“I could never put my mind on”: The first guilty pleasure Billie Joe Armstrong ever had
No music fan is safe from having at least a few guilty pleasures spread throughout their record collection. As much as people might claim to be ride-or-die for a genre like grunge back in the 1990s, there’s a good chance that those same kids also had a copy of a Mariah Carey CD stashed away in their room that they hoped no one would find. While Billie Joe Armstrong always claimed to have an eclectic ear for music, he always had a soft-rock guilty pleasure.
Considering Armstrong’s background in punk, though, anything outside of the genre would normally have been spat at. Remember that Green Day came from the underground Bay Area punk scene, and that normally meant having a lot more interest in bands like Operation Ivy while also talking shit about anyone who dared to wear a Poison T-shirt into any punk squalor.
Armstrong never saw music that way, though. He grew up listening to anything he could get his hands on, which generally meant playing a fair bit of metal back in the day. Even though most bands of their ilk relied on power chords half the time, Armstrong was one of the few people in the area who could feasibly play an approximation of Van Halen’s ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love’ when he played his first gigs.
Because even if it wasn’t punk, Armstrong related to the human aspect behind the music. Even if The Replacements were closer to alternative when they started to make waves in the underground scene, records like Tim and Pleased to Meet Me were equally indebted to the punk ethos as they were to the giants of power pop like Cheap Trick and Big Star.
Despite Armstrong’s love of heavy rock and roll, Fleetwood Mac was the first time he got into something a bit softer. Gone were all the loud guitars, and in their place were massive productions that sounded like they were coming from a completely different world whenever songs like ‘Landslide’ or ‘Dreams’ came on the radio.
While Armstrong was still neck-deep in bands like Van Halen at that point, he could still appreciate what Fleetwood Mac was doing at the time, saying, “My sister, Anna, she listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac. The first feeling I felt of having a guilty pleasure was Fleetwood Mac. I don’t know why but there was something very earth-tones about it that I could never really put my mind on.”
Even if Armstrong only listened to those songs in passing, it only takes a few notes to permanently etch themselves on someone’s subconscious. Fast forward to the 2000s, and some of the softer moments on 21st Century Breakdown are as indebted to Stevie Nicks as they are to The Beatles or Ramones, like the tenderness of ‘Last Night on Earth’ or the beginning of ‘Restless Heart Syndrome’.
At this point in his career, though, chances are that Armstrong has done away with what the definition of ‘guilty pleasure’ even means. Because if it sounds good to you, there should be no shame in admitting it.
