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Green Day, there and back again

By JAY CRIDLIN
Published April 13, 2005

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Dookie was obscene. Sneering. Urgent. Bloody.

It riffed on drugs. Burnout. Masturbation. Pulled teeth. Paranoia.

And it was the first CD Sandra Nimmo-Ward ever bought.

"It was some of the foulest things I'd ever heard," said Nimmo-Ward, 23, who discovered Green Day's breakthrough album in middle school. "I really hadn't been exposed to a lot of cussing, drug lyrics or anything of that sort. It definitely widened my eyes."

It has been 11 years since Dookie ushered millions of teens like Nimmo-Ward into the world of punk rock, but Green Day's blend of Ramone-like riffs and Beatle-esque melodies still resonates with fans.

On Monday (4/18), about 8,000 fans will pack the USF Sun Dome for Green Day's first local show since 2002.

Green Day arguably is the biggest punk band of all time.. But the band's legacy is intact: Green Day made punk pop. The sound, the look, the attitude -- it's all still here, in countless forms, more than a decade after Green Day made it cool.

When Dookie broke in 1994, Green Day, along with Rancid and the Offspring, "finally brought skate-rock into the world of John Q. Mallrat," wrote music critic David Sprague. The band played Saturday Night Live , landed the cover of Rolling Stone and stole the show at a mud-soaked Woodstock '94.

"All of a sudden, it just sprouted up everywhere," Susan Riggs, co-owner of St. Petersburg's Star Booty fashion store, said of the skate-punk movement. "It made it more acceptable. People saw it on TV."

Hardcore punk fans, though, had seen it coming.

"Kids were starting to spike their hair, and everybody was getting spiked belts," said Shane Ward, Sandra's 26-year-old husband, who saw Green Day play Tampa's Brass Mug in the early 1990s. "You could pretty much see the tide changing. They crossed that line first, and other bands followed in suit."

Today, those bands -- Blink-182, New Found Glory, Good Charlotte, Sum 41, Sugarcult -- all have T-shirts on the wall at Hot Topic, the California-based mall chain specializing in punk, rock and goth wear.

Since founding in 1989, Hot Topic has made a killing off wallet chains, studded belts and other hallmarks of punk culture. During one 12-month span in 2003 and 2004, the company raked in sales of $600 million; in 2003 it ranked fourth on Forbes' annual list of the best small companies in America.

The corporatism of the punk ethos is a common theme in the barbs lobbed by Green Day's detractors -- and there are many.

Over the years, Green Day has taken flak for abandoning its indie label; scoring a VH1-ready pop hit with the acoustic, cello-backed Good Riddance (Time of Your Life); and recording a cover of I Fought the Law for a Pepsi/iTunes Super Bowl ad.

None of this has been easy for hardcore punk fans to swallow.

At 31, Ryan Clements is two years younger than Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong. He grew up skateboarding to the Circle Jerks and Minor Threat, and being labeled an outcast because of it.

It always has seemed strange to Clements to see the punk lifestyle -- or the Green Day version of it, at least -- embraced by mainstream America.

"It makes me smirk when I walk down the street and some kid looks at me, gear-checks me, looks at my tattoos, and is like, "What's up with that guy with the gray hair? What does he think he's into?"' said Clements, general manager of Skatepark of Tampa.

"But they don't know. They don't know where it came from and what we went through as adolescents to make it normal. We didn't even want that to happen, but it did. It's not our secret anymore."

John "Jack" Bodziak, the owner of Jannus Landing and a Vans Warped Tour promoter, said fans should just accept Green Day's music for what it is.

"I don't understand what certain fans would want -- that nobody listen to the music?" he said. "Punk rock is not what it used to be. It's not the late '70s, and everybody doesn't want to overthrow the government."

Punk? Not punk? As a band, Green Day doesn't seem to care.

Last year's American Idiot , a furious, intricate, political opera, is the band's most ambitious work to date. Like Dookie 10 years earlier, Idiot brought home a Grammy in February -- nothing punk about that -- and has sold more than 3 million copies.

Even fans who deserted the band in the late 1990s, saying they were no longer punk enough, came back. In the end, it was all about the music -- intelligent lyrics, intense chords, incendiary live shows. No other band or culture could co-opt that.

"You've got to give them credit," Ward says. "They came out with this album that, in some people's eyes, could be anti-American, with some of the lyrics, just because it's so political. That's going back to their punk-rock roots."

-- Jay Cridlin cridlin@tampabay.com

[Last modified April 13, 2005, 16:22:52]

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