The Green Day song Billie Joe Armstrong compared to The Beatles
Were The Beatles the best band in the world? It’s up for debate, but the fact that the debate rages on six decades after the band’s first song was released shows that there certainly is some credibility to the statement. There are a lot of people out there who believe the band is incredibly overrated, while others say that they deserve all of the praise that they get.
One argument for the fact that The Beatles aren’t overrated is that it wasn’t just their music that has left a lasting impact. Granted, many of their albums, such as Revolver, Abbey Road, and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, definitely influenced the music people were making, but it was more than just sound. The fact that they made it in America changed how British bands marketed themselves overseas.
What Brian Epstein managed to do with The Beatles paved the way for other bands to do the same thing. Billy J Kramer recalled going to the States with Epstein when they were preparing for The Beatles. “I came over with Brian Epstein on a little promo tour in November 1963,” he said, “Brian was setting things up for when The Beatles came over in February.”
Kramer continued, “He had a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. There were lots of meetings with people coming and going. There wasn’t much going on – Cliff Richard had been to America and hadn’t got anywhere. I felt at the time that it would be a difficult market to break – but if anybody could, it would be The Beatles.”
The Beatles seem untouchable because they changed the music industry, but not necessarily because of the songs they wrote. As such, when Billie Joe Armstrong says that he thinks Green Day once wrote a song that sounded like something The Beatles would write, it shouldn’t be received with the controversy that many people might feel tempted to show it.
“The song is such a dark horse,” said Armstrong when discussing the 1995 track ‘Insomniac’, “I had just gotten some recording equipment, and I came up with the riff when I was experimenting with it for the first time: ‘Oh, this is cool. It almost sounds like a harder Beatles song, like ‘My Guitar Gently Weeps’.”
Armstrong was in quite a difficult place when he wrote the track. Similar to The Beatles, Green Day had shot to fame following the release of their album Dookie, and it was difficult trying to keep a hold of their identity as a punk band while they were having the same level of success as pop artists.
“The song is about methamphetamine, not being able to sleep, and staying up all night,” he said, “It was something that was creeping into our punk scene at the time, and I definitely did my experimenting with it. It’s such an evil drug.”
