Billie Joe Armstrong: The Rolling Stone Interview

This is definitely the only interview I’m gonna do about it,” Billie Joe Armstrong says, dropping onto a couch at Green Day’s studio in the Jingletown section of Oak­land. “I never want to be the kind of guy who talks about addiction. The last thing I want is sympathy from anybody. I don’t want a pity party.”

Armstrong, Green Day’s singer-guitar­ist and driving songwriter, is starting a second day of intense, candid talk about the past six months of his life: his violent meltdown during Green Day’s set at the I Heart Radio Music Festival in Las Vegas last September; his trip to rehab for alco­holism and addiction to prescription med­ications; a canceled tour and the disas­trous effect on sales of Green Day’s three new albums, ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tre!; and the severe testing of his lifelong friend­ships with bassist Mike Dirnt and drum­mer Tre Cool.

“I have not revisited this at all,” Arm­strong admits, pulling chunks from a muffin for lunch. There are frequent, thought­ful pauses in the conversation, as if he is still feeling his way out of trouble. There is also a healthy impatience in his voice as he reflects on his ordeal, the effect on his family — his wife, Adrienne, and their teenage sons, Joseph and Jakob — and his immediate future. Green Day are back on the road in March, playing North Ameri­can arenas, European stadiums and festi­vals into midsummer.

“After our first interview, I was like, ‘We talked so much about addiction,'” Arm­strong says. “I’m fucking bigger than this thing, better than this shit. This is an incident. It happened. The rest is history. I have so many important things to do. I have my family to take care of. I have my band. I’m a crazy-idea person. I always will be. And that will overshadow any­thing with my addiction problems.”

Sporting a porkpie hat, tight black jeans slightly torn at the knee and coal-black eyeliner, Armstrong, who turned 41 on February 17th, still looks and fidgets in his seat like a punk-rock kid, the furious, articulate imp behind Green Day’s biggest albums: their 1994 breakthrough, Dookie, and the operatic 2004 grenade, Ameri­can Idiot. But the Armstrong who turned up in Las Vegas on September 21st for the I Heart Radio concert — part of an interna­tional touring-and-promo blitz for Green Day’s new records — was a mess: taking a runaway combination of pills for anxiety and insomnia, compounded by a long his­tory of heavy drinking.

Backstage before Green Day’s set, “I took him aside,” Dirnt recalls, “and told him, ‘Dude, you’ve got to fucking lay off the sauce.’ And the minute I walked onstage, I thought, ‘This is not gonna be good.’ We’re known as a pretty tight band. He couldn’t play guitar.” Instead, Armstrong smashed his instrument, after a profanity-laden diatribe against the event (promoted by Clear Channel) and the short set time. On September 24th, Armstrong entered a monthlong outpatient rehab program.

“A lot of this stuff dates back to [2009’s] 21st Century Breakdown,” Armstrong confesses. “There were meltdowns on that tour that were huge.” At a 2010 show in Peru, during an anti-technology rant, Armstrong shouted, “I can’t wait for Steve Jobs to die of fucking cancer.” Jobs died a year later. “It was a really stupid thing,” Armstrong says, cringing. “A lot of that shit was going on.”

During his rehab, Armstrong had only what he calls “semicontact” with Dirnt and Cool. “I wrote him and Adrienne a few letters explaining how I felt, how I was concerned and proud of him,” says Dirnt, 40. Sometime later, as Armstrong relates in this interview, the two friends — who have been playing music togeth­er since they were 12 — unexpectedly ran into each other, over coffee, in Oak­land. “Billie apologized to me from the bottom of his heart,” Dirnt says. “It was just two old friends on a park bench. I hope to be on a park bench with him when I’m old, feeding fucking birds and having conversations.”