The best performance Billie Joe Armstrong ever witnessed: “Straight-up aggression”
Whatever your opinion on Billie Joe Armstrong, there’s no denying his knack for putting on a good show. The way he stirs up the perfect electrical storm among the audience is like he wields the lightning himself. It’s interesting, then, to consider the one show that changed his attitude on the entire thing at the young age of 13.
In all fairness, Armstrong has probably been able to establish such an onstage intensity because he’s never pretended to be anything else. From the beginning, even in their more gritty, authentic punk days (before drawing labels like sell-out, overly commercial, and everything in between), there was a sense about Green Day that made them feel different, even if they knowingly looked the part.
But it was always underscored by an authenticity, the kind that proved they never really cared all that much for what people thought, so long as they were doing something that made people talk. As Armstrong once said, “I was never Mr Hardcore. When we first started playing together, there was a big trend of who can play the fastest. And it was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that’. That’s not really musical for me. It became almost a bit macho, which is something we were definitely trying to get away from.”
This thinking factored into his attitude towards music, too. At age 13, he felt he’d already fallen victim to the snootiness of being a young, impressionable music lover, turning his nose up at anything that didn’t seem “real” enough for his attention. This was the exact mood he found himself in the moment he witnessed REM perform in his school gymnasium, with his fully-realised preconceptions making him completely unsuspecting of the feeling that was about to rush over him like a perfect storm.
Most musicians have that moment, the one where everything suddenly clicks into place and they realise what they want to put their minds to for the rest of their lives. But for Armstrong, it wasn’t just a nice surprise that made him transition from loyal metalhead to a more open minded music lover, it exuded a certain energy he carried with him into his own career which might not have made sense before, but once it kicked in, there was nothing you could do except get swept up in the moment.
“They played in this high school gymnasium in Santa Cruz,” he recalled during an MTV interview in 1995. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, they’re not metal, dude’. And I went, and it was like a religious experience for me. They say every seven years there’s a certain moment that changes your life; I think that was definitely one of them. It wasn’t so much the music or the band so much as the whole atmosphere.”
Recalling how it felt more punk than most other experiences, he said: “It was anger. It was straight-up aggression”.
The fact that REM aren’t usually considered metal, punk, or even rock to some proves the visceral appeal of Green Day, too, and that, sometimes, it’s just about that feeling in the moment that makes something primal such that it transcends the music itself. It’s much like during many of Armstrong’s shows when it’s less about the music and more about the experience itself. Whatever anyone thinks of the band, there’s no denying how they replicate that simplistic energy in their own shows, like a perfect storm.
And, all things considered, that’s the only thing that matters, even when everything else is defined by aimless criticism. As Armstrong notes, “Whatever the criticisms were, though, I had enough of a chip on my shoulder that I wasn’t going to let anybody hold me down”.
