Working Class Heroes

But when they were fifteen years old, Armstrong and Dirnt first ventured to the punk-rock all-ages club 924 Gilman Street Project, and everything changed. Located beside a canning shop in the gritty warehouse district of Berkeley, 924 Gilman was a graffiti-etched nonprofit drop-in center for legions of tattooed and mohawked punkers who ran the place on a volunteer, co-op basis. Gilman was where Armstrong and Dirnt first fell in love with punk music, and it's where they cut their political teeth.

"We were all pretty much in the same ballpark when it came to politics," says Jesse Townley, a longtime volunteer at the Gilman who has known the members of Green Day since the late 1980s. President Ronald Reagan was in his second term, and he was a target for the rage of American punkers everywhere, especially those in California, who had already suffered eight years under his governorship of the state. "It wasn't just Reagan," Townley points out. "It was an examination of the corruption of the politics of the United States, late-twentieth-century style: the quest for the almighty dollar, and the quest for conformity. You can hear that in all kinds of bands from that time and that scene."

Armstrong and Dirnt became regulars at the Gilman and soaked up the ideologies of the myriad punk subsets who hung there. "There was an aggro faction," says Dirnt, "a goofy faction -- everything from bands like Gwar to people that were literally like Weird Al with an acoustic guitar and a fried-chicken bucket on their head." "There was the straight-edge scene of kids who hewed to a hardcore anarchist line," says Armstrong, "then there was that Germs side of it too, just total nihilism. There was the really educated people, as well as leftover burned-out hippies. And lots of local punk-rock kids. We sort of represented the teenage runaway faction." He laughs.

It was impossible to hang at the Gilman and not become politicized. "It was everything from the bands we were listening to," says Dirnt, "to fanzines, to just sitting around in coffee shops or behind buildings drinking beer and talking about things with friends who had political leanings." One day someone gave Dirnt a cassette of a band called Crimpshrine, who had a song titled "Free Will." "It had the lyrics 'Question everything,' and I thought that was really great," he says. "Don't accept things without thinking about it." Armstrong recalls a band called Sewer Trout who had a song called "Wally and Beaver Go to Nicaragua" -- a tune about the lead characters in the TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver debating the Reagan administration's war in Central America. "That summed up a lot of what Gilman Street was all about," Armstrong says.