Trivia / Green Day

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• Black Sheep Hit:
  • Though "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" is considered one of Green Day's most widely-recognized songs, it sounds almost nothing like their power pop/pop punk edge they're known to this day for.
  • Within American Idiot, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", which has a Post-Grunge feel that contrasts the other faster-paced songs in the album.
  • "21 Guns", the most well-known song from 21st Century Breakdown, can be seen as an even calmer version of "Boulevard".
• Breakthrough Hit: Dookie, and "When I Come Around" or "Basket Case" in particular.
• Career Resurrection: While it's become more beloved with the passage of time, the more mature themes and Lighter and Softer sound of Warning: met a lukewarm reception upon its initial release. Coupled with how they started to feel overshadowed by other Pop Punk bands becoming successful in their wake, the band were getting disillusioned, and considered hanging it up. Of course, we all know that didn't happen — after a false start where the master tapes for their next album got stolen, they eventually released the iconic American Idiot. It simply cannot be overstated how pivotal the album became for both the band and the rock scene at large — it's their first number one album, it spun off five successful singles, it's their second biggest selling album behind Dookie, and it helped set the stage for the mid-2000s emo explosion.
• Chart Displacement: It's not surprising that "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" was a #2 hit, but due to Billboard's rules in the 90s not favoring songs without a physical release, the Dookie singles and "Good Riddance" had huge airplay numbers but couldn't crack the Hot 100. One of their #1s on Alternative Airplay is "J.A.R.", which is not as well-known as their other hits (to the point it entered one Greatest Hits Album, but not the next).
• Creator Backlash:
  • Billie doesn't look back on the ¡Uno! ¡Dos! ¡Tré! trilogy fondly, and not just because of his drug addiction.
    Billie: Those records have absolutely no direction to them. It was about being prolific for the sake of it. So we were just going and going.
  • While he has no regrets of the song itself, Billie got really tired of trolls/haters/"comedians" constantly spamming him to "wake up" when September ended, even jokingly saying he'd write a sequel called "Shut the Fuck Up When October Begins". Considering the song itself is a reference to his father's death when he was just ten years old, one can't blame him for it.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: All three members of the band consider◊ "Jesus of Suburbia" from American Idiot to be their favorite song to play live.
• Dye Hard: Billie, Mike and Tre have all variously changed their hair colour throughout the band's career, from relatively natural colours like blonde, red or black to unnatural like blue or green.
  • Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: As a result of above, they sometimes appeared as this. For example during American Idiot era Mike was the blonde, Billie Joe was the brunette and Tre was the redhead.
• Licensed Game: Green Day: Rock Band.
• Missing Episode: A few of the songs they've recorded aren't available anywhere but YouTube and file sharing sites; their rerecording of '409 in Your Coffeemaker,' which was only released as a B-side in Germany, and 'Favorite Son,' which was only released on a compilation of songs against the George Bush presidency. You can get 'Favorite Son' in the form of the American Idiot Broadway recording pretty easily, but not the original for some reason. Their YouTube channel also only has censored versions of their pre-2009 music videos for some reason, as well as their music video for 'Kill the DJ' being on the Warner Music YouTube rather than their own (it was actually uploaded there for a few days before moving channels for some reason). There are also a few music videos missing from their YouTube channel as well, namely the music videos for 'Nice Guys Finish Last' and 'Welcome to Paradise.' They also don't have the full performances from their Bullet in a Bible and Awesome as Fuck live albums available on there either.
• The Pete Best: John Kiffmeyer, a.k.a. Al Sobrante.
• Similarly Named Works: The first lineup of the group was called "Sweet Children" and had a song of the same name. They later wrote a song called "Green Day", which inspired them to make THAT the group's name. Green Day recorded the two songs.
• Throw It In!:
  • When the band were recording for Insomniac, they were working on one song called "Stuck With Me", and another, yet-untitled song. Then someone at the studio mistakenly labeled a recording of the untitled song as "Stuck With Me", and the band decided to make that the new title - the song that was originally going to be "Stuck With Me" was released as a B-Side under the title "Do Dah Dah". As a result, they have one song with the Non-Appearing Title of "Stuck With Me", and another that has the line "You're stuck with me" in the chorus, but is called something else.
  • In the album version of "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)", Billie Joe plays a wrong note on the opening guitar chords twice. He mumbles "Fuck" after the second, and then the song starts as normal.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Cigarettes and Valentines, the follow-up to Warning that was supposed to be a return to Green Day's old sound. They recorded the entire album in 2003, but the master tapes were stolen before they could release it. Instead of rerecording everything, they decided to write an entirely new album, which became American Idiot. In 2016, the band confirmed that they managed to recover the stolen master tapes of the album and that they're using them as song ideas, but said that there are no plans to release the album.
    • They eventually played some of the songs from the album on the 21st Century Breakdown tour. The title track, which was featured on the live album Awesome As Fuck, sounds like it would be right at home on Kerplunk or Dookie.
  • When Tim Armstrong was forming Rancid, he asked Billie Joe to audition for the band. Billie Joe said no, as Green Day already had a few albums under their belt and were on the verge of becoming huge.
  • "Fuck Time" debuted with Foxboro Hot Tubs years before being recorded on ¡Dos!, and has slight differences, most notably a guitar solo.
  • One idea for Father of All Motherfuckers was to call the album American Idiot Part 2: Father of All Motherfuckers as a joke. The band decided against this later on, but this is the reason the album cover reuses the American Idiot artwork.
  • For Nimrod, Billie wrote a song called 'Black Eyeliner' that he later reused parts of for Green Day's song 'Church on Sunday' and The Longshot's 'Kill Your Friends.'
• Working Title: Billie Joe tweeted that Insomniac was going to be called Jesus Christ Supermarket, which he believes is a better title. Apparently, there were also plans to call the album Tight Wad Hill, after the penultimate track.

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