The archives on Greenday.net are not the most organized or easy to search, but they do have some hidden gems. These little e-zines with news updates, interview reprints, and other tidbits were sent out to members of the Green Day Burnout Club in 1997. They can be found in the Way Back Machine’s internet archive. You may have seen them on GDC, where they were posted a couple months ago. I very rarely go to GDC these days, but I came across the GDC thread about them in a Google search.

These are some of my favorite parts: (The links are to the individual e-zines in which each item appears. You have to scroll down to find the items.)

~Billie Joe’s 25th birthday surprise party (from Addicted To Noise):

“There were lots of things that looked like cigars but didn’t smell like cigars,” noted our source. “A wall of hors d’oeuvres. And an old friend of Billie’s jumped out of a giant cake and hugged him.”

~Tre’s wedding (from Addicted To Noise):

The groom wore a blue suit and a yarmulke, ­­looking very dashing but decidedly un-punk. Who among you would have believed that Tre Cool would have hired a string quartet to softly play “Beethoven’s Ninth,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”?

~Ellen DeGeneres getting high with Green Day backstage at the David Letterman show.

~A blurb on Green Day’s benefit concert for Food Not Bombs:

“Hell, Food Not Bombs fed my ass a couple of times a few years back,” says Billie Joe. “It’s good to put something back into our community as a ‘thank you’.”

I thought this one was a pretty cool interview, from the San Jose Mercury News, in which Billie Joe talks about the then-ongoing controversy of Green Day having signed to a major label, disappointing many in the punk scene. It’s lovely to read how generous Billie Joe’s feelings are toward the people who had it in for him. His love for and understanding of the punk scene that nurtured his music has never wavered.

“To a certain extent, those opinions are valid opinions,” he says. “If it wasn’t for magazines like Maximumrocknroll, the world would be a boring place. Or music would be, anyway. You need that totally radical left opinion. (The editors of Maximumrocknroll) have done a lot of great things for the punk scene. I don’t have anything against them personally. But we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things about music. They’re journalists and I’m a musician. I don’t really tend to like much rock journalism at all. People are entitled to their opinion. If they need me as a scapegoat, so be it. I will still keep putting my music out no matter what their opinion is.”

“I wanted our records to be available in places like Hungary. We’ve played in Hungary and Prague and stuff like that. If you’re on the label and like the amount of distribution they have, that’s great. Our time on Lookout was a great time for us. I wouldn’t change it for the world. But it was time to do something different.”

There are a lot of nice bits in this interview. If you only read one item, I recommend this one. Here’s a funny bit. Asked if he now eats in four star restaurants, after the success of Dookie:

“Well, I dip a little caviar in my Top Ramen once in a while,” he jokes. “I
still eat fat slice pizza. If I got into a four- or five-star restaurant, I
wouldn’t know what anything was.”

There are also two other interviews, one with Seventeen and the other with Vox. Both are pretty somber, a reminder of the tough times that the band was experiencing surrounding the release of Insomniac. Billie Joe says: “I don’t even want to think about being happy. No one’s really happy anyway. It’s not human.”

Write a comment