The Green Day song stolen from The Beatles
One of the most significant crimes a punk band can commit is trying to become a rock star. Even though many get into the music business in an attempt to sell millions of records, the idea of selling out has loomed large over any up-and-coming punk act, with fans wondering if they put their music before the royalty check. While Green Day was proud of their punk ethos throughout every facet of their career, they were just as willing to pull from rock’s past.
Looking through the band’s first few albums, it’s easy to spot where Billie Joe Armstrong was taking inspiration from. Across albums like Dookie, one can pick up just as many influences from Cheap Trick as one could from Sex Pistols, with Armstrong writing the songs meant to get stuck in your head from the first time they came on.
Out of all the bands that Armstrong referenced, no band had as significant an impact as The Beatles. Even before the band got a proper record deal, they initially bonded with their future producer Rob Cavallo because of his knowledge of Beatles songs, with their first conversations being about how to play certain licks by the Fab Four.
While the band were more interested in playing crazed punk rock throughout the 1990s, albums like Nimrod saw them slowly shifting towards classic rock, with tracks like ‘Hitchin A Ride’ having a blues-infused progression and ‘Redundant’ sounding like it could have come off a later-era Beatles record.
Even though fans were concerned about where their favourite punk act was going, Green Day was about to make a quantum leap with the album Warning. Embracing acoustic guitars, much of the album was about bringing an organic flair to the sessions, with Armstrong penning songs that took a good look at society on tracks like ‘Deadbeat Holiday’ and ‘Fashion Victim’.
While the band could still play aggressive songs when they wanted to, ‘Hold On’ would be one of their most personal songs yet. Although the track was intended as a tribute to one of Armstrong’s friends who had been going through intense personal trauma, the band almost scrapped the song because of how much they ripped off a Beatles classic.
From the opening acoustic chords and blaring harmonica from Armstrong, the original version of the tune was copied note-for-note from The Beatles’ ‘I Should Have Known Better’. Since Armstrong knew that he had a killer hook on his hands, though, he decided to go back into the studio and tweak the harmonica part instead of trashing the song.
Speaking with Alan Di Perna, Armstrong knew that the song’s message mattered much more than the plagiarism, saying, “It was just too much. That song was a pretty meaningful one. I didn’t want it to get overshadowed because of some stupid harmonica part”. Outside of ‘Hold On’, though, Armstrong would take massive strides as a songwriter across the rest of the album, critiquing the shallow hole that comes from consumerism on ‘Macy’s Day Parade’.
While fans may not have latched onto the record’s sound then, this would be the calm before the storm before American Idiot, featuring Armstrong writing songs that would become legendary in the Green Day canon like ‘Holiday’ and ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’. Armstrong may have felt insecure about ripping off The Beatles, but just a few albums later, he could write something that would speak to his audience in the same way that the Fab Four did with their audience.
