The success of Green Day and other Gilman Street bands like Rancid, The Offspring and AFI saw major label representatives in regular attendance at the club and others like it as they sought to cash in on the pop-punk phenomenon. ‘Welcome To Paradise’ told the sort of small-town tale Bruce Springsteen made famous, smash-hit ‘Basket Case’ deals with Armstrong’s anxiety and ‘Coming Clean’ concerns his bisexuality – even in the wake of Nirvana that was a pretty progressive thing to be singing about in 1994. Unlike, it could be argued, some of the bands which would follow them though Green Day could do depth too. Elsewhere ‘Longview’ served as a three-minute long ode to the joys of masturbation, ‘Sassafras Roots’ to marijuana and ‘Having A Blast’ is an in-hindsight-uncomfortable fantasy of shooting up your school. “I’m burning up and out and growing bored, in my smoked out boring room”. “I declare I don’t care no more,” sneers Armstrong on the album’s opening track.
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Released the same year as Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks the pair act as documents to the rise of what was dismissively termed ‘slacker’ culture. While major label distribution definitely helped, the success of Dookie was also in part due to capturing the zeitgeist. Lookout, meanwhile, made an estimated $10m on subsequent sales of 39/Smooth and Kerplunk!. Green Day’s first album on Reprise (a subsidiary of Warner Bros), Dookie, would eventually sell 15 million copies. When they signed for Repreise, Yohannon felt the group had sold out and immediately banned them from the club, while Armstrong had urged them to release one more record on Lookout.įor his part, singer and main songwriter Billie Joe pointed out he was a high school dropout from a single parent household who didn’t have the financial security of some of those crying ‘sellout’.
Sales of that level were bound to be noticed and the band were soon approached my major labels – putting them firmly at odds with the Gilman Street ethos. Having recruited Tim Armstrong’s former drummer Tré Cool and built a loyal following thanks to a relentless touring schedule, Green Day released Kerplunk on Decemto sales of 10,000 on its first day.īillie Joe Armstrong of Green Day performs at V Festival in 1998 (Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images) Their debut LP 39/Smooth sold 3,000 copies – a perfectly healthy return for an indie punk label – but it was its follow-up that really took pop-punk mainstream. Initially rejected for a stage slot due to their music being ‘too pop’ – “we were pretty pop,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong shrugs in ‘Turn It Around – that combination of the melodic sensibilities of The Beatles and The Kinks with the power of punk’s first wave proved to be a winner. While releases by Operation Ivy brought strong sales – at least in terms of an underground punk scene – the real breakthrough came when Lookout signed up a young Gilman Street band named Green Day. The label lasted until 2012 and, it may be surprising to learn, its success wasn’t based on sales of records by Crimpshrine, Sewer Trout and Isocracy. Gilman Street would also play host to the first show by Operation Ivy, members of whom would later form Rancid, and the club became a recruiting ground for the local independent punk label run by Larry Livermore, Lookout Records.
Read More: How Euphoria gave a Gerry Rafferty classic a new lease of life The club, the story of which was told in the documentary ‘Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk’, hosted Riot Grrrl acts as well as ‘homocore’ groups – that being the self-appointed title of the gay punk underground. Indeed, by 1988 the punks of Gilman Street had to physically repel an invasion of far-right elements who had presumably misunderstood the deeply coded message in the Dead Kennedy’s song ‘Nazi Punks F*** Off’. Many punk clubs of the time were dominated by speed metal and aggressive hardcore sounds, which in many cases unfortunately attracted a skinhead element. Other rules, enforced by the volunteers who ran the club, included no racism, no sexism, no homophobia and, as though it were as bad as the others, no major label bands.
In order to avoid being shut down by the police it was as straight edge as straight edge gets: no drinking, no fighting, no drugs. It was there that a punk rock club was conceived by Maximumrocknroll founder Tim Yohannon, opening its doors on New Years’ Eve 1986.
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