The musician Billie Joe Armstrong called the musical love of his life: “My soulmate”
Most musicians need to be dealing with something more than friendship to last them decades together in a group. Anyone can figure that they are better off working with people who will follow orders whenever they are making their classics, but sometimes it’s that push and pull between artists that makes them so great working together. And while Billie Joe Armstrong has had moments where he felt like the driving force behind Green Day, he knew that he had some collaborators who could never be replaced in his mind.
But from day one, Green Day never seemed to have the kind of bad blood that every other band had to worry about. They had a few stumbling blocks when working with Al Sobrante on their first albums, but once Tre Cool was brought in, they became the kind of well-oiled punk rock machine that could throw down with some of the best artists in the world.
And despite anyone wanting time and space away from their bandmates half the time, Armstrong has kept things fairly insular. There is Pinhead Gunpowder for him to fall back on, and even his Everly Brothers tribute record with Norah Jones was beautifully done, but the Green Day side projects like The Network and Foxboro Hottubs always had the rest of the band working together, albeit in different roles.
The original power trio that put everything together may still be what people have come to see all the time, but Armstrong always felt a greater kinship with Mike Dirnt than anyone else in his life, saying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “Me and Mike met in fifth grade and I was the class clown and he was too, so it was like this ‘Dueling Banjos’. But Mike, you are my musical soulmate, and we’ve been through everything together, and I thank you so much for your friendship.”
Although a lot about Green Day comes down to Armstrong’s fantastic songwriting, one of the most criminally underrated parts of their sound is Dirnt’s bass playing. They played punk, so nothing was centred around being flashy or anything, but Dirnt’s bass playing was often far more technical than anything else that the rest of the punk crowd was playing.
Looking through the Dookie era of their career, all of Dirnt’s basslines are far more intricate than anything that Armstrong was playing, and compared to every other bassist that wanted to pump out the low end and sling their bass around for ages, Dirnt practically put together the punk rock equivalent of a walking bassline in the middle of ‘Longview’ and the co-lead guitarist on ‘When I Come Around’.
But the most important thing Dirnt has done is being able to stick by Armstrong through the darkest moments of their career. The frontman was already in serious trouble when performing at the iHeartRadio festival in 2012, but right after everything broke down, Dirnt knew that the best way for him to move forward was to talk to his friend and get him to a place where he could function again.
And despite them being one of the bigger legacy acts still going today, both Armstrong and Dirnt are still in it for the right reasons as well. Many people of their age would have wanted to hang it up by this point, but they still seem like the same kids who loved jamming together in their garage back in the late 1980s.
