Working Class Heroes

Apart from their political awakening, something else happened at the Gilman that would have an incalculable effect on their future. They met a fellow teenager, and Gilman regular, who already bore the stage name Tre Cool. Of the three members of Green Day, Tre (invariably referred to as the band's "comic relief" for his twisted sense of humor) grew up furthest from the mainstream of American society. Born Frank Edwin Wright III in 1972, he is the son of a Vietnam-vet father who, after the war, retreated with his family to a remote mountaintop home near the tiny town of Laytonville, three and a half hours north of San Francisco. The house, which the family built, had no electricity, TV or plumbing. Tre was eleven when he was recruited to play in a band led by a punk-rock-loving mountain neighbor who taught him to drum to his self-penned song "Fuck Religion."

Tre wound up in the Gilman scene after dropping out of high school. He, too, eagerly imbibed the punk politics of Gilman Street. "It was the way people were political at Gilman," says Tre, "which is something that we walked away with. Be very bold with your statements. Like, a band flier with a simple cut-and-paste that an eighth-grader would do but with Ronald Reagan's head cut out, and put in a tank and having him mowing down Gandhi's followers. Shit like that."

By 1990, Armstrong, Dirnt and Tre had coalesced into Green Day (named in honor of a daylong weed binge) and were one of the biggest draws at the Gilman, pulling in crowds of fans for their punky three-chord rave-ups about life as latchkey teenage potheads. The band released Kerplunk on the tiny indie label Lookout! Records in 1992, and a bidding war broke out among the majors. Green Day signed to Reprise, and in February 1994, they released their major-label debut, Dookie, which made them, in their early twenties, instant stars and MTV staples, selling 8 million copies in the United States. They followed up with the pummeling Insomniac (1995) and the more friendly Nimrod (1997), at which point the band seemed to run out of steam. With all three members then married with kids, Armstrong's lyrics increasingly turned inward, expressing navel-gazing fears that he was getting old, boring and apathetic -- a "grouch sitting on the couch," as he put it on Nimrod. Three years passed before they released Warning, in 2000. The title track and the song "Minority" ("down with the moral majority") showed the band reaching for wider themes than middle-aged angst, but the music was lackluster and so were sales. By 2003, Green Day were asking themselves if they even wanted to continue as a band.

[Excerpt From Issue 987 — November 17, 2005] (Excerpted from RS 987, November 17, 2005)