FEATURE:
Beautiful Longview
Green Day’s Dookie at Thirty
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ORIGINALLY released on 1st February, 1994…
PHOTO CREDIT: SPIN
Green Day recently released a thirtieth anniversary edition of Dookie. The U.S. band’s third studio album is one of their masterpieces. Seen as their very best by many fans, there is no denying that in a legendary year for music, Dookie stands out as one of the very best. Including iconic songs like Basket Case, Longview and When I Come Around, this is an album that stands up to this day. With lyrics by the band’s lead, Billie Joe Armstrong, and the band themselves – Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool – in outstanding form, Dookie is a classic! Thirty years after its release and I can hear how it has influenced artists who have come through since. Released by Reprise and co-produced by Rob Cavallo, this was Green Day taking a big step after 1991’s Kerplunk. I want to bring in a few features around the (im)pure genius of Dookie. I would recommend people check out Billboard’s 2014 track-by-track guide to Dookie. There is no doubting how important this album is. Dookie received massive critical acclaim upon its release. It received a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album in 1995. Dookie peaked at number two on the Billboard 200 in the United States. It also reached top five positions in several other countries. Dookie has gone on to sell over twenty million copies worldwide - making it one of the best-selling albums worldwide. No doubt one of the greatest albums of the '90s, it also one of the most influential Punk-Rock/Pop-Punk albums ever. I want to get on to some interesting features…
In November 2022, Guitar.com took a look inside the magnificent Dookie. If some see 1997’s Nimrod as the peak of Green Day’s career – or their major breakthrough -, there is no denying that Dookie took them to new heights! From an emerging band to something legendary and commercial, Dookie was this very timely release. At the start of 1994, when Grunge was still around and Britpop was starting to form and evolve, Dookie’s distinctly American sound was very different to what we were listening to in the U.K. 1994 was a fascinating year where so many different genres and movements sat alongside one another:
“Green Day’s credentials as key instigators of the mainstream uptake of pop-punk is well documented, yet the band’s major label debut, 1994’s Dookie, bore little resemblance to the crude, freshman antics of the genre’s later key players. While the album’s cartoonish cover (and scatological title) might have signalled a carefree, blazed humour, the depths of the fourteen songs within revealed a band with world-beating potential.
Prior to pop-punk’s American Pie-ification, Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool were penning songs that drew on the darker side of both their internal and external lives. Dookie was primarily set within a broken landscape, rife with dropout-ridden slums and penniless destitution, balanced with a heady quantity of apathy and self-loathing.
Formed as teens back in 1986, Green Day had already found cult success on the Bay Area punk scene, but after Nirvana’s Nevermind exploded its way into the mainstream consciousness, major labels were eagerly hunting for the next troupe of guitar-toting chart-invaders. As adherents to the scene’s DIY ideals, the band had typically shrugged off any major label interest. Until A&R man and producer Rob Cavallo offered to both take them on, and record them for the Warner-owned Reprise Records.
It all keeps adding up
Controversially ignoring the punk fundamentalists, the three opted to take a chance with Cavallo, who had earned their respect. Green Day tracked their major label debut at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California over a three-week span. In the vein of the Ramones and The Sex Pistols, Armstrong’s guitar approach prioritised swerving major chords, often rhythmically palm-muted, while Mike Dirnt’s dexterous bass work melodically augmented his adroit chord sequences.
An early, striking example of Dirnt’s melodic centrality could be heard on the fourth track – and the band’s debut single – Longview. A laconic walking bass-line in E formed the verse’s bedrock, over which Armstrong delivered a self-deprecating lyric, decrying his own boredom and lack of motivation, all leading up to a hard-hitting power chord assault in the chorus.
Search the world around
Armed with this tougher guitar sound, Armstrong was keen to revisit a highlight from their previous album Kerplunk, and fattened-up the springy favourite Welcome to Paradise. Its buzzsaw central riff was a repeated, crowd-pleasing refrain that punctuated a tale that documented the grim underbelly of West Oakland, based on Armstrong’s own experiences after leaving his parents home.
While still evolving into the band who’d go on to dominate alternative culture with 1997’s fifth LP Nimrod and 2004’s politically-leaning crossover smash American Idiot, Dookie firmly indicated that Green Day were reaching far beyond their punk ethos-adhering contemporaries. The off-rhythm, palm-muted rhythm guitar of the rollercoaster breakthrough single Basket Case was thrillingly edgy. It reflected Armstrong’s lyric, wherein the 21 year-old thoroughly stripped himself bare, questioning his own grip on sanity. When it cut loose into its myriad back-and-forth power-chord waves, Basket Case roared to ebullient life.
Elsewhere, the pained When I Come Around revealed their emotional articulacy, as Billie Joe delineated his commitment issues atop a cycle of four stadium-sized chords. The songs’ cinematic breadth now a far cry from the lo-fi trappings of their independent work”.
I want to come to a 2019 Consequence article that goes deep inside of Dookie. An honest record where there is this raw honesty and vulnerability, many might perceive it as quite a dirty or ‘teenage’ album. Something smutty or of its time! I don’t think that is the case. Even though some of the lyrics have not aged well, there is much more to Dookie that many assume:
“Dookie landed as hard as it did, with as many young people as it did, because Green Day’s lyrics, and the delivery mechanism of truly melodic punk, tackle a whole heap of emotions with a wry self-awareness and tenderly brazen honesty, and they dare the listener to be creeped out while also suspecting (knowing, deep down) that these fundamental personal experiences are universal.
Indeed, unlike a lot of other rock bands in the ’90s, Green Day is not remotely macho; they say as much in a 1995 televised interview with Much Music. “I don’t think we’re capable of being macho to tell you the truth … It’s pretty disgusting,” Armstrong says. The singer has also spoken multiples times about how the heartfelt Dookie song “Coming Clean” (With lyrics like “I finally figured out myself for the first time/ I found out what it takes to be a man/ Mom and dad will never understand/ What’s happening to me”) is about his journey to understanding his bisexuality.
In October 2018, the members of Green Day posted several photographs on Instagram of their early years in which they are wearing dresses, skirts, and makeup, and an unsourced but very popular quote attributed to Billie Joe Armstrong goes as follows: “What do you mean we walked around in girls clothes? We walked around in dresses, and they happened to be ours!” (Fellow Green Day fans, help me out! I know you can find out where that quote came from.) In later years, the band would write the song “King for a Day” about crossdressing.
And the romance, oh the romance. On many of Dookie’s tracks, Armstrong and crew carried through with the complementary themes of love and self-loathing; the brutal torrent of physical suffering (“broken bones and nasty guts”) described in the love song “Pulling Teeth” serves as a perfect example. “She”, one of the Buzzcocksier songs in Green Day’s extremely Buzzcocksian ouevre, asks questions to the subject, inquires about how she’s feeling (“Are you locked up in a world that’s been planned out for you?”), and offers real, sincere listening: “Scream at me until my ears bleed/ I’m taking it just for you.” Love is sacrifice, and sometimes girls need a safe place to scream. That’s some insightful punk rock right there, especially considering that at the time of Dookie (long before American Idiot), the punk scene looked askew at Green Day for the absence of politics in their lyrics.
Ultimately, the album layers all kinds of embarrassing feelings like this one on top of another, ultimately providing a type of liberation that comes from airing out your dirty (crusty, stinky, hand-me-down) laundry. What could be more charming, more vulnerable, than the conceit of “Sassafras Roots”, which acknowledges that Armstrong and the object of his affection are both “wastes” with “nothing else to do,” but still asks in the most winkingly bashful tone, “May I waste your time, too?.
A lot of times when I go back and listen to a punk or rock album I used to love, I realized the lyrics are grossly chauvinistic, and I feel alone and betrayed. Listening to Dookie, I have the opposite experience. This, for me, is one of the crucial reasons why Dookie works so well. It’s angry but not malevolent, guyish but not masculine, horny but not misogynist, and ejaculatory, but — astoundingly — not masturbatory”.
I am going to end with a 2017 review of Dookie from Pitchfork. An album with anthem and big hooks, it was a real move up and progression for Green Day. Pitchfork called it the “greatest teenage wasteland albums of any generation”. It is a magnificent and iconic album that ranks alongside the best of the 1990s:
“What set Dookie apart from the grunge rock bellowers of its day was Armstrong’s voice, foggy and vaguely unplaceable. “I’m an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent,” he teased at the time. Though Armstrong’s tone was bratty, his phrasing had that lackadaisical quality that left room for listeners to fill in their own interpretations. On Dookie, Armstrong channeled a lifetime of songcraft obsession into buzzing, hook-crammed tracks that acted like they didn’t give a shit—fashionably then, but also appealingly for the 12-year-old spirit within us all. Maybe they worked so well because, on a compositional and emotional level, they were actually gravely serious. Sometimes singing about the serious stuff in your life—desire, anxiety, identity—feels a lot more weightless done against the backdrop of a dogshit-bombarded illustration of your hometown by East Bay punk fixture Richie Bucher.
“Longview,” Dookie’s outstanding first single, smacks of the most extreme disengagement: a title taken from Longview, Washington, where it happened to be played live for the first time; a loping bass line supposedly concocted while Dirnt was tripping on acid; and a theme of shrugging boredom that placed it in the ne’er-do-well pantheon next to “Slack Motherfucker” to “Loser.” Adolescent interest may always be piqued by lyrical references to drugs and jerking off, the way a 5-year-old mainly laughs at the Calvin and Hobbes panels where Calvin is naked or calling Hobbes an “idiot.” But as beer-raising alt-rock goes, this is also exceptionally bleak, with the narrator’s couch-locked wank session transforming into a self-imposed prison where Armstrong semi-decipherably sings, per the liner notes, “You’re fucking breaking.” No motivation? For a high-school dropout hoping to succeed in music, that mental hell sounds like plenty of motivation.
The other singles mix Armstrong’s burgeoning songwriting chops with deceptively lighthearted takes on deeper topics. The opening line, “Do you have the time/To listen to me whine?” is endlessly quotable, but the self-mocking stoner paranoia of the irresistible “Basket Case” was inspired by Armstrong’s anxiety attacks. As late as 1992, Armstrong still had no fixed address, and “Welcome to Paradise” reaches back to those nights crashing at dodgy West Oakland warehouse spaces. It also brashly embodies punk’s trash-is-treasure aesthetic at its most American. But the closest Armstrong came to a pop standard, one that any guitarist who knows four power chords can play at a home and a more established star could likely have made an even bigger hit, was the midtempo “When I Come Around”—a smoldering devotion to the then-estranged lover who would become the mother of Armstrong’s two children. They’re still married.
Elsewhere, the bouncy, brief “Coming Clean” is from the perspective of a confused 17-year-old, uncovering secrets about manhood that his parents can’t fathom; Armstrong has forthrightly related the song to his own youthful questions about bisexuality. “Seventeen and coming clean for the first time/I finally figured out myself for the time,” he declares, in one particularly sublime bit of wordcraft. Teenage angst pays off well: Now he was bored and almost 22. Likewise, the rest of the album tracks often further showed what an accomplished songwriter Armstrong had become. “I declare I don’t care no more,” from breakneck slacker anthem “Burnout,” would be a classic first opener on any album, even though by now we know it contains an element of false bravado. The contrasts that made up the band’s identity also helped elevate Dookie above its shitty name, couching anti-social childishness in whip-smart melodic and lyrical turns. When, on the last proper track, the nuke-invoking “F.O.D.” (short for “fuck off and die”), Armstrong vents, “It’s real and it’s been fun/But was it all real fun,” it’s his Dookie-era way of saying he hopes you had the time of your life.
Critics have been kind to Dookie, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s tempting to wonder how many of these lyrics could’ve been influenced by Robert Christgau’s two-word, two-star Village Voice review of Kerplunk!: “Beats masturbation.” Still, he gave Dookie an A-, and the album made it onto the Voice’s 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll at No. 12. But the backlash against Green Day in the pages of Maximumrocknroll was real and visceral. The June 1994 cover showed a man holding a gun in his mouth with the words, “Major labels: some of your friends are already this fucked,” with Yohannan sniffing inside, “I thought it was oh so touching that MTV decided to interrupt playing Green Day videos to overwhelm us with Nirvana videos on the day of Kobain’s [sic] death.” At Gilman, where major label acts were banned, graffiti on the wall proclaimed, “Billie Joe must die.” So it’s an album many people adore, but like loving the Beatles, proclaiming your adoration for it doesn’t necessarily win you any special recognition. Oh, you were in seventh grade and learned every word of a Green Day album? Duh.
Time has worked on Dookie in strange ways. Most blatantly, the post-grunge alt boom allowed an album like this to exist in the first place. Green Day were masters at pulling stoner humor out of malaise, and that is what the so-called alternative nation needed. One of Dookie’s great light-hearted touches, the image of Ernie from “Sesame Street” on the back cover, has been airbrushed away from later physical editions, ostensibly due to legal concerns. Among the many things streaming has ruined was the old ’90s trick of including hidden tracks on the album buried without notice at the end of the CD, so all digital releases treat Tré Cool’s novelty goof “All By Myself” as its own proper track. The unfortunate “Having a Blast,” about wanting to lash out with a suicide bombing, is understandably absent from most recent Green Day setlists”.
A classic album that was released on 1st February, 1994, there is so much love and respect for Dookie. It was heralded as a work of brilliance in 1994 - though some did dismiss it and were not kind. In years since, it has definitely inspired so many artists. Influencing a new wave of Punk-Rock and Pop-Punk sounds, I think that Dookie will keep on inspiring artists and reaching new listeners. Rather than see it as a '90s classic and something that was important then, when it comes to Dookie, we should all be…
TAKING the long view.