Young, Hopeless, Rich and Famous

One reason Good Charlotte don't complain about the past is that they've already exacted revenge on Waldorf and its attendant bad memories. While their former classmates are getting married and working dead-end jobs, these unlikely successes -- all between twenty-one and twenty-four years old -- have become megapopular pop punkers, and their second album, the vibrant, hook-filled The Young and the Hopeless, has produced two TRL-topping singles and sold more than a million copies. All four are nice, regular hard-working guys whose tattooed, don't-give-a-fuck image belies their incessantly polite behavior. There's Benji, the guitarist and former bully who sometimes sounds like a guidance counselor preaching to wayward teenagers; Joel, the sweet, chatty singer who fills his lyrics with punk-rock rants but worships Morrissey; Thomas, the doughy bassist and band smartass who lives with his parents and has a serious relationship with his hairstylist girlfriend; and Billy Martin, the gothed-out guitarist who has a Nightmare Before Christmas tattoo covering his right arm, and whose idea of a good time is staying up late playing video games.

"We live pretty much the anti-rock & roll clich?," says Martin. "We're supposed to tell you about all of our drug problems and all this stuff. But, unfortunately, we don't have any." What they do have is lots of energy, dogged determination and a devout work ethic. So glad are they to have put bad day jobs and family troubles behind them, so tenaciously polite and dedicated are they to their working-class values, that the mere thought of acting less than totally appreciative of their situation repulses them.

Case in point: After Benji mentions that an unnamed singer in a different band behaved like an asshole during the last Warped tour, Martin delivers a lecture on the importance of humility. "It just seems like common sense that when someone does something nice for you, to say thank you," he says. "I don't know. Maybe it's because my parents were divorced. I was pretty much raised by my mom and my sister, so it's probably made me a little softer, you know?" Benji concurs: "There's no room for rock stars in this band. What's cool about shitting on people?"