The guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong said he would never be as good as: “I know my limitations”
One of the best things about Billie Joe Armstrong’s approach to guitar playing is that he never takes it too seriously.
While working on Saviors, Armstrong looked to some of his favourite guitarists and songs and channelled the ones that had this knack for bending certain sounds as though they were stories themselves. He mirrored the talents of legends like Angus Young, or sounds like “an old Kinks song”, as he once put it – the things that have a “haywire” feel to it without becoming the sole focus of the song.
But learning that there was never a singular approach to the guitar has been a long journey for Armstrong, especially considering the fact that, in Green Day’s early days, it was all about rhythm. Because it wasn’t just the fact that, as a young kid, he’d simply fallen for players like Young, as well as Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen, it was the transition he’d experience when he realised how people weren’t always impressed by simplicity, especially in competitive spaces.
But this introduced a point of contention that Armstrong had to get over to realise his own voice and his own artistic identity. A point of contention that wasn’t just about picking up a guitar and playing a basic progression, but becoming more advanced and intricate in a way that mirrored the impossible talents of names like Yngwie Malmsteen. “If you wanted to play, you had to be able to play as fast as Yngwie Malmsteen,” Armstrong once told Guitar World.
Coming across people like Malmsteen was frustrating for Armstrong because he knew he’d never be that good, but it was also a necessarily evil that set him on his own path as a guitar player. Not necessarily in terms of greatness but in the way he utilised the instrument as a storytelling tool that serviced the sound of Green Day and shaped the sounds of the pop punk he was at the very forefront of.
And the beginning of that was figuring out why he would never be Malmsteen, and getting to a point of acceptance with it in a way that replaced complacency with productivity. As he explained, “And I was like, ‘Man, then I’m just gonna end up sitting in my room for the rest of my life. I’m never gonna be in a band, ever!’ That’s when my tastes started changing and I started getting more into punk music and alternative, where it was more about rhythm playing.”
He continued, “And also still about great guitar sounds and great solos, but not like the heavy metal thing, which started to become kind of a parody. So what happened was I got more into being an anti-solo guitar player, especially for Dookie. I’ve gotten to a point where I know my limitations, but at the same time I’m really pushing myself to be a better guitar player.”
To his credit, there are elements of Armstrong’s prowess as a guitarist littered all across Green Day’s discography. But weirdly, his shining moment came with Saviors, and not just because he said he “soloed more on this record than any we’ve ever done”. In fact, Saviors pinpointed the two sides of Armstrong’s mindset as a guitar player – the knowledge that he’ll never reach the standards of the heroes, and the greatness that comes with accepting that and still doing whatever it was that his heart wanted to do.
