Green Day was interviewed by Jello Biafra (of the Dead Kennedys and other projects) for a magazine called Huh (or huH, I guess), in 1996. Jello Biafra is not the usual interviewer, so it’s more like a conversation among punk rock colleagues. To a certain extent, it reflects the issues Biafra is interested in more than it does Green Day’s.

Although they share similar political views and concerns, the members of Green Day and Jello Biafra have very different perspectives. Jello wants to talk with the guys about the evils of major labels, and Green Day are kind of ho-hum about it all. Billie Joe says: “I wanted to live off of what I was fucking doing, and that’s as honest as I can be. I don’t have a diploma, I know how to play music.”

But if Jello comes off as maybe a little whiny, it’s because he really did pave the way for later bands. He says as much, jokingly, in the interview: “You younguns have no idea what we were up against to create a punk scene for you to walk into!” And Billie Joe replies, laughing: “You jaded old bastard!” But when the Dead Kennedys became popular in the early 80s, punk rock really did seem dangerous and threatening to many in the mainstream. Jello was even criminally charged for “distributing harmful matter.”

The interview is so long that there’s a lot of great stuff, like Billie Joe talking about the hospital patients he sang for when he was little, Green Day’s first gig with Crimpshrine and Sewer Trout, the benefit they played for Food Not Bombs, which raised 30 grand, Billie Joe going to Gilman in disguise, and the heavy metal band called Bloodrage that Billie played in when he was 14. Biafra: “Did any of the lyrics make it into Green Day songs?” Billie: “Oh yeah, like fiery graves and bloody bones…”

Continued:
Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8, Page 9, Page 10, Page 11,
Page 12, Page 13, Page 14, Page 15.

The magazine is a weird format that didn’t fit on the scanner, so it’s scanned in slightly odd sections.

I got my grubby not-so-little hands on another old magazine with an interview and photos of the boys in Green Day. The magazine is called Huh, and the issue is from 1996. To be honest, I had never heard of Huh magazine, but I was intrigued because the interviewer is Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. I haven’t scanned the interview yet, but here are some of the photos that ran with the article. Click the links and thumbnails for larger versions.

[ Larger ]

[ Larger ]

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any old magazines. This article is from the August 1996 issue of Guitar World. It was a bitter time, less than a year after the release of Insomniac and after the abrupt cancellation of their European tour. Here, the guys are dealing with the stress by being completely and hilariously obnoxious, ranting about all the old-time punk bastards who have been complaining about Green Day’s success. Click on the thumbnail for the full size scan.

And here’s a bigger version of my favorite photo from the article.

——————–
Related posts:
More magazine scans.

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.”

Click on the thumbnail for the full size image:

When I read that Tre Cool was going to be featured in the 150th Anniversary edition of DRUM! magazine, I was itching to see it, but alas it wasn’t out yet. At last, it hit the newsstands when December rolled around, and the wonderful loves2bang made scans of the mag. A big, big thanks to her!

The article looks back on Tre’s first cover for the magazine, in 1996. As goofy as he is, there’s no doubt that Tre is very serious about his drumming — he has to be, or he wouldn’t be that fantastic drummer we know and love. When he talks about the drums, he comes up with some pretty thoughtful insights: “On a snare, yo don’t expect anything of what you’re playing, but what happens is you end up doing something totally incredible with just one drum. And then you impress yourself.” Read it all, below.

Click the thumbnail for the full size image:

Here’s a new review of the Pinhead Gunpowder 7 inch that gets to the heart of it for me:

“I love everything about this band. I love that their songs rule. I love that they’re friends playing music for the love of music. I love that they easily could have a larger label release something for them, yet only release music on their friends labels. The brilliance in Pinhead Gunpowder has always been in their ability to write some of the best East Bay punk this side of late 80’s. As much as I like Billie’s other band (what’s their name again), his lyrics in Pinhead Gunpowder always strike a bigger chord with me.”

Read the full review here.

Pinhead Gunpowder not only has great music, with catchy melodies and driving guitars, and not only does it have great lyrics that grab your heart and paint vivid word pictures, but they also have never wavered from the independent spirit that makes punk rock such a personal and satisfying genre of music. Green Day has held on to that ideal as well, but it may be harder to make out in the harsh light of their enormous mainstream success. That Billie Joe took part in this latest project by Pinhead Gunpowder, playing tiny shows and putting out a record on a small independent label, is a testament to his unflagging connection to his roots in the DIY scene.

That got me thinking about the concept of DIY, and I came across a great definition of it, in a book about zines, which seems particularly appropriate since Aaron is known as much for his zine, Cometbus, as he is for his music and for the lyrics he writes for Pinhead Gunpowder.

From the book Notes from Underground, by Stephen Duncombe:

“Defining themselves against a society predicated on consumption, zinesters privilege the ethic of DIY, do-it-yourself: make your own culture and stop consuming that which is made for you.”

The culture of punk rock, with which zines are closely associated, has always been about doing it yourself, for yourself and your peers, so that the distinction between producer and consumer is blurred or even erased. Whether you start a band, make a zine, volunteer to help independent projects and venues, or knit your own mittens, any time you take on any personal endeavor, you are making your own culture instead of passively taking in a culture created for you, usually by commercial entities that are only after your money.

Green Day’s music now comes to us through commercial culture, but it doesn’t mean we have to passively experience it. The guys in Green Day have always encouraged fans to question, to be active, to act on their values on their creativity. Music can be an inspiration rather than a product, and one can contribute to creating an independent culture in many ways. Billie Joe has said (at 4:43):

“You end up meeting these people that were involved in a different way, like politics, creating a place like Gilman Street, having their own fanzines. I came more from the musical side of it, but there were these other people who were just as important and just as influential as far as the scene was concerned. They were even more important in a lot of ways. People that just put out stuff, they would do cartoons. There was this one one guy who did a cartoon of every single day of his life for like a year.”

And speaking of zines, Billie Joe has been known to contribute to zines now and then. These are his writings over time for Robert Eggplant’s zine, Absolutely Zippo. Highlights of that zine have now been compiled into a book, available here. Thanks to beatupcar for originally posting these scans. Click on the thumbnail for the full size image.

  
Jan. 1989; May/June 1989; around 1995.

A big thanks to Ville for sending in all this cool stuff. They’re magazine articles about Green Day that were published in Finland during the Dookie and Insomniac eras. You won’t be able to read any of them unless you can read Finnish, but I think they’re pretty great, even though I can’t read them myself.

I love all the bits of history about Green Day, and I’m especially fond of the Dookie period, which was such a heady time for the guys and their music. American Idiot was so huge that it may have dwarfed, in the eyes of current fans, how huge Dookie was. That Green Day were splashed on magazines the world over, including in Finland, is a testament to how much and how many people they affected with their music. And I never get tired of the cheeky, nose-picking, silly-faced poses in the old pics… (And who has cuter knees?) Click on the thumbnails for the full size image.

April 1995:
  
August 1995:
   
November 1995 and December 1995:
  

NME adds its voice to the glowing, nearly breathless reviews, that have been coming out, of the Foxboro Hot Tubs tour. (Links to other reviews are here and here.) They say: “There’s still, at this moment, no hotter band in America.” Hells yeah. And another favorite line: “For a man of Billie Joe’s experience he exhibits a youth-shaming amount of bouncing, fist-pumping and riling, as he holds court with a big mop of peroxide-blond hair, wields his mic cord like a coachmaster’s whip, welcomes showers of stagedivers with open arms and regularly dips his face into the swirl of the front row.” His athleticism was really something to behold.

Thanks to girltufty for the scan, or read it online, here. It’s a great photo of Billie Joe too. He can be on fire, but still he has that aw-shucks, amazed and happy look that is so distinctive. Sigh.

[ Source ]
German magazine Bravo has an article on Pinhead Gunpowder. As far as I can tell, the orange button says, “A sensation: Billie Joe plays for six dollars!” which struck me as kind of funny: oh my, a big rock star slumming it, in a dive! Imagine that!

If you speak German, which I don’t, you can read the whole article here.

[ Source ]

ATOMKNIT GARDEN
Every day’s a Green Day for environmentalist, entrepreneur and rock-and-roll knitter Adrienne Armstrong, who chats with pal Vickie Howell.

The latest issue of Knit1 magazine, which is an issue about eco-friendly crafting, has an interview with Adrienne Armstrong by Vickie Howell, who also interviewed her for a podcast last year. Here’s a page from the magazine, from Vickie Howell’s blog.

Update: I picked up a copy of the magazine. Here’s the scans: [Page 1, Page 2].

Here’s a larger version of the photo. There are no other photos of Billie Joe, but there’s a nice picture of Adrienne on page two, and the interview is a nice read. It covers some of the same material from the earlier podcast, but in a nice, condensed format. If you like the scans, please buy the magazine, and while you’re at it, support a craftster.

Thanks to Tedifer and arohex on GDC and beatupcar.

Update: I made some scans of the two page spread. Click on the thumbnails.

The new issue of Spin magazine has a photo spread on Pinhead Gunpowder’s recent shows. The photo above is by Shanty Cheryl, and the photos published in the magazine are hers too. Read her comments and see the complete photo here.

I’d pick up a copy but it’s the middle of the night. I’ll just wait patiently until tomorrow…

Beatupcar posted new scans of some great old magazine interviews that I had never seen before. This one is from Rip, April 1996. She also has a good one from Faces and scans of Billie’s Joe’s contributions to the zine Absolutely Zippo from 1989. Check them out at her LJ.

This is probably the most bitter and most heart-wrenching interview I’ve ever read from our man Billie Joe. But what strikes me about it is that no matter how tough it gets — dealing with stardom, playing shows night after night in front of thousands who expect him to be and do something for them, and always having “eyeballs all over” him wherever he goes — he doesn’t throw in the towel and become a bitter cynical bastard: he’s always striving, always trying to understand himself and look for the best that he can do. Especially back then, but even now, I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves for his integrity and steadfastness. Maybe it’s the little-boy scruffiness, or the silly antics, or his self-effacing humor. I think people in general tend to be confused by integrity because they think it can’t be for real…

The very last quote sums it up. Some girls spot him in the restaurant where he’s being interviewed and he’s itching to get out: “I gotta go — it’s gettin’ weird. I can feel eyeballs all over me already…”

« Previous entries