Spring

The Green Day Family Grows

Billie Joe and Adrienne discovered the morning after their wedding – 3 July 1994 – that she was pregnant and their first child, Joseph, was born in February 1995. A second son, Joshua, was born in September 1998. Tre Cool’s daughter was born in January 1995 and he married Lisea Lyons in March, although subsequently they divorced. He remarried in 2000, siring a son before again divorcing. Mike Dirnt married in 1996 and his daughter was born in 1997, although he later divorced his first wife. Happily, he remarried in 2009 and he and his wife have a son and another daughter.

March

Grammy Winners

The icing was applied to the cake in 1995 when Dookie won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance, easily beating off competition from Tori Amos, The Crash Test Dummies, Sarah McLachlan and Nine Inch Nails. Although the band won no MTV awards, ‘Longview’ had been nominated for Best Group Video in 1994 and ‘Basket Case’ was nominated in 1995, showing how far the band had come in 12 months. Mike and Tre won outstanding bassist and outstanding drummer respectively at the more low-key Bammys – Bay Area Music Awards – hosted by BAM (Bay Area Music) magazine. Carlos Santana won Best Guitarist....

Summer

Money, Money, Money

The success of Dookie made Green Day millionaires. Money became a sensitive subject in interviews as their wealth and success made them an even greater target for the Green Day = sellout brigade, ‘but if anyone says anything, I just run them over in my Ferrari,’ joked Tre, deflecting yet another question on the subject. The band made a charitable donation in the region of $40,000 to Food Not Bombs in San Francisco that fed the homeless, ‘...fed my ass a couple of times a few years back,’ said Billie Joe, ‘it’s good to put something back into our community.’

Moving Forward

‘The f***ed up thing about being famous and having money,’ Billie Joe told Spin magazine, ‘is that if you complain about something, people are like “what the f*** are you complaining about? You don’t have to worry about money or a place to live.” I feel I don’t have anyone to vent my frustrations to because they won’t understand.’ This sense of dislocation and alienation from old friends, associates and even family informed many of the new songs that Billie Joe began to write and rehearse with the band as they prepared to record their eagerly awaited follow-up to Dookie.

July

Taking Control

‘We were going in one direction, they were going in another,’ Billie Joe told NME when discussing Green Day’s uncoupling from their management deal with Elliot Cahn and Jeff Saltzman. ‘There was no big fall out. They weren’t trying to get us to do anything that we didn’t want to do. It’s just that no one on this earth knows what’s best for us better than we do.’ Cahn and Saltzman were probably...

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