The one Green Day tour Billie Joe Armstrong hated: “It just sucked”
The road can usually be a musician’s best friend and worst enemy at the same time. It might be nice to get out of the studio environment for a while, but it only takes people three or four shows before they realise that they’ve committed years to living on a bus and not being able to see their families for extended periods of time. It all should come back to the love of playing music, though, and Billie Joe Armstrong was not having any fun when Green Day went out on tour to support Insomniac.
By the time Green Day started gaining traction as everyone’s favourite childish punks, they had garnered more than a few enemies as well. Throughout their time in the California punk scene, the amount of fans they earned one gig at a time was thrown out the window the minute they signed to a major label. Either this new album had to work, or they would return to their old stomping grounds as one of the biggest embarrassments to their local scene.
Dookie didn’t just deliver, though…it was a musical version of a nuclear bomb. In the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, a lot of fans found an outlet for their anger with Green Day, returning to the kind of snotty pop tunes that made them love rock and roll in the first place, like ‘Longview’ and ‘Welcome to Paradise’.
The album would also become legendary in the punk sphere, being one of the only punk albums to have achieved Diamond certification. Green Day may have been on top of the world, but no label will make an album that big and not get their money’s worth from the band out on the road the next time around.
After the band went into the studio for the album Insomniac, their harsh approach to the punk backlash earned them even more fans, leading to them going from small theatres and support slots to headlining their own festivals. It may have been a dream come true from a marketing standpoint, but not so much for the band.
When speaking with Alan Di Perna, Armstrong admitted that he never liked working in those venues at the start of his career, saying, “Playing those huge arenas really sucked. I tried to be optimistic about it, but it just sucked. That’s not our thing. We’re a three-piece, tight-knit band, and we belong in a tight-knit room. I think we belong in theatres”.
Given that Green Day had never played outside of their traditional punk rock squats, being thrown into the world of arena rock probably wasn’t the smoothest of transitions. It also didn’t help that the sell-out backlash from their old stomping grounds came back around, with many “true punks” showing up at their shows specifically to boycott the band.
Although Armstrong had his reservations, that didn’t mean that the band’s momentum was about to stop. After becoming one of the biggest names in music, they would turn the arena into their new home, eventually making the music that sounds amazing in arenas on albums like American Idiot. Artists may have a clear vision in mind for what they want out of their career, but once you hit the big time, you don’t really have a say in how big you get anymore.
