The show Billie Joe Armstrong said should have never happened: “That doesn’t seem fair”
No one goes through the music machine without a few regrets. Although Green Day was always out to have fun, Billie Joe Armstrong did manage to have a few moments that he felt should have been changed over the years. While some were more public than others, the frontman felt that one of his worst moments happened before the band took off.
Then again, the idea of any punk rock band “taking off” in the early 1990s didn’t seem like a feasible idea. Armstrong had studied the guitar licks of people like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen when he was a kid, but he completely understood the fact that he was going to be a lot more interested in playing power-chord songs in punk squalors than growing his hair out and moving to Los Angeles. But something funny happened when 1991 rolled around.
With Nirvana becoming one of the biggest names in music, it suddenly felt like the chances of a punk band signing to a major label were actually going to work. But if Green Day had their sights set on becoming much bigger than their scene in Oakland, they needed to go through a few shakeups before everything looked right, and that all began with the drummer situation.
That’s not to say that John Kiffmeyer was a bad drummer by any stretch. He was fine for the clubs they played in at the time, but the idea of him having a hand as their manager was too much control for any band member. And in the same way that Pete Best made The Beatles a good band with the potential for being great, Kiffmeyer was in the way before Tre Cool came roaring in.
He was a bit younger than Armstrong and Mike Dirnt, but he could already play like a madman before he was out of his teens. Whereas Kiffmeyer could keep the beat going and even throw a handful of fills in for good measure, Green Day finally had their Keith Moon behind the kit when Cool started playing songs like ‘Welcome to Paradise’. But while there didn’t seem to be any hard feelings when they let Kiffmeyer go, there was a chance that things turned sour when he wanted back in later down the line.
Despite Cool already being in the group, Armstrong was a little uneasy when Kiffmeyer insisted on playing one last gig with the band opening for Bad Religion, saying, “John comes down and suddenly takes the gig away from Tre. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, Tre has been working with us for months, and you come down to play this one gig? That doesn’t seem fair.’
“That was one of my biggest regrets about Tre. I’m sure he’ll never tell me that it bothered him, but it was a pretty awful thing that we did. I don’t think [John] deserved to play that gig, because it felt more like he was just showing off.”
For all that Kiffmeyer wanted to show off, though, it’s fair to say that Cool one-upped more than a few times in the years since. There might have been a little bit of resentment on Kiffmeyer’s part, knowing that he had lost the gig, but Cool definitely had a statement to make on the first track on Dookie, ‘Burnout’, where he gives a clinic on how to write some of the best drum fills anyone has ever done.
The band was never meant to be flashy for the hell of it, but in Cool, they found someone who actually served the songs that Armstrong was writing. Kiffmeyer kept the pulse for what Armstrong wanted for a tune, but Cool was the one bringing rhythmic hooks that would stick in your head when the album was over.
