The Green Day song Billie Joe Armstrong was scared to perform: “I had to pound a beer backstage”
There’s always a certain amount of fear that comes with getting up onstage for any rock band. It might be easy trying to play in your room, but once you have to translate your feelings to an entire crowd of people, it can get more than a little bit intimidating with all those eyes locked in on you. Billie Joe Armstrong usually looks like he had zero fear when fronting Green Day, but he was mortified when he went out to sing ‘Good Riddance’ for the first time.
By this point in Green Day’s career, though, Armstrong had to be on the defensive for nearly half the pieces in their catalogue. While it’s hard for anyone to complain about the songs on Dookie now, the band’s magnum opus drove a line in the sand with punk rock fans, with the true fans hating what they stood for and thinking they were watering down what made punk cool, to begin with.
Artists aren’t made of stone, and when you tell them that their musical flesh and blood is a piece of trash, they will respond accordingly. Even though Insomniac was a way for Green Day to earn some of those fans back by getting heavier, they still couldn’t outrun the stigma of being the gateway version of what punk sounded like. If you can’t please the people crying “sell out” at you, why try to keep doing it?
On Nimrod, the trio started to focus more on what they wanted to hear than anything else. Sure, there were still pop-punk songs, but hearing tracks like ‘Redundant’ and ‘Worry Rock’ were welcome surprises, almost like they were taking the sounds of power pop from The Beatles and putting a nastier spin on it.
The real clincher was ‘Good Riddance’, and it was bound to turn some heads no matter what your opinion of the band was. Written during the time of Dookie, Armstrong kept it on ice for years before deciding to flesh it out for Nimrod, by which time their producer started to add different string arrangements into the mix.
It’s one thing to put it on the record, but once it started gaining steam, Armstrong was terrified to play it live, saying, “That was really the first time we attempted a ballad. The first time we ever played that song was during an encore in New Jersey – I had to pound a beer backstage to get up the courage. I knew we were gonna take a tomato to the face.”
Even with its saccharine arrangement, the tune became one of the biggest successes of Green Day’s career. It was used in major cultural events like the ending of Seinfeld, and the end of the World Series that year, continuing to be played at nearly every single graduation ceremony until the end of time.
If fans were turned off by it, Green Day didn’t care anymore, eventually throwing out distorted guitars altogether for half the tracks on their next album, Warning. Armstrong certainly wasn’t lacking in his confidence to write songs, but given how much bile was thrown his way for speaking his mind, going against the grain and putting out a ballad probably was the only punk thing he could muster at that point.