“I declare I don’t care no more”.
A quick drum fill breaks the silence before that opening line brings you in to guitars, punk, weed and teenage angst. The opening to Green Day’s album Dookie has now been gracing the ears of confused adolescents for 21 years this month.
So basically, if Dookie was a person, it would be legally drinking in the US, trying to hide its old punk rock phase, and still listening to Dookie behind closed doors.
As frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told iHeartRadio, “I’ve been around since fucking-nineteen-eight-fucking-eight.” And “I’m not fucking Justin Beiber you motherfuckers,” which is true.
The year is 1988. Starting out in the city of Berkley, California, two high school friends decide to form a band. Mike Dirnt and Billie Joe Armstrong go from jamming Metallica in the basement to writing their own tunes. Joined by drummer Al Sabronte (who would leave the band a few years later, and then go on to experience Pete Best levels of regret), and then Tre Cool, the band started writing songs that took the foundation of bands like The Clash, The Ramones and Descendents, and blurred the lines of what punk could be.
Green Day (originally called Sweet Children) came out of the punk rock scene in California, which in the late ’80s/early ’90s was white hot. Starting out as show openers at the iconic Gilman Street venue (a room that can tie with CBGBs for its punk rock history), the band took influence from other local acts such as Isocrazy and Operation Ivy (seriously. Go listen to Op Ivy.) and joined the infamous Lookout! Records, releasing two albums before finally breaking through and signing to a major label, which of course angered tru-punk across California.
Dookie, Green Day’s third album, is a punk rock gem. It’s loud and snotty, but also catchy and poppy. The album’s cover is one of the great pieces of album art. It’s chaotic and cartoon-y, but every time you look at it there’s something new to notice. Musically, it was the best album Green Day had made so far. They had taken some of the pop shine off their old songs and given it a sharper edge. The melodies were still there, the pop hooks were on every song, but there was a punk energy that they didn’t have before.
Great moments run through the album: the drum fill in ‘Burnout’, the famous bass line in ‘Longview’, and the opening lines of ‘Basket Case’ are all moments that get the nostalgia running. Dookie is teenage angst personified. Let me break down the tracklisting for you:
1. Smoking weed/hating everyone
2. Hating everyone
3. Jerks from high school
4. Being bored/masturbating
5. Moving out of your mum’s house
6. Hating everything/girls
7. Feeling insane
8. Girls
9. Girls
10. Girls
11. Sexuality
12. People change
13. Jerks from high school
14. Jerks from high school
15. (BONUS TRACK) Masturbating
Green Day were a band that got you; they understood you. Hell, a few years ago they were you. They were three confused teenagers out of a small California town now thrust into the mainstream. This was an album that was written like it was going to be played in a bedroom, but accidentally sold ten million copies in the US alone. The death of Kurt Cobain left a hole in every misunderstood teenager’s heart, and Green Day were there to pick up the pieces.
Their live show was raucous, bringing the energy of those small Cali shows to the big stage. They had a mudfight at Woodstock, they performed naked sometimes, and they started a riot in Boston. Their live show was all killer, no filler.
Green Day spent the rest of the decade being one of the ’90s greatest punk bands, before finally breaking through the glass ceiling with American Idiot, and moving into the upper echelon to become one of the world’s biggest bands. Green Day now sit on the top of the rock music pile, looking a little bit like a trio of daggy dads. They’re in their mid-40s taking selfies, they’re having breakdowns on live TV, and they’re releasing one great album across a whole trilogy. They might be trying and failing to recapture that Dookie spirit, but there’s no doubt that this was the album that influenced a generation.
