The Playlist is my Sisyphean attempt to review every song in an artist’s catalog.
“GREEN DAY”
It’s rare that a band pulls the move of naming a song after themselves. It’s a hard one to justify, like wearing the t-shirt of the band you’re about to see. Look at Bad Company, or Black Sabbath? Those guys found a way to make it work. Green Day, on the other hand, probably never meant to name a song after themselves in the first place. In fact, the band was originally named Sweet Children, only changing their name so as not to run afoul of another Bay Area outfit named Sweet Baby1. And it’s entirely likely the song “Green Day” was written in the Sweet Children days, so the band probably adopted the name after a song they already wrote.
The title, like the song itself, is a reference to smoking pot. A ‘Green Day’ is one where the band would just hang around and smoke up all day. Simple as that. This is a theme the band would come back to on a few of their more popular tunes, but here…
Well, this song definitely sounds like the kind of thing three guys would write while stoned out of their gourds. Musically, it’s all over the place, and not in a good way. There’s a little bit of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” in Billie Joe’s guitar solo, but I realize that’s being extremely generous.
I distinctly recall Billie Joe saying on an episode of VH-1’s Behind The Music that he thinks Green Day is the worst band name ever. I wonder if it’s residual embarrassment for this song, which I’m going to be honest here and say is just not very good.
“GOING TO PASALACQUA”
We’re hitting the part of the album where a lot of the music and lyrics are starting to blend together for me. Or maybe it’s just that the familiar tropes start bearing themselves out here. Because “Going To Pasalacqua” feels like another quintessential Green Day track, a song about a forlorn lover, longing for someone just out of reach. Pretty soon we’re gonna be swimming in a river of sad boy tears with dozens of songs just like this.
But this is one of the standout tracks on this album. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. While the song itself was never released as a proper single, it did get the single treatment years later in a big box set release, suggesting even the band themselves knew what they had with this one.
There’s a universal quality to the writing on this one. It’s vague enough that anyone can relate to it, but also some of the phrasing is specific enough that you feel Billie Joe’s point of view coming through loud and clear.
The question hanging over this one is “Where is Pasalacqua? What, even, is Pasalacqua?” Is it a town? Maybe where the object of our narrator’s affection lives? Or where he’s hoping to meet her? Or is it just a name that sounds good? Obviously not good enough to sing, as the name doesn’t appear in the lyrics anywhere.
According to the enterprising nerds over at genius.com2, Billie Joe says Pasalacqua is a funeral home in Benicia, CA. Knowing that, what the heck is the title “Going to Pasalacqua” supposed to mean? Could be that our narrator is saying he’ll take his unrequited crush to his grave. That’s certainly a universal sentiment. Now if that doesn’t soundlike some purestrain, proto-emo shit, I don’t know what does…
How many teenage crushes go un-requited, un-addressed, un-acted upon? Millions, I’d wager. And the thing about teenagers is they’re making more of them every day. So with a song like “Going to Pasalacqua”, it really sounds like Green Day are dialing into a market that’s going to pay huge dividends down the road.
- If you want to nitpick, the band was originally named Blood Rage. So they really dodged a few bullets when you think about it.
↩︎ - And corroborated by geekstinkbreath.net, a Green Day fan site that doesn’t appear to have updated in nearly a decade.
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