43. Green Day – Dookie / Insomniac
The first CD I ever bought was a cassette.
I‘m not sure why this is; by the time of Dookie’s release in 1994, CDs had been the standard for years. I even distinctly remember having a CD setup in the house. It was my dad’s, a multidisc changer connected to an ancient silver tank receiver and two wood-paneled cabinet speakers. Christmas music would blast in a constant loop out of it during the Season; I even remember shuffling through my parents lot of jewel cases lined in a cheap black plastic pull-out drawer, just staring at cover art—Michael Jackson leaning on an elbow in his signature white suit, all the Chicago albums that were impossible to differentiate since they were numbered instead of named and rarely had pictures on the front.
But I was buying tapes, not because I was a purist but more because of this awesome yellow Walkman I had that you could use underwater just by snapping shut a gray clasp on its side. I never used it like that, of course, but I could if I wanted to, which is more than I could say about your Walkman.
Regardless, with my parents’ money I picked up Dookie along with tapes of REM’s Monster and Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. Even at 8 years old I appreciated an inscrutable dose of eclecticism.
15 years later and I have to admit that Green Day isn’t a band that I necessarily love. But when constructing a list of not 10 or 20 but 50 of the most important albums in your life, there are bound to be a few like this, a few automatics that sort of “are what they are” but would leave the list incomplete if they weren’t on it. For me, Dookie and Insomniac (a kind of Dookie II in my mind) are perennials. They’re the two albums in my collection that have been there the longest, through phases and fads, new schools and bigger CD racks. And there aren’t many I can say have endured all that—most albums from this far “back in the day” at one point or another made the walk of shame into the nethers of my “Rejects” pile, a dried out Ziplock in the glove compartment of my car where I keep all the discs I don’t listen to enough to store in my binder.
Green Day was always a band you could relate to, the one group it seemed nobody disliked. Their early stuff was simple enough—not a lot of light bulbs or surprises there—but maybe that was part of what made it so alluring. You always knew what you were getting with these guys: they played fast, were bitter and loud, and Billy Joe even sounded like he was right around your age.
There may not be much obvious depth to Dookie or Insomniac, but these are two records that deserve their due. With them, Green Day more or less revitalized the mainstream punk-rock sensibility, made absolutely no bones about filling their tracklists with two-minute explosions of songs, spawned a ton of imitators, and did it with a sense of genuine adolescent wisdom and even, dare I say, a glimmer of emotion. Both of those things are especially evident in tracks like “Coming Clean” (the post-puberty thrasher), “Sassafras Roots” (the pseudo love ballad) and “Stuart and the Ave.” (the ”destiny is dead in the hands of bad luck” contemplation) . Plus, “When I Come Around” still sometimes plays in my head as a kind of muscle memory when I ride my bike around the block of my hometown. And Insomniac ‘s album art is still one of my gut favorites ever.
I even feel like I grew up with this band a bit, maturing in middle school when they released and I rocked to Warning in 2000.
In their own way, Green Day seemed like pioneers, a sign of the times incarnate that walked with us through elementary, middle and high school, playing the part of yet another generation’s indignant and jaded moral compass. “Good Riddance” played as my graduation song in middle school, for God’s sake, as it probably did for hundreds of other schools across the country (And I bet none of the administrators or parents ever even pegged the sentimentality in it for sarcasm; it was our little secret).
Push comes to shove, I don’t think Green Day’s influence ever physically manifested itself in me but somehow, it was always nice to know it was there. Despite the attitude of their early work, it served in a way I never quite recognized back then as a sort of reminder that we kids weren’t totally alone in this whole “strung out on confusion” thing that they call growing up.
But that didn’t mean we couldn’t still be pissed about it.
Listen/Watch:
*It was really tough this time picking just a couple songs to attach here, so I went mostly w/ hits. Do yourself a favor and revisit these albums in full if it’s been awhile. Hopefully these couple are just the push you need.
Runner-up: Bush – Sixteen Stone
What amps up the head-scratchery in this whole cassette mystery is the fact that Sixteen Stone came out the same year as Dookie, and I owned that, too… on CD. Let me use this space to say that I do little to no research before writing just about anything, and if I follow a misremembered thread of memory because I think it might make for a better story, well, that doesn’t bother me. So lay off, okay? They’re my memories.
As for Sixteen Stone, you know this album, everybody knows this album—what’s to say? Gavin Rossdale’s throaty rock voice. “Everything’s Zen.” “Glycerine.” Bush’s dirty, distorted sound tinged with the just perfect dash of metal angst. “Machine Head.” “Comedown.” This album is stacked and couldn’t be more 90s if it tried.
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