February

Producer Upheaval

As producer and friend, Rob Cavallo had been pivotal in Dookie, Insomnia and Nimrod but the band thought change might stimulate their next album and turned to Scott Litt who had been crucial in delivering R.E.M.’s finest work. Litt saw the band perform their first acoustic-only set at Neil Young’s Bridge Street fundraiser project and told Rolling Stone, ‘I’m excited about the album, some of the songs I’ve heard are really special.’ Sadly, Litt was not special enough and failed to gel with the band, who elected to take full production duties themselves, with Cavallo acting in an executive role.

Spring

Making A Statement

Although Mike Dirnt was a massive collector of original punk seven-inch singles, what Billie Joe listened to filtered into his songwriting. His investigation of early Bob Dylan albums like Bringing It All Back Home (1965) certainly helped shape the long sessions for the new album. The track ‘Hold On’, dominated by acoustic guitar and harmonica, also had elements of Welsh band The Alarm blended into an energetic delivery. ‘I don’t want to become the type of band where people know what they’re going to get from us before they hear it,’ Billie Joe told Kerrang! magazine when discussing the sessions.

Summer

Headline The Warped Tour

With their sixth album in the can, Green Day went out on the road in the summer to headline the annual Warped Tour. Sponsored by the shoe manufacturer Vans, the first tour had taken place in 1994, and took a broad spectrum of punk and punk-skate bands around America; by 2000 it was an annual affair. Although eyebrows were raised about Green Day touring with a festival of – mostly – unknown bands, the 30 dates between 24 June and 6 August allowed them, augmented by second guitarist Jason White, to deliver a set of hard-hitting old favourites to outdoor audiences of between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

October

‘Minority’

‘I want to be the minority/I don’t need your authority.’ Billie Joe sings at the opening of this first Green Day protest song which was the lead single from new album Warning. It was guided onto MTV by a promotional video that saw the band playing the song on a float as part of a Green Day parade through the streets of New York. Although the band sound more like The Alarm, the song showed Billie Joe looking outside of traditional Green Day lyrical concerns to areas like the 2000 American Presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore for immediate lyrical inspiration.

Warning

Although Warning was in and out of the charts in pretty short order, in retrospect it was a pivotal album as it saw Green Day breaking away from perceived formulaic punk-rock templates. Although there was recognized Green Day fodder on tracks like ‘Church On Sunday’ and ‘Misery’, there was mature reflection from the acoustic strut of the title track – complete with air raid sirens – to the uplifting,...

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