(Credits: Far Out / Emmie America)
Part of what made punk music such a breath of fresh air was its radical stance against the mythology of rock. The people who make the music we love are nothing more than people, not legendary beings or Gods sent down to bless us with their healing music. Part of the way this manifested was how the bands were often more important than the people in them. There’s no such thing as a “sacred” or “classic” lineup, because anyone can play music. Ironically enough, one of the best examples of this comes from one of the very few punk bands that most music fans can name every member of, Green Day.
The band’s core line-up is Billie Joe Armstrong on lead guitar and vocals, Mike Dirnt on bass guitar and Tré Cool on the drums. This has been the case since 1990, and while they may augment their number with touring members both live and in the studio, the spirit of the band lies in this core power trio. However, this wasn’t always the case.
In fact, the band was first started by Armstrong and Dirnt when they were all of 15 years old. They were joined by high school friends Sean Hughes on bass and Raj Punjabi on drums and started playing their first gigs, initially under the name Blood Rage, before switching to Sweet Children. Within a year, Punjabi and Hughes had left the band. Determined to make the band work, though, Dirnt switched from guitar to bass, and the duo tapped up friend of the band John Kiffmeyer of fellow punkers Isocracy to man the sticks for them.
This incarnation was the first true incarnation of the band. It recorded their first demos and, thanks to the older and more experienced Kiffmeyer, secured them their first gigs around the Gillman Street punk scene they’d cut their teeth in. Once they’d changed their name once more to Green Day, they even recorded their debut album, 1990s 39/Smooth, with this lineup. As far as Armstrong and Dirnt were concerned, everything was hunky-dory, but unbeknownst to them, Kiffmeyer had other ideas.
How did Tré Cool join Green Day?
As previously mentioned, Kiffmeyer was a few years older than the band and unlike his compatriots, wanted to go to college. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the heart to tell them this until after he’d moved up to Arcata, nearly three hundred miles away from the band’s San Francisco base of operations. In fact, he didn’t have the heart to tell them at all, Armstrong and Dirnt found out from a mutual friend.
However, Kiffmeyer insisted that he was still in the band and would travel down for rehearsals when he could. In the meantime, though, Armstrong and Dirnt began looking for a backup option to fill in for rehearsals. In the documentary Green Day: The Early Years, Dirnt talked through a house party that would change his life forever.
He said, “There was just this guy running around in a tutu with, like, a shower cap on or something, and he was just a nut. I was like ‘This guy’s a nut’”. Green Day had played this house party, and Kiffmeyer’s kit was still set up. Still clad in his tutu, this guy stepped up and began hammering away at it for the sheer fun of it. Armstrong corroborates this, saying that even though many sheets to the wind, this guy was “one of the best drummers I’d ever heard.”
The guy in a tutu turned out to be a relative newcomer to the area, Frank Edwin Wright III, who everyone knew as Tré Cool. With Kiffmeyer out of the picture and Cool’s presence taking the band’s sound a huge step up, he was soon invited to join the band full-time. As much as punk is an iconoclastic art form that hates the very idea of “punk rock history”, it’s pretty inarguable that punk rock history was made that night.
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