“It’s actually good”: How Billie Joe Armstrong fell back in love with Poison
Every music fan has their fair share of guilty pleasure artists they will keep returning to. Not everything is meant to be played at loud volumes in a public place in one’s music library, and it’s hard to think of a band like Cannibal Corpse secretly jamming to Britney Spears in their spare time before going up onstage to demolish every single person in the crowd. And when it came to Billie Joe Armstrong, anything remotely commercial would have been considered taboo when Green Day first hit it big.
Then again, “pop” was never a dirty word for Armstrong. His heroes were always bands like The Beatles and Cheap Trick, so it wasn’t out of the question to have songs on his records that people actually want to listen to. When they decided to break free from their punk roots on Dookie, it didn’t take long for every single one of their peers to call them “sell-outs”, which is more than a little bit strange.
The whole point behind 1990s rock was about making rooms for bands that were left of the dial, and since Nirvana had the same kind of punk roots, why not try to make a bid to get a song about masturbation on the radio like ‘Longview’? Green Day kept trucking along like they could have cared less, and by the time they had reached American Idiot, they had finally embraced the idea that it was pretty cool to be a rockstar.
They may have come from the kind of generation that saw fame as an embarrassment, but by playing the role of St Jimmy when performing the tune, Armstrong became the archetype for what a theatrical version of a gutter-rat punk was supposed to be. And whether most wanted to admit it or not, that kind of theatricality came from listening to a lot of hair metal from the pre-punk days.
Despite the spandex and hairspray crowd being the most uncool thing in the world when Green Day started making hits, Armstrong did get a few chops from the LA rock scene. He had been obsessed with Ozzy Osbourne when he was a kid and had learned some licks from Van Halen’s catalogue, but when reminiscing on his musical stomping grounds, he admitted being a bit too hard on bands like Poison.
“I put together a guilty-pleasure mix the other day, and I’ve gotten to like Poison a little bit more. I think their first album was actually pretty good.”
Billie Joe Armstrong
Bret Michaels was already the poster boy for everything wrong with Los Angeles circa 1988, but Armstrong was willing to give him his flowers as well, saying, “I put together a guilty-pleasure mix the other day, and I’ve gotten to like Poison a little bit more. I think their first album was actually pretty good. ‘I Want Action’—that’s a good swing, man. It’s actually good. It’s hard to look at them, but I think there’s some good shit there.”
And if we’re being fair, the one thing that Poison knew better than anything else was how to nail a good hook. They never claimed to have the same kind of guitar chops as the shredders or the impressive vocal range as everybody else, but there’s a reason why karaoke bars will feature songs like ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ or ‘Talk Dirty To Me’ until the end of time. They knew what their audience wanted, and they pressed those buttons hard whenever they performed.
For all the ridicule that that comment might have earned Armstrong years before, it was a far more mellow take by the 2000s. Green Day had become the spokesmen of rock in many respects by that point, and that meant being respectful to any genre, even if it wasn’t the most glamorous thing to look back on.
