song always struck me as a faithful recreation of my internal doofus-teenager monologue, right? This is what it sounded like in my head in 1994, and also every year previously and every year thereafter. This is what it sounds like in my head right now. Just a frantic descending bassline on a loop. Zero chill ever. It’s awesome. It’s great. I feel seen by this part of “Welcome to Paradise.” I feel heard. All 300,000 times I’ve heard this song—whether it’s on the radio, on CD, streaming, whatever—I stop what I’m doing and just concentrate on this part of the song. I merge with it, or, I suppose, it merges with me. Anyways, it’s time to get these fellas signed to a major label. This is gonna go great.
To hear the full episode click here, and be sure to follow on Spotify and check back every Wednesday for new episodes on the most important songs of the decade. This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
