Before we can begin our journey together, we need to establish where we came from.
Believe it or not, there was once a time when I wasn’t an insufferable movie nerd. My first cultural love was music. Growing up, my parents fed me a steady diet of pop and rock music in all its forms. Dad’s station was WKRR, Rock 92.3, which trafficked in quintessential classic rock: Led Zeppelin, Queen, Meat Loaf, The Rolling Stones, etc. You know, Dad Rock. He loved this stuff, and he’d make sure to crank the car radio up really loud anytime AC/DC’s “For Those About To Rock” came on. He taught me when and how to shout “FIRE!” like Brian Johnson before the cannons went off at the end of the song.
Mom’s station was Oldies 93.1, which played everything else. From Motown hits to 70s disco, and especially all the 60s British Invasion acts, which of course included The Beatles. If dad’s group was AC/DC, mom had The Beatles. Like any boomer parents, my folks had a hi-fi system with a record player and a CD/tape player to match, with big three-foot high speakers sitting right there in the living room. Our house was filled with music, and from an early age I learned to appreciate all of it. Spending time with my grandparents even brought country/western music into my orbit. Not that I actually liked much of it at the time. I appreciate it more now, but that’s because it was in the mix from an early age.
So naturally, around the age of 9 or 10, when I learned the radio had *other* stations, I started to branch out on my own. I learned about popular music that my parents weren’t necessarily aware of (or more likely just not interested in). I first heard Mariah Carey and Madonna at a friend’s house. His older sister would blast that music, probably to drown out the sounds of whatever video games he and I were playing. Pop music was floating in the ether, but I was only vaguely aware of it as “girl music”.
But as time wore on, I started to develop my own taste in music. This was 1996, so the grunge movement was dead (but not entirely gone), and mainstream rock had morphed into something slightly more palatable. Hootie & the Blowfish blew up the year before with their debut album, “Cracked Rear View”, which seemed tailor-made for suburban dads everywhere. Yes, of course we had a copy. And of course I loved it too. “Only Wanna Be With You” was the big, goofy pop hit, but I always found myself hitting repeat on “Time”. To this day, dad says “Let Her Cry” is one of his favorite songs, though I’m not sure what that says about him…
Then the copycats and also-rans jumped into the fray. The Wallflowers, Matchbox 20, Semisonic, Fastball. These were the bands that pop rock radio started pushing, and the ones whose videos played on VH-1 all the time1. These, incidentally, were also the groups that formed my first real identity as a music fan. 90s mainstream rock that was mostly inoffensive, and classic rock adjacent (“Classic Rock Adjacent” might as well be Jakob Dylan’s middle name).
1996-1998 was my prime ‘getting into music’ phase. I started using my allowance to buy CDs from the bands listed above, but also other stuff. Movie soundtracks and weirdo pop albums piqued my interest, hard rock started sneaking in there, and I even began exploring the short-lived history of grunge music. (The day I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a revelation, as it was with most people in the early-to-mid-90s). Friends broadened my horizons with their own tastes in music. A little bit of hip-hop crept in here, a little electronica there…
At one point I wound up with this little green bag that I’d carry with me on all our family road trips. In it, I kept a portable CD player, a set of headphones, and all the necessary plugs and chargers for use in long car rides. My brother was still playing our Gameboy, but I graduated to a Discman. I’d listen to my CDs on car trips, playing favorite songs on repeat, playing whole albums on shuffle, and swapping out discs constantly.
On my 12th birthday, I got a carrying case for my burgeoning CD collection. The case was covered in black foam padding on either side, clicking shut with a green plastic latch. On one side of the case I put a sticker of Kyle from South Park. This was 1998, so probably right around the time I first started watching that show (many years too young, to be honest). And on the other side, I would place a band decal that I found at the North Carolina State Fair. It was an album cover from a band that I knew I liked, but hadn’t worked my way up to this particular album just yet. It was their biggest hit, their breakthrough album that put them on the national stage, and into the faces of impressionable kids all over. I’d get my hands on the album soon enough, but for now, I was simply fascinated with the idea of anyone would let a rock band make an album titled “Dookie”.
In 1997, Green Day was riding high on their 5th album, “Nimrod”, a sprawling 18-track punk rock opus where the band seemed desperate to reassert that, yes, we are still totally punk rock. Buried at the bottom of the tracklist was “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”, an acoustic ballad that became the surprise hit off the album, and likely tricking millions of parents into thinking this album was okay to buy for their kids. I know this, because it worked for me. My mom loved the song. She sang it around the house often enough. But I had seen the music video for “Nice Guys Finish Last” on VH-1 a couple times, which was what got me hooked in the first place.
To make a long story short, I had quickly become enamored with this trashy pop punk outfit who was making loud, annoying music that my parents weren’t particularly thrilled about, but were speaking to things I was starting to feel in my own adolescence. It was the right music at the right time. I was determined to become a Green Day fan.
And over time, I did! I picked up as many of their albums as I could find, from the aforementioned “Dookie” to the weird middle-child record “Insomniac”, and from there I’d follow the group through a greatest hits record, “Warning”, and eventually their real magnum opus, “American Idiot”. But I was never a completist. There are still plenty of gaps in my Green Day knowledge. So I want to do a career-spanning retrospective, looking at the band’s entire body of work. And if this takes off (and I actually complete it), I’ll dig into other artists’ discographies later!
2024 seems like a good time to do something like this, too. It’s the 30th anniversary of Dookie, and the 20th anniversary of American Idiot. The ten-year gap in between those albums more or less represents the decade in which I grew up, bookends for my teenage years in which I first discovered my love of music, discovered other loves along the way, and finally entered my college years, ready to tackle adulthood with all the ferocity a mild-mannered suburban kid can muster.
So here’s what I want to do: I want to go through the entire Green Day catalog start to finish, song by song. I want to see how the band got started, go through their heyday with some nostalgic thoughts of my own, and then finally dig into the band’s more recent catalog, which spans nearly 20 years of albums I never bothered to catch up on. Until now. Is this a ridiculous task? Maybe. Will I have anything to say about most of these? There’s only one way to find out! Hey we gotta start this blog somewhere, right?
- Our household did not have MTV. That’s a story for another day. ↩︎
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