Working Class Heroes

Born thirty-three years ago in Oakland, California, Billie Joe Armstrong was raised in the blue-collar San Francisco suburb of Rodeo. The youngest of six children of a truck-driver dad and waitress mom, he was a prodigiously gifted singer. At age five, on the urging of a music teacher, he cut a single, "Look for Love," on a tiny local label and went on to play gigs with his part-time drummer dad, Andy. It was a happy childhood, until, when Billie Joe was ten years old, his dad died of cancer. His mother was left to raise Billie Joe and his five siblings on her salary waiting tables at a twenty-four-hour restaurant called Rod's Hickory Pit. "She worked a lot of graveyard shifts," he says. "My brothers and sisters were put in a position where they had to grow up really fast and become parents to me." Then his mom married a man that Billie Joe and his siblings loathed. He retreated into music, and by the time he entered Carquinez Middle School in the fall of 1982, at age eleven, he thought about little else than mastering the guitar. One day, he fell into conversation with another eighth-grader, a skinny blond kid and fellow music fanatic, Michael Ryan Pritchard -- better known today as Mike Dirnt. "The first conversation we ever had was about music and songwriting," says Dirnt. "Right there in the lunchroom."

Dirnt describes himself as someone who has always felt like he's on the "outside looking in." Born in 1972 to a heroin-addict teenage mother, he was given up for adoption at six weeks old. His adoptive parents divorced when he was seven, and he wound up with his mother, a Native American, who had to work three jobs to support the family. "We just never saw her," Dirnt says. "She had to work all the time." Like Armstrong, he took refuge in music, playing guitar in his room. After the friends linked up at Carquinez, they set up a rehearsal space in the Armstrongs' living room and bashed through Van Halen and Motley Crue covers. When Dirnt's mother went broke, lost their home and moved from the area, Dirnt moved into the Armstrong family's garage.

"Your politics, when you're a kid, are just basically whatever your parents are bitching about around the house," says Dirnt. "I remember when I was a little kid hoping that Jimmy Carter would win. I don't know why the fuck I was hoping that. I didn't know him from anything."