Foxboro Hottubs: The 1960s-inspired side project by Green Day
It’s not exactly hard to pinpoint why Green Day fall under the ‘punk rock’ banner on 90% of their records. They may have far more eclectic taste than other punk rock bands, but no one listens to a song like ‘Basket Case’ or ‘Longview’ and does not think that it was birthed from the same music as Ramones decades before. Billie Joe Armstrong was always just a fan of a good song, and after they had conquered the world a second time, it was time to have some fun.
If Dookie had turned the band into global megastars during the 1990s, American Idiot was when they hit the reset button on their career. They may have been pushed to make the same type of pop-punk after going through a major low point on Warning, but Armstrong wasn’t looking just to roll over and make ‘When I Come Around 2: Still Coming’.
The band still had something to say, and the sharp pivot towards political pop-punk was enough to stop everyone in their tracks. After putting together their punk rock opera, though, any band would most likely have a record executive breathing down their necks and wondering when they can get three more albums that sound like that. Although they may have made the questionable decision of letting go of their original producer Rob Cavallo, getting Butch Vig for 21st Century Breakdown ensured that the band weren’t in shaky hands.
Before they tried their hand at making their second rock opera, the band decided to put together a completely different group. Although they may have started the American Idiot sessions by blowing off steam as their band, The Network, the album Stop Drop and Roll by Foxboro Hottubs was a much different animal.
Whereas the band were making some of the slickest music that they had ever done in their main outfit, this is the kind of garage rock album that feels like it could have been thrown together in a weekend. Instead of the usual pop-punk or even their softhearted sound, these songs feel like they’ve been pulled directly out of 1966, brandishing that kind of ramshackle energy of acts like the MC5.
Since Armstrong usually had a guitar strapped across his back throughout Green Day’s tenure, this was his opportunity to get in touch with the superstar frontman that he had always been, especially when making songs that sounded like Ramones by way of The Kinks on ‘Ruby Room’ and ‘Alligator’, the latter of which is practically a rewrite of ‘You Really Got Me’.
While the group may not have thought enough of these songs to be Green Day tracks, some of them even surpass what they did on their next album. ‘Mother Mary’ is one of the best power-pop songs that the 1960s never spit out, and ‘The Pedestrian’ feels like the kind of song you listen to right before you hit the city on a Friday night.
Even though this was meant to get the band’s retro fix out of their system, some of the lessons they learned on this album ended up bleeding into their rock opera. The guitars may have been louder, but the band balanced their love of bands like The Beatles on ‘Last Night on Earth’ with this kind of garage rock angle, like the slap-in-the-face guitar line running throughout ‘Horseshoes and Handgrenades’.
While the band have never released a proper follow-up to Stop Drop and Roll, some of the band’s lesser albums of the past few tend to feel like the sloppy seconds of their side project. The good parts of their album Dos could easily fit on a Foxboro Hottubs project, and the entire aesthetic of Father of All Motherfuckers would work perfectly under that banner had they not sounded like dads trying to sound hip with the kids.
Considering how much of Green Day’s most recent output is indebted to that retro sound, it might be time for a full-scale Foxboro Hottubs revival. The garage rock revival may have started to die out around the 2010s, but even in a genre that they were just getting used to, Green Day were still masters of making rough-and-tumble rock classics.
