“Grandiose style”: the rock legends Billie Joe Armstrong never fully embraced
Not every band that sells a million records will be for everybody. There are plenty of rock fans who go nuts whenever they hear a guitar lick by Boston, but if you try to throw those same people into a room full of fans of bands like Korn, there’s a good chance that their heads might explode due to how intense everything can be. And while Green Day have prided themselves on being fairly open-minded when it comes to all forms of rock and roll, Billie Joe Armstrong knew that there were some pieces of the genre that were never going to be his cup of tea.
Then again, all forms of rock music have brought Armstrong to where he is today. Even though punk and progressive rock are two poles opposites most of the time, there’s a good chance that an album like American Idiot would not have been able to exist had the band not focused on projects like The Wall first.
Those kinds of punk rules never exactly applied to Green Day, though. Every single punk fan was supposed to be scared of the mainstream and want nothing more than to spit in the face of every single pop star they came across but when Armstrong was writing songs that were indebted to pop-rock acts like Cheap Trick and The Jam, why the hell would you want to stay in the punk squalors until the end of time?
But when you’re playing to stadiums across the world, you have to rely on more than the punk bands in your record collection to entertain a crowd. And while Armstrong was more than happy to fall back on his love of heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath and Van Halen, there is no mathematical way to put on a great live show and not include at least a little bit of Queen in your repertoire.
“I think I like the idea of Queen more than I like Queen.”
Billie Joe Armstrong
Compared to every other massive rock act that came before or after them, Freddie Mercury owned the stage and devoured any audience in front of him. Although their brand of stadium rock is still among the finest ever made, Armstrong had to admit that he was far from their biggest fan behind the scenes.
Despite them playing tunes like ‘We Are the Champions’ live and using ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as their entrance music for the past few years, Armstrong admitted that he can only stomach so much of them at a time, saying, “I think I like the idea of Queen more than I like Queen, ’cause I can’t sit there and name every song on A Night at the Opera. I like Freddie Mercury’s kind of grandiose style, and I like all the harmonies. Songs like ‘Killer Queen’ are great. But I’m not a person who puts on a Queen record all the time.”
And upon going through their discography, you can see where Armstrong’s taste dips in and out of Queen’s catalogue. There are tunes like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that served as a breeding ground for him to come up with tracks like ‘Jesus of Suburbia’, but there’s no way that he was going to go 100% Mercury and start writing fanciful showtunes like on ‘Seaside Rendezvous’.
Because for all of the music in his collection, Armstrong was interested in a song that made him feel something, and Queen were never that kind of band. They wanted to experiment with every genre under the sun, but Armstrong needed a song to grab him by the throat or have a knockout chorus to get him on board.
