“One of my biggest regrets”: Green Day and their contentious first drummer
Despite being a snotty little punk band coming up in the same Bay Area scene that gave the world cult heroes like Dead Kennedys and Operation Ivy, Green Day were an absolute no-brainer. A band of supernaturally talented young men, each with model-good looks, built around a once-in-a-generation songwriter with a seemingly limitless supply of absurdly catchy sunbeam pop hooks to his name.
There’s no suit in this world out of touch enough to turn that kind of package deal down, whatever the style of music they played. They were always going to be a big deal. However, the moment Nirvana dropped ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and a scrappy, underdog punk band suddenly became the biggest band in the world, Green Day seemed like the ideal band to replicate that breakout success.
Did you know that band mascot, certifiable maniac, and absolutely phenomenal drummer Tré Cool was not an original part of that package deal? It’s true. Green Day have always been the brainchild of singer/songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong, along with his childhood best friend and bassist Mike Dirnt.
They formed the very first version of Green Day as Sweet Children when they were 15 years old, and a year later, their first seemingly permanent drummer was found in the form of John Kiffmeyer. A man known to the Bay Area scene by his stage name Al Sobrante.
How did John Kiffmeyer join Green Day?
Kiffmeyer was a few years older than Dirnt and Armstrong and had already spent a few years playing with fellow punkers Isocracy. His contacts actually got the band their first gigs playing in the Bay Area scene they made famous. These gigs were so good that they resulted in them signing their first record deal with Lookout Records. An interview Armstrong gave in 2009 to Larry Livermore, the founder of Lookout, elaborated on Kiffmeyer’s influence in the band’s early days.
He said, “He was a big influence to us. We were so young, and he’s a really smart person. We learned a lot from him. He was already a veteran of the scene with Isocracy. He knew so much, and he worked really hard.“ The band’s first releases even contained a few of Livermore’s original songs. However, shortly after the band signed that deal, it became clear that Kiffmeyer may not have been as dedicated to the band as Armstrong and Dirnt would have liked him to be.
Armstrong and Dirnt had quit school to focus on the band full-time. Not that they had ever been that focused on school to begin with; they skived off to smoke weed together so many times that all the “green days” they were taking became the new name of the band. Kiffmeyer, on the other hand, had just accepted an offer to study in Arcata, nearly 300 miles away on the northernmost tip of California.
Something which, according to Armstrong, he didn’t even tell the band about, instead letting Armstrong find out through mutual friends of theirs. According to Armstrong, the core issue was a class difference. Armstrong and Dirnt came from very working-class backgrounds, and they felt like music was their only hope.
According to Armstrong, “John had options. He had opportunities, like being able to go to school. And I don’t have anything against that, but I didn’t want to feel like anybody’s side project.” While Kiffmeyer was at college, a friend of the newly christened Green Day and sticksman for fellow punk band The Lookouts, Frank Wright III, sat in with them so they could play gigs in his absence.
These gigs went so absurdly well that Armstrong and Dirnt made the decision for Wright, known in the scene as Tré Cool, to join the band full-time. Yet Kiffmeyer had other plans. He still saw himself as Green Day’s drummer, and in an all-timer of a dick move, he showed up unannounced at the young Green Day’s biggest show to date in order to carpetbag Tré’s spot behind the kit.
As Armstrong puts it, “There was this big gig with Bad Religion—we were opening for them at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma—and John comes down and suddenly takes the gig away from Tré. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute, Tré has been working with us for months, and you come down to play this one gig?’ That doesn’t seem fair to Tré, who by then was becoming a good friend of ours.”
At the time of the interview, these are events that happened almost two decades previously, yet they still eat away at the frontman. Armstrong says, “That was one of my biggest regrets about Tré. I’m sure he’ll never tell me that it bothered him, but it was a pretty awful thing that we did, letting John play that last big gig.” Legitimately, I think that’s a sign of Armstrong’s fundamentally good nature.
It would be very easy to reason that, since Tré was with them for their ascension into one of the biggest bands in the world, that would make it OK. Not to Armstrong. Fortunately, there’s a happy ending on both sides here. As mentioned, 1994’s Dookie would make Green Day arguably the biggest punk band of all time.
At the same time, Kiffmeyer spent the rest of the decade tooling around in bands before launching a successful career as a director of photography for film and TV. By 2015, all the bad blood was water under the bridge as Kiffmeyer joined Dirnt and Armstrong before Green Day’s headline set at the Cleveland House of Blues. They played a special set of their early numbers as Sweet Children for the first time in nearly 30 years.
