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History

Lookout: the beginning (1988-1992)
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At the age of twelve, Tré Cool became a member of the band The Lookouts. Their album attracted some attention, and Tré began performing at an early age at the Berkeley, California punk rock all-ages venue 924 Gilman Street.

In 1987, Billie Joe Armstrong (aged 15) and Mike Dirnt (also aged 15) formed Sweet Children, with Armstrong on lead vocals and guitar, Dirnt on bass and backing vocals, and John Kiffmeyer (a.k.a. Al Sobrante) on drums. Their first show was on October 17, 1988, at Rod's Hickory Pit in Vallejo, California where Armstrong's mother was working.

Livermore, who also ran the Berkeley independent label Lookout! Records, immediately offered them a deal, and in early 1989 they recorded their first EP, 1,000 Hours. A few weeks before the EP release, the band decided to change their name to Green Day, a slang term for a day spent smoking marijuana. The band had been smokers since puberty and Armstrong got his nickname, "Two Dollar Bill," from selling joints at that price ($2) at his high school. The song "Green Day", written by Armstrong, is about his first experience using marijuana.

One year later, in April 1990, Green Day released their first album 39/Smooth, and that summer they set out in a van on their first national tour. Before leaving, they recorded another four-song EP called Slappy. This release was followed by another four-song EP, Sweet Children, including some of their old songs for the local label Skene Records. In 1991, 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours was released, which re-issued 39/Smooth with all the tracks from Slappy and 1,000 Hours.

After this tour, at the end of the summer of 1990, Al Sobrante left the band temporarily to attend college in Arcata, California. By this time the Lookouts had become mostly inactive, and Tré Cool, now 17 and living in Berkeley, began playing with Green Day as a temporary replacement. The combination worked out so well that he soon became Green Day's permanent drummer.

In 1991, the band toured and played locally, building up a large fan following. In January 1992 they wrote and recorded their second album, Kerplunk!, which they released on Lookout! Records. The CD version also included the four tracks from the Sweet Children EP. They continued to tour through 1992 and 1993, expanding their tour to the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).

The UK leg of the tour featured a notable appearance at The Rainbow, a Wigan social club. That gig would have been a standard stop on an independent punk band's minor UK tour, were it not for one small fact: the band decided to use their set to stage their own version of the Nativity, featuring Armstrong as all three schizophrenic Three Wise Punks, Dirnt as Santa Claus and a bad-taste version of the Virgin Birth featuring Cool as Mary, a roadie as Jesus and a bag of rice pudding and tomato ketchup as the Holy Placenta. This theatrical trait would become common practice for the band ten years later, only on a much larger scale.

Mainstream success with Dookie (1993-1995)

By 1993, Green Day had sold about 55,000 copies of Kerplunk!, which was considered a large amount for the independent punk scene in those days, and attracted a great deal of attention from the major labels. Eventually they left Lookout on friendly terms and signed a deal with Reprise Records. This came as a blow to their image as they had stated many times while playing in Berkeley that they would never sign to a major label. The band had even gone as far as to write EMI records stating that. They spent the greater part of the year recording their major label debut, Dookie, which was a near-instant sensation, helped by extensive MTV airplay for the videos "Longview", "When I Come Around", and "Basket Case".

In 1994, Green Day embarked on a nationwide tour and chose queercore band Pansy Division as their opening act. At the time this was considered controversial; nonetheless, the tour was a huge success. The band also joined the lineups of both the Lollapalooza Festival and Woodstock 1994. Green Day's Woodstock gig included a gigantic mud fight between the band and the audience, leading to a mêlée in which Dirnt lost his front teeth.

In 1995 they recorded a single called "J.A.R." for the Angus movie soundtrack, and followed it up with the album Insomniac in the fall of 1995. It was a darker response to the poppy simplicity of Dookie. One track, "86," was a reference to the Gilman Street club refusing them entry after the release of Dookie, claiming that they had "gone too commercial." Though the album didn't approach the success of Dookie, it still sold two million copies in the United States. After that, the band abruptly cancelled a European tour, claiming exhaustion.

Nimrod: (1996-1998)

Following Insomniac, Green Day was back in the studio by 1996, at work on a new album. The result was Nimrod, an experimental deviation from the band's classic pop-punk brand of music. This new album, released to mainly positive reviews and mixed fan response in October 1997, combined everything from peppy ska ("King for a Day") to heavy-metal ("Take Back") to surf instrumentals ("Last Ride In") to acoustic ballads, e.g. "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)", which is one of the group’s biggest hits to date. The song was the official theme for the 1998 PGA Golf Tour, as well as being featured in the final episode of Seinfeld. It was also the top wedding song for that year, ironically, seeing as how the song was written as a bitter message to the other party after a breakup.

Despite a brief surge in popularity thanks to "Good Riddance", their fourth #1 single, the band decided to take a two-year break after completing their Nimrod tour.

Warning: (2000-2002)

In 2000, they released Warning:, a step further in the style that they had hinted at with Nimrod. The album's recording was marked with bandmembers' significant reduce of marijuana intake, which marked most of their adult lives, before. Warning: was a pure pop album peppered with punk ideals, more inspired by The Kinks than by The Buzzcocks, and many fans were surprised and not pleased. Concurrently, critics' reviews of the album were mixed, many of them deeming the album simply mediocre. Though it produced the #1 hit "Minority" and a smaller hit with "Warning", nearly everyone was coming to the conclusion that the band was losing relevance, and the decline in popularity was undeniable. While all of Green Day's past albums had reached a status of at least double platinum, Warning: was only certified gold. The band's future seemed to be in question by everyone, including its own members.

The release of a greatest-hits compilation, International Superhits!, and the token complementary assemblage of B-sides, Shenanigans, only fueled the theory that Green Day's career was on the rocks. A 2002 co-headlining tour with blink-182 helped to resurrect some of the band's fame, and earned the group many positive concert reviews stating that they outshined blink-182 by far, but many still feared that the end of Green Day was on the horizon. The band decided to take some time off after the Pop Disaster Tour closed, to spend time with their families and, ultimately, to decide whether maintaining the band was in anybody’s best interest anymore.

American Idiot (2004-2005)

Fighting burnout after Warning:, the band went into the studio to write and record new material for an album, believed to be titled Cigarettes and Valentines. After completing 20 tracks — an impressive album likening to Nimrod and Warning, according to those few who heard it — the master tapes were stolen from the studio. The band, understandably upset, chose not to try to re-create the stolen album (Armstrong feared that it would take their fan base "back to about 50"), but instead started over with a vow to be even better than before. In addition, they underwent serious "band therapy," engaging in several long talks to work out the members' differences after accusations from Dirnt and Cool that Armstrong was "the band's Nazi"[1] and a show-off bent on taking the limelight from the other band members. After a restoration of band democracy, the creative floodgates opened as well, with each member trying different things every day in the studio — most notably the creation of two 9-minute tracks for the forthcoming Green Day record. The resulting 2004 album, American Idiot, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, the band's first ever album to reach #1, backed by the success of the album's first single, "American Idiot." The album was billed as a "punk rock opera", or more accurately a concept album, which follows the journey of the fictitious "Jesus of Suburbia." Over the course of the album, "Jesus" becomes addicted to drugs; falls in love with a girl known as "Whatsername"; meets a crazy, drug-doing risk taker named "St. Jimmy"; and ultimately learns more about himself and grows as a person. In the second-to-last song on the album ("Homecoming"), when St. Jimmy commits suicide, the lyrics imply that Jimmy may have been a Tyler Durden-like figment of Jesus's imagination (lyrics: "Jimmy died today/ He blew his brains out into the bay/ In the state of mind, it's my own private suicide"). Another example from the song "Letterbomb" almost proves this. (lyrics: "You're not the Jesus of Suburbia, The St. Jimmy is a figment of, your father's rage and your mother's love") The album could also be described as an anti-war allegory, as it features songs blasting George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. However, the song "Wake Me Up When September Ends" veers from the main theme of the opera, instead being a personal song by Armstrong about his father, who died when he was 10.

Another noticeable difference was the members of the band having discarded their trademark instruments. Billie Joe Armstrong changed his guitar from the replicas of the Fender Stratocaster he had been playing since the age of 10 to a Gibson Les Paul Junior. Armstrong does however continue to use his Strat copy at some point in every live show. Mike Dirnt used his Gibson G-3 bass guitar for several of their albums leading up to Nimrod, but now plays a custom Fender Precision Bass. Exact duplicates of his guitar are made by Fender, and they are called the Mike Dirnt Precision Bass. Tré Cool also severed his longtime association with Slingerland, which he had been using since Nimrod years, and started using Ludwig-Musser drums.

American Idiot also marked a major change of image. While in the past they had dyed their hair in different colors (ranging from red to green to pink and back again) and appeared in mostly variegated clothes, here they started wearing fitted black shirts with skinny neckties and also dyed their hair in more plain colours like platinum and black. Also, Tre and Billie Joe began wearing eyeliner and black nail polish.

American Idiot won a Grammy in 2005 for "Best Rock Album" and was nominated for 5 other Grammy awards. The song "American Idiot" was featured in the video game Madden NFL 2005 and "Holiday" in the game Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. Through 2005, the band toured, promoting the album with many dates. This tour continued the theatrics of the shows from the Warning: and Shenanigans tours by featuring a horn section dressed as a pink rabbit and a bumblebee, Armstrong donning a crown and silk cape for the song "King For A Day," and drawn-out performances of certain songs like "Hitchin' a Ride" and "Minority", where Armstrong used the instrumental sections to make popcorn with the crowd, a staple of Green Day's blue live performances. They also performed covers of the songs "We Are the Champions" by Queen, "Shout" by The Isley Brothers (by way of the Otis Day & the Knights version from Animal House), "Outsider" by The Ramones, and "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King. The high point of the show had Armstrong choosing 3 fans from the crowd to come onstage and perform a cover of the Operation Ivy song "Knowledge" using the band's own instruments. At the end of the song, the person who played in Armstrong's place got to keep his guitar (either a replica of Armstrong's childhood guitar "Blue," or, in several concerts including the San Fransisco show at SBC Park, a custom black "American Idiot" decorated Gibson Les Paul), and the person who played Dirnt's bass got to stage dive off the runway.

On August 1, 2005, it was announced that Green Day had rescinded the master rights to their pre-Dookie material from Lookout! Records, citing breach of contract regarding unpaid royalties that had been ongoing for some time, and with other Lookout! bands as well. As of October 2005, it is unknown whether a label affiliated with the band (Reprise, Armstrong's own Adeline), a reissue specialist like Rhino, or another label entirely will reissue the Lookout!-era material. As a result of Green Day reclaiming the masters from Lookout! Records, the independent label laid off two thirds of its nine-person staff and delayed its new release plans for the rest of 2005.

While touring for American Idiot, they filmed and recorded the two concerts at the Milton Keynes National Bowl in England. These recordings were released as a live CD & DVD called Bullet in a Bible on November 15, 2005. The final shows of their 2005 world tour were in Sydney, Australia and Melbourne, Australia on December 14 and 17 respectively. On January 10, 2006 the band was awarded with a People's Choice Award for favorite group.

In the Australian Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2005, Jesus of Suburbia entered at #61 making it the longest ever song to place in the chart at 9 minutes and 8 seconds.

Line Up

* Billie Joe Armstrong: First Guitar, Lead Vocals (1988-present)
* Mike Dirnt: Bass, Backup Vocals (1988-present)
* Tré Cool: Drums, Backup Vocals (1990-present)

Backing members

* Jason White: Second Guitar, Backup Vocals (1999-present)
* Jason Freese (Brother of studio drummer Josh Freese of A Perfect Circle): Keyboard/Piano, Saxophone, Trombone, Backup Guitar, Accordion, Backup Vocals (2003-present)
* Ronnie Blake: Trumpet, Timpani/Percussions, Backup Vocals (2005-present)
* Mike Pelino (from The Enemies): Third Guitar (2004-present)

Former members

* John Kiffmeyer a.k.a. Al Sobrante: Drums (1989-1991)