Here’s a break from thinking about the new album and all the excitement that has come with it (who would have expected even a Broadway-style musical?!!!). This is a magazine article about Green Day from September 1994, which is, of course, one of my favorite eras. At the time it was written, Dookie was only a gold album (half a million copies sold), so the article is thankfully more about the guys than it is about how astonishing their rise to fame had been, like so many other articles that were published around that time, and since, and it does a nice job of capturing their inherent contradictions.

On the one hand, the guys were outrageously silly, and they loved ridiculous and gross pranks (“Billie Joe is playing yo-yo with his saliva. He reels out about four inches of drool, sucks it back in, then reels it out again. It’s strangely hypnotic.”), but they were also, even back then, caring, kind, and thoughtful about the important things. (For instance, they think it’s wrong that in the fable about the grasshopper and the ant, the hardworking ant who accumulated food for the winter while the grasshopper played, turns the grasshopper away when he asks her for help. “Something about the story bothers Green Day. ‘ I don’t see anything wrong with giving the grasshopper some food,’ says Mike earnestly. The others nod.”) Their pranks may have gotten less gross over the years, but that combination of enjoying ridiculous fun and caring about serious issues seems to still essentially be their core.

Some favorite bits:

~Tre looks as if his mother lost him on the playground: His pants are torn, his knees slathered in Mercurochrome. He pads around the airport in bare feet, getting amused stares.

~Roughly recorded but surprisingly touching, 39/Smooth captured exactly how vulnerable boys could be to the casual, unthinking cruelty of girls.

~Billie always knew how to get people’s attention. As a kid, he says, “I had a problem keeping my penis in my pants.” Meaning? He shrugs. “Flashing, mostly.”

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