Foxboro Hot Tubs: The side project Billie Joe Armstrong picked over Green Day
Any side project is usually healthy for an artist who’s been in the business for too long. As much as people like your signature sound, there’s only so many times they can go down to their studio with the same style of songs and have the same passion behind them without going a little bit crazy. Green Day was no exception to that rule, but Billie Joe Armstrong knew he was in dangerous territory when he started having much more fun in Foxboro Hot Tubs.
But I use the term ‘side project’ pretty loosely here. While most of these bands are put together because every band member wants to go their separate ways, Green Day has fully fleshed-out side projects that just happen to have every band member playing on the record because it didn’t fit under the pop-punk label.
Yes, they could still make punk classics like American Idiot, but where the hell were they going to fit the new wave-style music they made as The Network on that record? It would have been like listening to an album by The Clash only to be interrupted halfway through because they wanted to make a Barry Manilow song.
Whereas The Network was a detour into nervy new wave territory, a la Devo, Foxboro Hot Tubs scratched their classics a lot better. Since this was the era when the garage-rock revival sound was on its way out, the band threw their hat into the ring with Stop Drop and Roll, which holds up as one of the better entries in the genre.
From front to end, the album fluctuates between being a sleazy version of Green Day and a modern update of something The Kinks would have done had they broken through in the early 2000s. After a handful of tours under their wild pseudonym, Armstrong remembered having so much fun that he didn’t want to return to Green Day.
When speaking to Kerrang, Armstrong said it never got better than playing that handful of gigs, saying, “It was just such a good fun departure from what we were doing that there was a period when I started liking Foxboro Hot Tubs more than Green Day. I remember guzzling two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer straight down, crawling to the side of the stage, puking, then coming back to the microphone, drinking another can and thinking, ‘Oh my God, I wouldn’t want to be any other place right now! This is badass!’”.
Once the band did regroup, though, what they delivered was one of the most expansive records they ever made. With the help of Butch Vig, their collective recharge helped turn 21st Century Breakdown into a mammoth record, complete with ballads like ‘Restless Heart Syndrome’ juxtaposed with harsh indictments of religion like ‘East Jesus Nowhere’.
And while Green Day have been riding high ever since the release of Saviors, it might do them some good to dip their toes back into garage rock once again. I mean, The Network got their eventual second record, but if Foxboro Hot Tubs got the chance to stretch, maybe we could have been spared some of the more boring parts of their album trilogy or almost half of Father of All…
