Green Day and the Palace of Wisdom

In 2001, they put out a greatest-hits album and went on the road. And the story could have ended there. "Breaking up was an option," says Dirnt. "We were arguing a lot and we were miserable. We needed to shift directions."

So they spent a year working out their differences and learning to make a new kind of music. Armstrong confessed to Dirnt and Cool that he had a secret, not very punk ambition: to write "the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' of the future." Soon they were working out the nine-minute suites that form the heart of American Idiot, "Jesus of Suburbia" and "Homecoming." Word leaked out that they were making a rock opera. "I looked on the message board," says Armstrong, "and some kids thought we were crazy. It's like, 'Fuck it, take the message board down.' We decided we were going to be the biggest, best band in the world or fall flat on our faces."

It's the day after the Brixton show. Armstrong has sunk down into a lime-green chair at his London hotel. He's the only member of Green Day who still looks younger than his age (all three celebrate their thirty-third birthdays this year), though today he's tired from a tour schedule so relentless he's sworn off alcohol for the month. Armstrong remains a drinker but no longer gets stoned -- a major change in a band that named itself after a song they'd written about spending the day smoking pot, though not a surprising one for a guy with two young sons: Joey, 10, and Jakob, 6. He's relaxed and talks slowly, with a weary confidence.

According to Armstrong, Green Day spent the three years following 2000's Warning "not talking about things, and not wanting to rock the boat." What had started as three seventeen-year-olds getting high and bashing out punk tunes had become a business, and over time a declining business. Resentment built, none of it articulated. Armstrong is the group's natural leader, a quiet take-charge guy, but he mentions in passing that he can see how Dirnt and Cool began to view him as the band's Nazi. He, in turn, became so mired in their resentment that he was afraid to show his bandmates new songs, because they'd immediately attack them. He was blocked, and he realized "to be in the greatest band in the world, we have to work on the small stuff."