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A&R reps had first come sniffing around punk rock during its birth in the mid-seventies, making unlikely stars of rock ’n’ roll’s antiheroes.
After the punk explosion died out toward the end of the decade, due to dwindling cultural cachet and the deaths of some of its figureheads, major labels largely left the underground alone.
Throughout the eighties, few bands from the punk, hardcore, and alternative rock realms were even blips on the radars of major-label A&R reps,
Following a decade of bombastic, sex-crazed hair metal bands and shiny, mass-market pop acts, the raw and unpretentious Nirvana was the perfect candidate to usher in the fresh look, sound, and attitude of the 1990s.
What followed in the wake of Nevermind has been described as a major-label feeding frenzy, an A&R gold rush, and an indie rock signing blitz.
The insular underground communities that had incubated these musicians were not about to let their scene be ransacked again without a fight.
A line was drawn in the sand: any band signing with the Big Six—Sony Music, EMI, MCA/Universal, BMG, PolyGram, and Warner Music Group—was doing business with the devil.
The notion of selling out didn’t originate in the nineties, of course, nor was it relegated to punk rock or even music, for that matter.
But the loaded term gained traction during this period as major labels began waving dollar signs in the faces of young musicians.
Punk’s great sellout divide fostered one of the most heated and antagonistic eras of rock history.
As long as the bands were good people and their releases sold enough copies to recoup their initial investment, Livermore was happy. For a 1960s hippie turned punk like him, breaking even was a success.
Livermore called the band the Lookouts and gave the boys nicknames—Hanschke became Kain Kong and Wright was dubbed Tré Cool.
For a guy raised on the Motown and rock ’n’ roll sounds of his native Detroit, Sweet Children was music to Livermore’s ears.
The band might have only been playing for five people, but they performed like they were onstage at a sold-out Shea Stadium.
“The very first time I saw them,” he recalls, “within minutes I thought they could be the next Beatles.”
On the last day of 1986, a new punk club opened at 924 Gilman Street, an unremarkable brick building that sat at the corner on an industrial street in San Francisco’s East Bay.
Gilman Street was a place for the misfits among misfits—kids who weren’t old enough to get into shows at bars and weren’t tough enough to survive shows at violent punk venues.
played. It heralded the return of an element that had faded from punk rock over the years: fun.
The long list of regulations might have made Gilman more puritanical than most punk clubs, but organizers knew that most punk clubs had very short life spans before being shuttered by police or lawsuits.
The group that quickly rose to the top was Operation Ivy, whose exuberant fusion of fast-paced punk and upbeat ska tempos was the talk of the scene, with shows reliably drawing a couple hundred fans.
As more bands honed their sound at Gilman, Lookout provided a means of releasing their records while also capturing an audio document of an exciting time in the East Bay.
Armstrong submitted Sweet Children’s demo tape to Yohannan and was told their sound was too poppy to play there.
Their poppiness didn’t offend the Gilman crowd as Yohannan had predicted, and the band went over well enough to get invited back a few times throughout the spring.
The band played their first show as Green Day on May 28, 1989, opening for Operation Ivy at Gilman.
Green Day jumped at any chance to play their growing repertoire of songs around town, performing at warehouses, garages, pizzerias, high schools, and coffeehouses for little or no money. Armstrong became consumed by two goals: playing music and getting out of Rodeo.
Playing basements and halls across the country sharpened their skills, and the band sounded better than ever by the time they returned to Gilman.
Livermore noticed something distinct about the crowds Green Day attracted that set them apart from the other bands on his label. They were larger, sure, but they were also predominantly female.
The album, Kerplunk, saw Green Day taking a giant step forward. The addition of Cool, plus all the time on the road, had made their sound more muscular.
By the time Lookout released Kerplunk in December of 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind was an unstoppable Billboard chart wrecking ball,
Chasing the high of the new rock craze kicked off by the grunge trio, major-label A&R scouts were on a quest to find other emerging rock acts.
The label’s most popular band, Fugazi, prided themselves on their independent ethos and wanted nothing to do with it. Two Dischord bands were talked into the jump, however, with Shudder to Think heading to Epic and Jawbox joining Atlantic.
Kerplunk caught on quickly among Green Day’s growing fan base, and word of their live show spread nationally.
But just about everywhere Green Day went, they’d hear complaints that their record was hard to find in stores.
Lookout was also ill-equipped to handle new opportunities that required industry know-how of things like publishing rights and licensing.
Cahn-Man had recently branched out from their metal roster in the wake of Nirvana’s success, signing indie rock darlings Mudhoney and Melvins.
The band was everything Cavallo had been searching for. It was up-tempo punk rock that had melody.
But most important, it was decidedly not grunge, a genre his label colleagues had mined for all it was worth over the past two years. This sound was completely new and fresh.
Armstrong did away with fancy solos. He was all about chords, largely of the power variety. His sticker-covered guitar hung so low off his shoulder that it was practically at his knees, and he hit the instrument with such downward force that it looked as if he was trying to punch it through the floor.
But while Geffen’s Nirvana boast was impressive, and although the band had milked the label for a free trip to Disneyland, Cavallo had left a better impression on them.
And so the band inked a modest deal that summer with Reprise Records, a Warner Bros. subsidiary founded by Frank Sinatra in 1960,
Shortly after Green Day signed to Reprise, the organizers at Gilman convened a meeting and decided that a new rule needed to be instituted at the club: NO MAJOR-LABEL BANDS.
“They were our friends, they grew up there, they played there all the time. But we didn’t want Gilman to be the farm league for the majors. Fuck that.”
Leaving Gilman in their rearview, the band got to work on their next chapter, recording their Reprise debut, Dookie, with Rob Cavallo at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley—the same studio where Armstrong had recorded his childhood single “Look for Love.”
There weren’t any fancy studio frills on Dookie. It just sounded clean, crisp, and loud as hell, striking the perfect balance for a snotty punk band with a gift for catchy melodies.
“Longview” was a radio slow burn that got more airplay as listeners called stations to request it, many of which, Cavallo admits, were him using a phony voice.
“Basket Case” leaned in even further to their synthetically colorful look, which Kohr achieved by filming the video in black-and-white and colorizing it later.
Maximum Rocknroll was known for its provocative covers, whether they were taking aim at Nazi punks or corrupt political leaders.
Featuring a close-up shot of a person jamming a handgun into their own mouth, the headline read: “Some of your friends are already this fucked.”
“The place was famously didactic,” says former MRR writer Kyle Ryan. “They’re basically the scene police. Tim had this reputation for being super self-righteous.
As for Green Day themselves, being barred from playing at Gilman to preserve the club’s independent identity was one thing, but reading personally spiteful words from the scene that had birthed them was a hard pill to swallow.
