Green Day |
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Thu. May 16.2002 1:04 PM EDT |
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Billie Joe: Confessions of a Basket CaseThe making of Dookie is a story of sleeping on couches, ex-girlfriends and plenty of bodily fluids. |
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Billie Joe (Publicity) |
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Masturbation, anxiety attacks, diarrhea. All in a day's work for Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong. But how did a spunky little punk trio from Berkeley, California end up recording one of the biggest albums of the '90s? The making of Dookie
VH1: What does Dookie say to you now about that time in your life? Billie Joe: Self-sufficiency. Survival. When we were writing that record I was living on Trey's couch. We were on the road a lot. We didn't have any true punk rock heroes. The Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat had passed. There was no Joe Strummer or Johnny Rotten anymore. We just networked with people out of state who were into our old label, Lookout Records. It was all Xeroxed underground magazines that no one really knew about. VH1: Did you have a collective vision for the album? Billie Joe: We wanted simple songs that didn't have bullshit like guitar solos, for everybody to put as much energy into it as we could, and for everybody's parts to get highlighted. Mike's bass lines are almost like a doo-wop singer or something. It's call and response with the way I'm singing. Trey fills in every single beat. We wanted to kick people's asses. We loved playing festivals because we got to kick bands' asses every single night. There is not a band you can mention that we haven't kicked their ass on stage at one time or another. VH1: How much of Dookie is a love letter to your wife Adrienne? Billie Joe: There really weren't any songs about her at that time. A lot of the songs are about this girl from San Diego, who went to Cal Berkeley. Adrienne and I weren't going out at the time. We lost contact with each other for about a year. She got engaged to a guy in Minneapolis. Then I got involved with this other girl. I lived in the basement in Berkeley with all these guys from the East Bay and she lived upstairs in the apartment. We ended up having this year-long relationship. The song "She" was about her. VH1: How did you come to write it? Billie Joe: She gave me this poem about this empowering woman, which I think is called "She." I wrote the song as an answer back to her. My now ex-girlfriend is also on the songs "Sassafras Roots" and "Chump." VH1: So how did you and Adrienne get back together? Billie Joe: My ex-girlfriend was moving to Ecuador to live there for the spring semester. At that point we were going to go on our tour and just keep going. So we had a hasty breakup. I never really talked to her ever again. VH1: So what's it like now for Adrienne to be married to you and your biggest record is filled with songs about another woman? Billie Joe: I know she likes that song! I've been married for almost eight years, so Adrienne and I are comfortable enough that I've had a past. She's got a past, too. She was engaged, had boyfriends, had flings, and I'm comfortable with that, otherwise I wouldn't be married to her. Adrienne is the only woman I'll ever love. VH1: Were you a heavy masturbator at the time you wrote "Longview"? Billie Joe: Chronic! I was just in a creative rut. I was in-between houses sleeping on people's couches. It's a song about trying not to feel pathetic and lonely. I didn't think that masturbation was really seen from the point of view that I was looking at it. In songs like "Turning Japanese" it always seemed more about people pulling a pud or something. I was coming from a lonely guy's perspective: No girlfriend, no life, complete loser. VH1: Did you have a sense that "Longview" was spectacular when you finished? Billie Joe: Yeah. Everybody shined on that song. Mike's bass-line is probably one of the most played bass-lines in Guitar Center history. There's a real menacing quality about it. I just wanted something that was schizophrenic, where there is this rolling bass-line and smooth feel and then, all of the sudden, it just blasts out. VH1: Do you remember the first time you played "Basket Case" and what the reaction was like? Billie Joe: The first time we played it was when they wanted to release it as a single. We thought, "Maybe we should start playing this song live, 'cause we were still stuck playing a lot of songs from 39 Smooth and Kerplunk." We immediately knew people had heard the song before, because everybody was singing along. It got to the point where I wasn't even singing the lyrics anymore; people were just doing it on their own. VH1: What do you feel you were addressing in "Basket Case?" Billie Joe: "Basket Case" was about anxiety attacks and feeling like you're ready to go crazy. At times I probably was. I've suffered from panic disorders my entire life. I thought I was just losing my mind. The only way I could know what the hell was going on was to write a song about it. It was only years later that I figured out I had a panic disorder. VH1: Is it fair to say that Dookie was a "pure" recording? Billie Joe: I didn't want our record to sound like some boring rock record. We wanted things to sound tighter. We wanted the guitars to be bigger, louder. I mean, we mixed that record twice. The first time we mixed we didn't even want to use any reverb. We just wanted it to sound really dry, the same way the Sex Pistols record or the early Black Sabbath records sounded. We wanted to make a record in the style of an independent $500 recording and then use a big budget to get bigger sounds. But the first time we mixed it, it sounded like shit! VH1: Did you submit a copy of the first mix? Billie Joe: We went on tour with Bad Religion after we mixed it. We were listening to it and thinking, "Why doesn't this sound right?" I kept thinking, "We've still got this money in the bank. What should we do?" I called up our producer Rob Cavallo and said, "This record doesn't sound right." He said, "Yeah, it doesn't really sound that good. Maybe we should remix it." I said, "Yeah." He goes, "Thank God you just said that." He already had the back-up plan to remix. So we just sat in this tiny room falling asleep at the board, smoking tons of weed and fixing our record. VH1: What is "Dookie" and how did you settle on that name for the album? Billie Joe: It's a really disgusting story, but I'll tell it. We were on tour, and you eat bad food all the time. You just end up getting the shits basically. So we started calling it liquid Dookie. Like, "How did it go in the bathroom?" "Oh, liquid, man, liquid." Later on we were like, "Wouldn't it be fun if we named our record that?" I always thought it was like a real childhood saying, reminiscent of being little kids or something. VH1: What was your anxiety level like around the time of the release? Billie Joe: I honestly wanted it to be one of the biggest records of all time because I couldn't see any middle ground. There's something about mediocrity that I don't want anything to do with. I wanted it to be a splash or else just get overlooked and let people think that there's this cool missing record that only cool people dug. But to go out there and have half a hit, that's more of a kiss of death then being shelved. VH1: Did Dookie take on a life of its own? Billie Joe: It just kept snowballing. That became scary, too, because that wasn't the only thing we wanted to be known for. We didn't want to be a one hit wonder. I felt like we had more to offer. I know every band says that, but there's only so many that can back it up. Fortunately, we're one band that's one of them. VH1: Did you have a sense of responsibility about the families that you'd brought to punk rock? Billie Joe: A lot of people said we were using punk rock as a stepping stone to get fame and fortune. People started called it "Gap punk." I didn't feel guilty. I felt like we were probably an introduction to a kid that's going to get into more punk rock music later on, and buy Black Flag records. That's a positive thing. There are a lot of kids now that are really active in the punk rock community, and it has to do with the fact that they got into Dookie. VH1: What is Dookie's legacy for the band and the music industry? Billie Joe: I don't know. I know that when we play the songs live, we get a great reaction. I never get tired of playing those songs, but would I never get tired of playing those songs if I only sold two records? I know that they're good and I'm real. I have a lot of pride in that. For me those songs are timeless. There's nothing on there that's some stupid novelty. Every song on that record's got a personal meaning. On the larger scale, I don't know. Is there a larger scale? It's great that people like it. It doesn't get any larger than that, I guess. |
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