My Amazon Reviews: Green Day "Dookie"

Still Flinging
5 Out Of 5 Stars

Essentially, this is the album that finally made punk safe for the masses. Led by a powerhouse trio, a wickedly juvenile sense of humor and, frankly, a killer set of songs, "Dookie" became a multi-platinum success and made overnight stars out of Green Day. They worked the basic best of the punk playbook with quick bursts of melody, propulsive drumming (Tre Cool may be one of the most underrated drummers of modern times) and vocals that were both young man snotty ("Longview") and mature beyond the format ("When I Come Around"), they managed to cover all the bases while holding a punk cachet.

Now that "Dookie" is 20 years old, there's a certain nostalgia for the Green Day of yore, before the politics and rock opera days. Billie Jo is still a wild eyed kid in the midst of all the rock dreams, so he can get away with lines like "when master.....'s lost it's thrill" and the oddball bad joke hidden at the tail end of "F.O.D.". And while they were kind of advanced for they're ages, it would still be another three albums before they'd try something as mature as "Good Riddance/Time Of Your Life."

So revel in the golden age of 1990's power punk, before the dam burst and every dyed hair band with a melody had a hit. Green Day got there first, with one of the best opening lines of a punk song ever in "Do you have the time, to listen to me whine" just before a buzzsaw guitar starts tearing the joint apart ("Longview"). They knew they were climbing over the backs of their forebears - the liner art screams Ramones circa "Rocket To Russia" - but little did they know how much farther they'd raise the bar.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Green Day "Tre!"

I'm beginning to recall why artists will record 30 to 40 songs and whittle down to 12.
3 Out Of 5 Stars

"Tre!" wraps up the three album rocket ride in Green Day's ambitious experiment. Ambition doesn't always yield greatness, and while Uno! felt like a great start, Dos! and Tre! were let downs. "Tre!" in particular starts off with a batch of soggy songs that just don't have any kick to them. You really don't get to the good stuff until "X-Kid" starts blowing down some doors. Then you get a teenage anthem in "Sex, Drugs & Violence" (which chooses to rhyme with "English Math and Science"). The best thing here is the segmented "Dirty Rotten Bastards," which has a feel more like "American Idiot" than the other albums in the trilogy plus has the added feature of some really nifty bass runs from Mike Dirnt. Finally, there's a Beatlesque string drenched power ballad, "The Forgotten." Which isn't bad, but not amazing.

There's a key line in "X-Kid" that's sort of telling.
"You're not so young,
but you're still dumb.
You're an X-Kid
and you never even got started again."

Is this how the band feels about itself? After two of the more successful albums of the past decade, "Uno," "Dos" and "Tre" feel a lot like the band treading through past glory (and maybe they're waiting for Billy Joe to get out of rehab so they can take these songs out and road rock them), but it feels like the Sandinista Clash. Three albums of sprawl that could have made one condensed kicking single disc, maybe even a double. What they stand as now is a case of overkill.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Green Day "Dos!"

Dosey Dos
3 Out Of 5 Stars

After listening to all three of Green Day's trilogy of Uno Dos and Tre, I'm beginning to recall why artists will record 30 to 40 songs and then whittle them down to the best dozen. Dos is a good album with a fair amount of filler, balanced by some experimental sidelines. They still maintain a snotty attitude and can deliver hooks like mad, just as you can tell from "F-Time" and "Wow That's Load" attest. Although once again, the sing along of "F-Time" is marred by the juvenile quality of the song.

What's good is "Nightlife," featuring a rap from one Lady Cobra (who gets a song named after here for her efforts) and the melancholy "Amy." Or more specifically, Amy Winehouse, whose trial leaves Billie Joe Armstrong to lament "will you be my friend?" It's a telling story (like "Macy's Day Parade" from "Warning") made all the more ironic by Armstrong's trip to rehab. There's still plenty of frantic energy involved, but like I stated previously, what feels like an inordinate number of lesser quality songs. "Tre" suffers from the same fate. "Uno" is the clear winner, but you can pick songs from the samples and make your own best of.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Green Day "Uno!"

Uno a GoGo
4 Out Of 5 Stars

Green Day certainly aren't lacking for ambition. After two groundbreaking rock operas and a Broadway play, they decide it's time to revisit their roots of punk blasters. But not like they'll just rack up 12 songs and see what happens. "Uno!" is the first step in a rapid fire release date trilogy, with "Dos" and "Tre" to follow. The album is a machine gun zapper of the kind of songs that made "Dookie" a classic," with the band now sounding older loud and snotty instead of young. This is not a bad thing.

In fact, there are remnants of the Ramones that haunt a lot of these tracks, be it the immediacy of "Nuclear family" or the snap-to-it of "Let Yourself Go," that buzzsaw guitar riffing is care punk with the kind of pop-sugar coat that Green Day has excelled at for decades. Yet the band stretches on the dance ready "Kill The DJ," which is begging for a remix, or the simple and sweet "Oh Love."

What is missing are good lyrics. Too many F-Bombs sound like the band wasn't 100% ready with the words, so they just filled in the blanks with obscenities. Not that there are a lack of great couplets, like "Want to crack your cranium delirium" on the rocker "Troublemaker" or "I ain't got much time, so I'll get to the point/Do you wanna share a ride and get the f--k out of this joint" on "Stay the Night." (Which is backed up by "Carpe Diem.") "Uno!" is not a great album, but it kicks off the trilogy with a bang.

    

My Amazon Reviews: Green Day "Nimrod"

Don't be a Nimrod 
3 Out Of 5 Stars 
 



Green Day overcame the creative slump of "Insomnia" with "Nimrod," their first real attempt at playing like a bunch of grown-ups. Granted, there are still plenty of explosive short and sharp punkers to be found here ("Take Back" and the goofy "Platypus"), this was the album where they threw out the rulebook and began to experimenting. It also gave them their first bonafide mass-appeal hit with "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)."

The spiraling blender of styles makes this a very interesting album. The topics range from the usual angry punk-outs ("Nice Guys Finish Last") to some very adult issues. "Hitching A Ride" confronts the difficulty in staying sober while trying to live one day at a time. The bitter old man in "The Grouch" details maturing in age but seeing your dreams fall behind. Then there's the instrumental "Last Ride In," playing like the end credits from a 60's beach romance. (They topped this with the eventual "Austin Powers" soundtrack song "Espionage"). There's also a vicious sense of humor in "The Grouch" and a more playful one in "King For a Day," in which the gay son is trying to sort out why he can't have his "GI Joe in panty hose."

The most fascinating thing about "Nimrod" is just how far Green Day had evolved since becoming superstars. The snotty juvenilia that was so charming on "Dookie" and sounded forced on "Insomnia" has pretty much vanished. The band is inventing characters for songs and exploring other musical textures, something that would fully open on "Warning" in another few years.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Original Broadway cast (Featuring Green Day) "American Idiot"

Green Day Make Their American Tommy

4 Out of 5 Stars

The concept of the Rock and Roll Stage Musical is nothing new. "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Hair" made that world safe decades ago. "Grease" and "The Wiz" modernized them slightly, but it wasn't until "Tommy" that the revolution started. The Pete Townsend took his 1969 album to Broadway in 1993, he did something that had not been done before; took an entire album and based the play around it. "Beatlemania" may have been its closest cousin, but that was watching a live evolution of The Beatles had they remained a convert playing live entity. "Beatlemania" is better noted as the grandfather of all Jukebox Musicals, where an artist's catalog becomes fodder for a story either about the band ("Jersey Boys") or some random hodgepodge of a storyline having little or nothing to do with the music ("Mama Mia," "We Will Rock You" or even the snatching of songs from an era that is "Rock of Ages").

"American Idiot" jerks the lineage in a whole new direction. Like The Who's "Tommy," it is based on an album (or two, if you coun't the couple of songs from "21'st Century Breakdown") and the band had a hand in the story. But unlike these other rock musicals, the time from original album to stage was relatively short. Green Day's "American Idiot" was released in 2004, the first version of the play opened in Berkeley in 2009. The songs have changed very little, other than being sung by stage pros that Billie Joe's punky-yowlp. In several instances, this helps the songs.

The original "American Idiot" was such a rampant mix of styles as played by a single rock band, that it was easy to overlook just how melodic and well structured the songs sometimes are. In particular, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "21 Guns" pull ahead of their originals, and "Wake Me Up When September Ends" matches Green Days hit version. Strings and solo pianos add the kind of stagey emotional depth to several of the songs as well. Heck, Billie Joe has even taken the role of St Jimmy for several weeks of the show. You can bet Bono and The Edge aren't going to be onstage for their Spiderman show.

There will be two schools regarding "American Idiot" and the original cast. If the thought of big crunchy guitars of Broadway intrigues you, you'll cheer when the Glee-cast sounding version of the title track kicks in. If you are annoyed the 90's Punk Rock would cross to mainstream stages (whether from the elitist viewpoint of a Punk-Snob or Stage-Snob), this will sound like the second horseman of the apocalypse. Me? I'm all for it. I anxiously await an Alice Cooper musical, Styx's Paradise Theater or Kilroy was Here, and the mind that eventually will dream up The Tupac Vs Biggie show.