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NAVIGATION
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 Billie Joe Armstrong was brought into this world on February 17, 1972, the youngest of six children. His father was a jazz musician and a truck driver, while his mother was a waitress at a local resturant named Rod's Hickory Pit as well as a huge country music fan. Billie started singing when he was just 5 years old. He would go around to hospitals and sing to the patients to make them feel better. Then he got to record his first song, "Looking for Love" at a local recording company named Fiat Records. Billie's father finally decided to give him an electric guitar, the infamous "Blue". Billie still uses Blue to this day and has several replicas of it. The guitar would be the last gift his father would ever give him. At the age of 10, Billie's father died of cancer to the esophagus which spread throughout his body. His mother continued to work at Rod's Hickory Pit in Vallejo, California, to support herself and her six kids. Billie Joe and Mike later worked there as busboys.Billie was 10 when he met Mike Dirnt in the school cafeteria in 1982. Then him and his two brothers Matt and Eric were introduced to punk rock. Soon Billie, Mike, and a drummer named John formed a punk band and named themselves Sweet Children. One day before his 18th birthday, and halfway through his senior year of high school, Billie dropped out of school to devote all his time to Sweet Children. He knew what he wanted to do: play music. John soon left the band to attend college, so a new drummer named Tre Cool was recruited. Later, Sweet Children was renamed Green Day. Before they knew it, they were traveling all over the country with little money and staying at fan's houses. It was in Minneapolis in 1990 when Billie first laid eyes on his future wife, a girl named Adrienne Nesser. They dated awhile and then were married on July 2, 1994, a 5 minute ceremony. The day after their wedding, Adrienne found out she was pregnant. Their son, Joseph Marcicano Armstrong, was born in March of 1995. Three years later on September 12, 1998, another boy, Jakob Danger was added to the Armstrong family. Today, Billie, Adrienne, Joseph, and Jakob reside in Berkeley, California. |
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 Michael Ryan Pritchard, now known as Mike Dirnt, was born on May 4, 1972 into poverty. Mike's mother was a heroin addict. He was given up for adoption when he was a baby. During his childhood, he went between familes for awhile. When Mike was just 6 years old, his foster parents got divorced, so Mike settled with his adoptive mother and older sister. Mike met Billie when they were in 5th grade in the school cafeteria, and they have been best friends ever since. Eventually, Mike even rented a room in Billie's house, and worked along side of Billie's mom at Rod's Hickory Pit. Both Billie and Mike were fascinated by punk rock music, and later the pair formed Sweet Children. Unlike Billie, Mike earned good grades in high school, and he even completed some courses at a local community college.Mike married his long time girlfriend Anastasia in 1996 and their daughter, Estella-Desiree was born in April 1997. Mike loves his daughter very much, and his nickname for her is "Hero". Today, Mike and Anastasia are separated, but still remain very good friends. He currently resides in Oakland, California.
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 Frank Edwin Wright III was born December 9, 1972, making him the youngest member of Green Day. He lived in the Mendocino mountains, California with his dad and his 2 older siblings. His dad, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, decided the move the family there to insulate them upon his return to the United States. Tre's closest neighbor was none other than Lookout! Records owner Lawrence Livermore, who also owned the punk band the Lookouts. At age 12, Livermore recruited Tre to join The Lookouts, and that's when Livermore gave him the name of Tre Cool (which means Very Cool in French). After Green Day's first tour around the country (following the release of 39/Smooth), John Kriftmeyer decided to leave Green Day. Looking no farther than Gilman Street, Billie Joe and Mike recruited Tre, who was already a 5 year veteran of the Gilman Street scene.Tre decided to drop out of high school his sophmore year. However, he did pass an equivalency test and earned his GED, and he even began taking classes at a nearby community college. He had to drop out of college however, when the demands of Green Day's touring intensified. Tre's father, who owns a small trucking company, overhauled a used bookmobile, and even served as the driver on three seperate tours. "I watched them go from a bunch of kids to a group of musicians with work eithic," says Tre's father, Frank Wright. "On their first tour or two, it was more of a party than anything else. I still scratch my head and say, 'How in the hell did they make it?' They used to practice in my living room here -- a lot of the songs they did on Dookie. You hear it coming together, and you don't expect people are going to go out and buy it. But when it does, you just say, 'Wow, that's so cool.'" (Rolling Stone, January 26, 1995).Tre had a daughter named Ramona in January of 1995, then he married his long time girlfriend Lisea Lyons in March. Him and Lisea are divorced now, but Tre remarried in May of 2000, to Claudia. Claudia and him have a son named Frankito, which means "Little Frank". Tre and Claudia divorced in 2003, but they still live together with Frankito in Oakland, California. Recently, Tre has been linked to Donna C., drummer of The Donnas, however they are no longer together. |
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 The Berklee School of Music, the famed conservatory in Boston, has helped launch the careers of such notable musicians as Quincy Jones, Branford Marsalis and Paula Cole. On the west coast, there's another Berkeley "school" of music -- Berkeley, California, that is, on whose streets the members of Green Day got their less than formal training. Like countless scruffy unknowns, this trio - Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool - got their start in that liberal college town, playing for free at the punk clubs on Gilman Street. Unlike most of those young hopefuls in the East Bay scene, somehow these three became punk rock's most remarkable -- and to some, most unlikely -- success story. They not only gave immaturity a good name, they sold more than 10 million albums and won a Grammy Award in the process. Think of Green Day as the harbingers of a radically revamped California sound: the Beach Boys of "couch surfing."
Armstrong and Dirnt were both born in Rodeo, California, in 1972 and they have been friends since age 10. At age 14, they put together their first band, Sweet Children, which started gigging at the all-ages clubs on Gilman Street. As Green Day, they recorded their first EP, 1,000 Hours, in two days when they were 17 and seniors in high school. Soon, Dirnt graduated, Armstrong dropped out and they started squatting in Oakland, California. Their debut album, with drummer Al Sobrante (real name: Jon Kiffmeyer), was released in 1990 by local indie label Lookout!. When Sobrante left, Dirnt and Armstrong found a friend in arms in Tre Cool (born Edwin Wright III), who had been playing drums with the Lookouts since age 12. (Tre, who grew up near Mendicino, was also a neighbor of Lookout! Records founder Lawrence Livermore.) Cool made his Green Day debut on the band's second album, Kerplunk.
Green Day built its following the old-fashioned way -- they earned it. Before they even hooked up with a major label, the band had already completed five national tours, driving their renovated bookmobile coast to coast and crashing on friends' and fan's floors. Pandemonium struck when their Reprise debut, Dookie, was released and Green Day introduced an ever-expanding audience to the energy and insanity of punk rock. With the 14 loud'n'fast tunes of Dookie clocking in at only 39 minutes, 1993 suddenly sounded more like 1977. Soon, Green Day's songs about picking scabs, pyromania and masturbation had become unofficial national anthems. Green Day was singing about its own distinct form of malcontent, but it seemed there was a world of followers who felt their pain and wanted to laugh --and mosh -- along with it. Immaturity was cool again. Dookie went on to sell more than 10 million copies in the U.S. alone, and Green Day won a Grammy in 1994 for "Best Alternative Music Performance." Of course, this led some of the gang back on Gilman Street to cry "sell-out" and "mainstream," but one listen to Green Day and you'd know this wasn't some watered- down white-bread punk designed to impress your parents.
On their next album, Insomniac, and especially on their latest, Nimrod, Green Day has managed to stay true to the punk attitude while proving they're not just one-trick ponies or even three-chord monkeys. On Nimrod, note the surf-style instrumental, "Last Ride," and the string section of "Good Riddance," which was featured prominently on an episode of ER and the final installment of Seinfield. The members of Green Day, who got married and had kids, have obviously matured -- at least a little bit. But Billie Joe and the boys aren't aging too gracefully. Sometimes they can still be wonderfully cranky and crass: "The wife's a nag and the kid's f**king up/I don't have sex cause I can't get it up," Armstrong sings in "The Grouch."
Green Day didn't reinvent anything, but they did reintroduce both the anger and the exuberance, as well as the off-the-wall humor, of punk into the popular conciousness - paving the way for other in-your-face acts like the Offspring and Rancid. While Dookie in and of itself became the soundtrack for a new generation of the young and the restless, Green Day has also proved it has staying power beyond such a career- defining commercial success. The band members asked the musical question, "Do you have the time to listen to me whine?" and we still answer with a resounding yes. |
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© 2005 Dennis
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