Why Billie Joe Armstrong never liked Pink Floyd: “I’m too impatient”
Every piece of Green Day’s music has been indebted to the world of classic rock. As much as Billie Joe Armstrong may have been drawing from artists like Operation Ivy and Crimpshrine when he was cutting his teeth in the Bay Area, he was just as liable to take a few cues from The Beatles whenever he wrote his masterpieces, turning in odes to the rock and roll of old in the later half of his career. While Armstrong was never a snob about his musical taste, he never considered one of the biggest bands in the world to be a particular favourite.
Then again, any form of classic rock would have probably been spat in the face in Armstrong’s native punk rock squalor. As opposed to the tunefulness of acts like Ramones, most bands that populated haunts like 924 Gilman Street focused on making a more dissonant approach to punk music.
When first coming up on the scene, though, Green Day was the diamond in the rough, having a specific musical foundation that no other musician could match. For all of the bands that wanted to hammer out a fistful of power chords and scream at the top of their lungs, Armstrong’s songs were much more thought, even containing the dreaded vocal harmonies that were hard to come by in punk rock.
Although Armstrong’s melodic sensibilities would serve him well when working on Dookie, he never wanted to play three-chord punk forever. As the band continued to evolve throughout the late 1990s, Armstrong continued experimenting with writing a traditional pop-punk song before finally settling on a concept record in the 2000s with American Idiot. Aimed squarely at the Bush administration, Amrstrong’s magnum opus would also be a love letter to the rock he loved as a kid, including references to artists like The Beatles, Tom Petty, and Bruce Springsteen.
While the album catered to the model of a rock opera, Armstrong made it clear that he didn’t want to dip his toes into progressive rock as Pink Floyd did on The Wall. When talking about the band’s approach to music at the time, Armstrong would say that he had no time to listen to Roger Waters’s take on prog, saying, “I’ve never been into Pink Floyd, ever. To me, Pink Floyd was always the ultimate example of beating around the bush. I’m too impatient for that kind of thing. I mean, I have massive respect for Pink Floyd. Without them, we couldn’t have made a record like American Idiot.”
As Armstrong came up with his lavish conceptual pieces, he would always flock to the way Pete Townshend would construct operas in the vein of Tommy. Akin to tracks like ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’, Armstrong eventually took bits and pieces from song fragments and put them into one epic story across tracks like ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ and ‘Homecoming’, providing unique bookends to the album’s storyline.
That influence would continue into the band’s next album, 21st Century Breakdown, where some aspects of the story would be broken into a three-act play across the track listing. Even though they were flirting with different progressive rock ideas, Armstrong still wanted to keep the foundation of pop alive in their sound, explaining, “Green Day have always come from that power pop side, whether it’s The Who, Cheap Trick, or The Jam. I think the root of pop pun is power pop — that kind of songwriting.”
