Green Day: still growing

Green Day
Special guest: Jimmy Eat World
Sept. 12
Conseco Fieldhouse
Ticketmaster.com
Phone: 317-239-5151

Green Day’s latest CD, American Idiot, is billed as a punk opera. But that doesn’t mean the band followed exactly in the trail blazed 35 years ago when the Who released rock’s first and still definitive rock opera, Tommy.

“It’s not so literal like that. It’s not like Green Day on Ice,” said drummer Tre Cool, noting that American Idiot doesn’t employ the linear storytelling device of most rock operas. “We have to leave it up to the imagination of the listener. Otherwise, you listen to it once, and there’s no underlying fabric that you can pull over and there’s nothing shrouded. There are lots of like hidden things and lots of new meanings that come up after the fifth, sixth listen. You keep hearing more and more. Even me, that’s the amazing thing, I keep discovering things on this album.”

To say the least, American Idiot is an audacious statement for Green Day, who in 2004 celebrated the 10th anniversary of the release of Dookie. That album, with hits like “Longview,” “Welcome To Paradise” and “When I Come Around,” turned Dookie into a multiplatinum hit and brought pop-punk into the rock mainstream.

Despite the competition from dozens of similar sounding pop-punk bands that came onto the scene in Dookie’s aftermath, Green Day has remained at the forefront of the genre by cranking out consistently strong CDs (1995’s Insomniac, 1997’s Nimrod and 2000’s Warning) and showing a full mastery of the pop-punk form.

American Idiot appears to have set an even higher standard by being the most ambitious Green Day CD yet.

It remains instantly recognizable as Green Day, sticking to the band’s patented brand of hard-charging, hook-filled rock. But American Idiot ups the ante, first of all with the CD’s centerpiece, “Jesus Of Suburbia,” itself a mini-opera that strings together what essentially are five mini-songs into a longer single piece.

And while most of American Idiot flows seamlessly from one song to the next, unlike most rock operas, most of the songs can stand alone as singles and don’t suffer when removed from the context of the entire album.

Overall, American Idiot, whose title track became a chart-topping modern rock hit when it was released as the lead single last year, stands up to any other album by the San Francisco-based group. The songs are consistently catchy and stirring, and get crystal clear production from Rob Cavallo.

The quality of American Idiot has translated into near-unanimous acclaim, a Grammy Award for best rock album and album sales that have topped 4 million. The CD sits at number 14 on the latest Billboard magazine album chart, while the latest single, “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” has reached No. 4 on Billboard’s modern rock chart and 21 on the Hot 100 single chart. Meanwhile, another single, “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams,” recently peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart and won video of the year honors at the recent MTV Video Music Awards (one of seven VMAs for the song).

Ironically, Green Day did not enter into the project expecting to create a punk opera, according to Cool. In fact, the band had recorded about 20 songs for a conventional CD and had started mixing the tracks. But then the master tapes were stolen.

Angered by the theft, the band decided rather than re-record those songs to start from scratch and forget any rules they had made for themselves about songwriting.

One day, this approach prompted the three band members — singer/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt — to playfully challenge each other.

“Out of fun came, you know, Mike wrote a 30-second song,” Cool said. “Then Billie listened to it and he put a 30-second song after it and then I put a 30-second song after it, but connected. We were just doing that and taking turns and trying to outdo each other and it got more serious and serious. After we were done, we had like a 10-minute piece that was like hilarious and funny and then thoughtful and provoking and provocative. It was great. We loved the feeling of that.”

The structure of that piece triggered the idea of writing an entire rock opera, Cool said, and before long Armstrong had developed an outline for the entire CD.

From there, American Idiot became perhaps the most planned-out project as the band wrote, refined and developed final versions of the songs. Then Green Day demoed the entire CD in a small studio in Oakland before moving onto Ocean Way Recording in Los Angeles to record the final versions of the tracks.

American Idiot is anything but a simple work. On a lyrical level, it’s multifaceted, with songs that are by turns sharply political (as on the title song, which has become a No. 1 modern rock hit) and strikingly personal (as on “Extraordinary Girl” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends”).

“I think there are three voices on the record,” Cool said. “There’s the musical voice, just the sound of Green Day and our instruments and the ingredients of all our favorite rock moments, all the bands that we love, that we sort of tip our hats to these ingredients. Then the second voice would be the human voice, the relationships, feelings and emotions. Yeah, that’s where you get your goose bumps and your hair standing on end and songs that make you cry and all that. That’s the emotional human voice. And then there’s the political voice, and that’s like the strong statements and the lack of fear. It’s three voices.”

The CD doesn’t tell a story so much as present a series of snapshots involving several key characters, with Jesus of Suburbia being the main protagonist.
“Definitely this album has a lot of meanings for different people,” Cool said. “I would say the story of it is kind of like a timeline of just basically his [Jesus of Suburbia’s] life and the stages and the choices he makes and the places he goes and the people he’s with. It’s sort of like a timeline and it kind of parallels a lot of peoples’ lives.”

Because American Idiot is clearly the most ambitious Green Day CD — and arguably the most ambitious punk rock album ever — it’s tempting to consider it the band’s attempt to stay one step ahead of the many pop-punk bands that also enjoy considerable commercial success.

Cool, while acknowledging that he’s proud of the influence Green Day has had over the past decade, said competition is not what fuels the band.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are the best Green Day type band in the world. And we always will be,” he said. “We are friends with a lot of these bands. We’ve taken New Found Glory and Sugarcult on tour, and I talked to Benji [Madden] from Good Charlotte yesterday. There’s a camaraderie with this sort of pop-punk genre that we have, and that’s good. But I don’t know about staying ahead or whatever. It’s just we don’t want to do the same things over and over.

“Like these bands, they’re all going to grow, too,” he said. “They started out basically in the pop punk genre, and then they moved to whatever they’re going to do. Everybody has their path. You can’t judge the Beastie Boys on ‘Fight For Your Right To Party.’ We’ll see what happens with these bands. It’s a great honor when a band that’s hugely successful will sit there and say, ‘We owe it all to Green Day.’ That’s awesome.”