The album that almost broke up Green Day: “We had to evaluate our situation”
As a band hurtling towards their 40th anniversary, Green Day are in a very strange position. On the one hand, the Bay Area punk-pop megastars are bigger than ever, comfortably playing the biggest gigs of their lives and headlining stadiums worldwide. On the other, those shows are being played to celebrate the anniversaries of the last two times they were relevant. Which are, damningly enough, 2004 and 1994.
However, as their history shows, you can never quite count out Green Day. While Billie Joe Armstrong’s band of overgrown teenagers seemed like they were on the ropes on two separate occasions, they came back swinging both times. The first was in the mid-1990s when megahit album Dookie’s two follow-up records, Insomniac and Nimrod, showed the world that fame, success and the backlash that came with it had curdled them.
Whereas Dookie covered up its darkness with sunbeam melodies and knockabout 20-something larks, Insomniac and Nimrod were both deeply bitter, resentful records. They wore their anger regarding their rejection from the punk scene on their sleeves. That, combined with just how ragged their legitimately insane touring schedule had left them, spilt over into the two records that sold decently enough. However, even put together, they didn’t come close to the juggernaut that was Dookie.
Then, of all things, an acoustic ballad written during the Dookie session but shelved for not being “punk enough” saved their arses. ‘Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)’ was the smash hit they needed to right the ship. However, it also inadvertently led to the closest the band would ever come to splitting up. The success of ‘Good Riddance’ and its acoustic sound led Armstrong to write more songs of that ilk, inspired by the likes of The Kinks, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, and especially early Bob Dylan.
Why did an album nearly break up Green Day?
The resulting album, 2000’s Warning, is regularly called the band’s commercial and critical low-point. While the record has its defenders, and it’s by no means a bad record, one needs only to look at their competition to see just how hard Green Day’s pants were being pulled down. While Green Day deigned to release a fairly political folk-punk album, the very same summer, their demon-spawn opposition Blink-182 were packing out arenas off the back of Enema Of The State. It was an LP that took a blueprint set by Dookie, sheared it of most of its charm and songwriting prowess, turned the puerility on full blast and coated it in a radio-friendly, unit-shifting sheen that, fair play to the lads, worked to the tune of 15 million albums sold.
In contrast, Warning didn’t sell one million copies until 2012. In the Green Day Camp, things were looking dire. In an interview with Billboard, Armstrong was asked whether the band had ever truly considered splitting up. He said: “The only time I ever really felt like that was some time around Warning. It was a time where we had to evaluate our situation and our relationship as a band.” Fortunately, that’s exactly what they did. To borrow from Pro-Wrestling parlance, Green Day kicked out at two-and-three quarters. Then, they followed up with a truly astonishing comeback, where they became the biggest band in the world all over again with the 2004 masterpiece American Idiot.
Today, they seem content to be the world’s biggest cult band, playing to a massive, worldwide fanbase that doesn’t seem to be getting any bigger or smaller. Acting as punk rock elder statesmen and having fun doing so, it’d be a cold-hearted soul that holds that against them, but then, the world is stuffed full of them these days. Could they release a record that reignites interest in them a third time? Stranger things have happened, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. After all, they’ve already done it twice, and that’s impressive enough.
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