by Billie Joe Armstrong
Green Day finally made it to Los Angeles for a gig in 1990. We were roughly ten years too late for a scene that spawned some of the best bands ever. We played the god-awful Coconut Teaszer on Sunset Boulevard. We were all under twenty-one, so we weren’t allowed inside the club.
We waited our turn outside, sandwiched in between a strange lineup of bands that were trying to get signed to a major label.
The stage wrangler hauled us in, and we played our twenty-minute set on borrowed gear. It was a good set, and people were genuinely into it. But before we got a chance to bask in the glory, we were asked to leave.
And that was my first impression of Los Angeles.
I sat outside on the curb kinda sad. I wondered if maybe Exene and John would walk by and bum a smoke off me. Or just maybe Leonard and Stan Lee possibly caught our set.
Or by some weird chance Jane Wiedlin would invite me to a party at the Canterbury . . . NOPE.
None of these things happened.
But what DID happen is that their music made its way to the painfully small town I came from in Northern California. And it made me want to slam dance my way out of it.
Finding like-minded weirdos at the Gilman Street scene in Berkeley who also had dreams of “almost” hanging out with Darby Crash and the Light Bulb Kids in the Decline of Western Civilization.
However, “almost” isn’t good enough. You have to take whatever spirit is left and make it your own. History only happens for a second, and you have to do everything you can in that moment.
Thank god for Alice Bag. Good lord! And Pat Smear, for that matter. The thing that makes these people brilliant is the fact that the music and ideas they created are still relevant today. Songs like “Los Angeles,” “We Got the Neutron Bomb,” and “Lexicon Devil” don’t have expiration dates. And that’s at a time when the entire decade of the eighties WAS a giant expiration date.
These are the kids before the kids. And then there are the kids after that. And so on.
I’m not much of a kid anymore, but I still got all these songs stuck in my head.
So even if the Coconut Teaszer wasn’t exactly the Masque, I still had all that graffiti in my brain.
Imagination can take you a long way.
Roughly,
Billie Joe Armstrong