(Credits: Far Out / Alice Baxley)
From the outset, Green Day were a punk band. Not a pop-punk band or any other permutation, but an old school, antagonistic, subversive punk band.
Their proud mission statement was thus: “We’re not a political band. We don’t want to tell people what to do or what to think. We just want to tell them to think.” However, by the time MTV had well and truly commercialised the second wave of mohawk-sporting rockers, the opposite was true.
Pop-punk championed a form of irreverent thoughtlessness. While you might say all art is political, Good Charlotte, Sum 41, and The Offspring might have been stretching that adage to its absolute limit. So, while Green Day might have been at odds with this ardent aversion to deep thought, or any sort of thought for that matter, they also didn’t want to become isolated icons of the past.
After all, punk in all of its guises, is a movement, a mass of bands rather than a snotty, asocial outlier. This placed Green Day between a rock and a hard place when they finally began to find fame a good few years after forming as Blood Rage in the 1990s.
1994’s Dookie might have slow-burnt its way to rarified punk heights, but they were almost hoisted by their own petard. The playfulness of the record helped to launch a legion of pop-punk bands, primed for the equally playful medium of MTV, so when Green Day returned to slightly more stern statements with subsequent records, their star began to wane.
Then in 2002, an olive branch was presented by the daft apprentices that had overtaken their former masters. Blink-182 invited Green Day out on a Pop Disaster Tour. Despite forming half a decade after Billy Joe Armstrong and his buddies, Blink-182 would be the headline act. While Green Day accepted the offer, there always seemed to be tension on the road.
“We set out to reclaim our throne as the most incredible live punk band from you know who,” Tré Cool would comment. The show became a boxing match. “We thought we were hot sh– when we walked in. And Green Day walked in ready to fight, with their music, of course. The first few nights, they blew us off the stage, and we thought, ‘Oh sh*t, we need to step it up’,” Mark Hoppus recalls.
But they did step it up, and they had the advantage of throwing the final punch every night. As Hoppus told NME, “I was a huge fan, then we’re touring with them, but it was a weird thing where Green Day were dipping at the time and Blink were ascendent. We were billed as co-headliners, but Blink were closing every night, and that was a strange sensation for us. Headlining over your idols is a little strange.”
Ultimately, as he would reflect in his new memoir, things began to grate on Green Day more and more. Relationships soured, and Hoppus concluded, “I got the sense that Green Day fucking hated that they’d been reduced to opening for us.” So, it wasn’t quite ‘never meet your heroes’, the Pop Disaster Tour was more akin to ‘never dare to upstage them’.
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